[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9990919
But, facebook is a fad that will be torn down and replaced one day. If facebook is still around in 50 years, we have failed humanity by letting such a violation of privacy and invasion of decency survive into an even more modern era.
Let's back up a bit to what Facebook was in its nascent days: a place to go and see what others were doing. The quality of the content was high relative to what the users wanted. Someone else here on HN posted within the last week or so a link to Reed's Law (Reed's homepage: http://www.reed.com/dpr/) which basically outlines how social networking groups become more useful. So, the question that someone is going to have to answer to beat Facebook is, 'How can I create something that is providing a large number of people with higher quality content than Facebook?'
Personally, I think it's going to be a Trojan Horse (in the historical sense, not the malicious program sense) that does this. Something that allows users to join (probably using their Facebook account to log in and register), and then facilitates sharing high quality information with others. The first iteration may not be an obvious threat to Facebook, but it's coming. I honestly believe it's going to come from the healthcare space, and probably in about 10 years. Full disclosure: I applied to the YC Fellowship with an idea of how to do this from healthcare, although it's not as obvious from the application, that's the end goal.
FBs biggest strength is it's market share, the fact that you can be reasonably assured that you _can_ look up that girl from that party on it.
But that strength is waning, especially in the sub 20s who are strangely rediscovering what sharing on the internet used to be. We have yikyak instead of IRC for community based anon-chat. We have whatsapp and wechat instead of AIM for non-anon chat. We have tumblr instead of geocities for free expression front walls.
Kind of funny how far people think we've come and how innovative these new apps are. It's all just a rehash wrapped up in pretty colors with trendy logos.
It was cool for about 5 years, then people started realizing that maybe it wasn't a good idea to have your smoking cyph posting pictured of bongs on your biometric profile that you got pressured into sharing with the boss and mom. No clue what happened to that early 90s generation. The late 90s are way more savvy.
Facebook managed to grab a huge share of the potential userbase that previous and subsequent services have not. I might like Google+ better for sharing links and photos with friends and family but Facebook is the one that finally got everyone to sign up. There's probably a good portion of Facebook that just won't bother switching to any similar service no matter how much nicer they make the interface or features because it's just too much "friction" for them.
And unlike email where you can host your own or choose from loads of providers, there's not a common protocol that allows you to use a different social sharing service and still communicate with everyone on Facebook. It's not like when I switched my personal email to Gmail in the mid-2000's and could continue to email the same friends and family even though most of them weren't interested in changing providers for more storage. They kept their @aol.com or @yahoo.com or @hotmail.com addresses and I could still send and receive emails.
I honestly don't think anyone's gonna upset this by building a "better Facebook" at this point. If Facebook falls by the wayside I think it will be because the current social-media-type activities are replaced by something else entirely.
Nobody's going to pull up their stakes for some new Facebook+ and maintain two accounts/profiles since half of their contacts don't want to bother. But when more of that sharing and communication starts taking place on a different style of service, whatever form that may take, people will start using FB less and less until it becomes more of a hassle to maintain your account than to leave it.
It's also possible that open social platforms like Diaspora will start attracting away some of Facebook's more privacy-oriented users.
1. The typical mom in twenty years will be much easier to get on a new web-/app-platform than the current typical mom.
2. Internationalization beyond the US and Western Europe is becoming easier.
Sorry guys, but it's true.
Facebook aligned itself too much with one particular nation state and not that there is anything wrong with that ( hell it may even be "morally right" ), it is just that it doesn't work for business.
Businesses right now can be truly global phenomena, much like harking back to the imperial days or Spanish or British companies ( like Swire's and P&O ) companies that had broad interests all around the world.
The most important trait of a global venture ?
Work with everybody.
When companies align themselves politically, they fail to truly engage a global marketplace.
Companies actual political aspect is to be like a reconciling diplomat between disputing parties, it does not behoove them to engage the same disputes as nation states and politics do, they can do a great benefit to themselves, to nations and to people by simply being truly global, rather than narrowly nation state.
Oh, and in 50 - 100 years, it's all going to be "giant corporations" anyway. The period now is just a period of transition, as government's projection of power is shifting toward being executed by corporations.
Companies that hold fast to the past -- nations and borders and such, and refuse to work with everybody for political reasons, are not going to make out. Dying breed.
Of course the insane fake lefty moralists will pretend moral righteousness and champion google's to block itself in China. "So righteous" -- yet really, the best way to serve human rights is to actually serve the people, wherever they are. Had Google been less political and more open to working with the Chinese they could have been a force there.
Same for FB. China is never going to go, "Come in come in, your intelligence agencies are welcome to the comings and goings of our citizens, we therefore embrace your FB"
The Chinese are practical. FB could have worked with them, had it been less political. So could have Google.
Now they missed their chances, swapping results for the fake payoff of a misguided sense of righteousness.
Well ... dying breed. That's what dying breeds do...make choices that don't work, and lead to their extinction.
The best way to create a global harmony is to create global companies.
Of course the fake lefties will pretend no one is allowed to do that, and pretend that they're right by saying others are wrong. Yet this just leads to morally bad outcomes that belie the very causes the fake lefties pretend to support, a contradiction that cuts to the core of the fake left paradox.
If you want more info about the fake left, go read Zizek's piece on the morally corrupt fake left championing of Islamist criminal apologism.
Companies are unavoidably political. It's just that it works for them, and for their customers, and for governments, when they choose to exercise that politics in a way that "works with everybody."