That's right, I'm calling it right here, right now in the Summer of 2010. With 500 million users and growing, Facebook is likely to face the same fate as Friendster and MySpace before it, which is underground cool site, followed by mass adoption and then mass exodus as everyone moves onto the next "big" social networking site. Why? Because youth is always in search of the next big cultural computerized craze. Facebook's DNA will be the cause of its demise. Facebook started out as a college site that grew as a way to communicate with your college friends. But now it's everyone's social networking site....your Mom's, your Dad's, your Aunt's that distant cousin, your former high school sweetheart....
Today's teens are looking for a place where they can have their social network without worrying about what their Mom saw on their wall this morning. What will that next big social networking site be? I don't know, but if you know call me so we can get rich with it.
And it never ceases to amaze me given the history of these social networking sites, that the company doesn't go public, cash in and then cash out as the social network business matures. I don't know what made Facebook think that it could avoid the fate of its social networking progenitors, but they are wrong.
The choice now for consumers is the stickiness factor. Too much of your current life is embedded in FB. Porting it all over to the next site will be a massively time consuming process. What's likely to happen is an easier mobile based social networking platform will emerge and consumers will simply start over on this new site and devote less time to FB.
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