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Comment by davi | Hacker News Reader

The only thing that can kill facebook is failure to innovate and evolve with the tastes of its users. This would open the door to a competitor to become the new 'cool place to be'. It will probably take 5-10 years to find out if this is going to happen. The internal 'move fast, break stuff' development model seems explicitly designed to prevent this.

Barring that (or some sustained operational mishap -- downtime, security breach, etc.), network effects make it unkillable.

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"It will probably take 5-10 years to find out if this is going to happen."

I won't even take 2 years. I will be surprised if several competitors don't emerge by the time Facebook goes public.

Why? Facebook is entrenched. Myspace was no where near the size of Facebook when Facebook came in and snatched the rug out from under them. FB has evolved to be the social networking platform, just as Google has evolved to be the primary search engine of the internet. Google gets competitors all the time, but none that really pose any major threat to their core search business. I'd say that FB has reached that level of critical mass for their own business. When it comes to social relationships, they have won. When it comes to everything else around that (places, questions, yadda yadda) the game is still very much in play.

I wouldn't for a second assume that just because Facebook came out of no where that history is a given to repeat. When FB came out of nowhere there was no web property with anywhere near FB's critical mass and momentum.

Entrenched in what? What's the compelling reason not to just walk away from your Facebook account? The scrabble game you're right in the middle of? Photo metadata? Messages about important parties?

Try just quitting Facebook cold-turkey. You'd be surprised how easy it is, and you just might like it.

I quit long ago. Unfortunately, you're missing the point that Facebook's entrenched power comes from a vast population of folks that enjoy it. To them, Facebook is the internet.

Photo metadata? Messages about important parties? Yes.

I can obviously quit fb easily, but I would miss it. And it would make no sense for me to join a different network instead, where my friends aren't (or only a fraction of them are).

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