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I hate to say it but Facebook is not going to be overthrown, ever. It's planted very firmly. Backed by mega corps and huge international banks.

Facebook is down right scary in the way it has permeated the life of almost every person on the globe. It's monolithic and we have little insight into what they will actually do with all of our data. A little government + facebook cooperation and we'll really be a dystopia.

With that said, I don't use Facebook and hope some more people wake up and smell the coffee too. We need a decentralized network, as that is the only way to avoid corruption.

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I think that fluid dynamics serves as an appropriate analogy for understanding social networking. Companies like facebook interact with a force that's very similar to fluid flow and equally subject to the conservation laws. As with fluids, it's convenient to view your community as a continuum of users whose desires are well-defined individually, but vary continuously between each other because of socialization.

From this, it logically follows that changing one aspect of the system could cause ``unforeseeable'' consequences in another. I hesitate to say ``unforeseeable,'' because really it's a complete failure by the decision makers to understand their community's intra-member interactions. So, claiming that facebook isn't going anywhere is flawed, because as soon as the users' needs change, altering one service could be like closing a release valve and increasing the temperature of water in a pipe: eventually, there'll be an explosion.

> I hate to say it but Facebook is not going to be overthrown, ever.

For ever is a long time. As eevilspock said, I'll take this as an exaggeration rather than literally. However even then I have to disagree. Virtually any prediction we make (pundits, bloggers, analysts too) certainly will be wrong regarding the tech sector. Disruptive technologies are unknown to us until they are surprised upon the general public. Facebook may stay around for a number of more years, or some new tech will push it into non-existance.

The great thing about guessing about the future is that it is free, and you don't get called on it if you're wrong.

Lastly, the only thing we truly know about the future, is that it will be unlike anything we can imagine today.

> I hate to say it but Facebook is not going to be overthrown, ever.

Just rhetorical exaggeration, right? But just in case you're that naive: IBM, Microsoft, Windows, Google. The Roman Empire, the British Empire. Need we go on?

I give Facebook ten years max. It may already be near its peak.

IBM, Microsoft, and Google -- None of them have been overthrown.

The Roman and British empires lasted hundreds of years.

Facebook will be around long after you and I are dead.

It's not another myspace or friendster. It's a firmly ingrained institution that people probably value more than their wallet at any given time.

Overthrown implies a zero sum of land, etc. How relevant is IBM to modern computing? Sure, they're doing some great work in supercomputing, but there's no monopoly they control like they once did. MSFT has a solid monopoly, but their relevance is lessening though still influential in some circles. Google is young/ambitious enough that it has its skunkworks projects - gGlasses is an extension from search, and self-driving cars is from maps/geo data, but it's still not really entirely defensible from their central data monopoly.

You can say that a website that most people on it use for less than five years will outlive us ?

"Overthrown" does not mean "disappear", it means "no longer king."

IBM was once the king of computing. It was overthrown by Microsoft. Microsoft was then king, but it is no longer, though those living in the past will point to its continue dominance of the PC, a dominance that is both declining and becoming more irrelevant. Google was crowned the king of the web, with users spending most of their time on google.com, but now they spend far more time on Facebook.

> The Roman and British empires lasted hundreds of years.

We're talking technology, not geopolitical power. The former operates on a vastly accelerated time scale, aka "Internet time". I recommend you read the Innovator's Dilemma, or at least the cliff notes on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation. There's a nice list of things many of which weren't expected to be overthrown so quickly.

I'm wondering if you might actually be a celeb: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U.

I don't think FB is going out of business anytime soon, but as time passes, I think that it's core value is more like its original vision -- i.e., a social directory. Seems like it'll become a repository of all your social contacts and your virtual passport when signing up for other sites and will cease to be the place where you spend all your time communicating with friends and discovering new things.

Sounds like you're suggesting Facebook may eventually become the next YellowPages. I could see that happening. It's mostly what I use it for anyway—remaining available to people who, since joining Facebook, seem to have forgotten I'm still reachable via phone, email, and IM.

MySpace anyone?

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