Is Facebook Going To Follow AOL's Fate?

Silicon Alley Insider:

For now, Facebook continues to take over the world. Its global traffic is about to blow past MySpace's, its image (and Mark Zuckerberg's) has recovered from the Beacon fiasco, and it has raised a big enough cash pile that it should be able to power through any downturn.

There are some flies in the ointment, however:

* For some early users, the thrill is gone. Our campus correspondent described how Facebook lost its appeal as soon as it tried to become everything to everyone, and we've seen evidence of declining usage in Comscore stats. The result has been less usage from the once-core user base.

* For some geriatric users (a.k.a., us), the thrill has never really been there. Having been raised on email and IM, it's hard to get in the habit of visiting a specific site to figure out what everyone's up to, especially when email accompanies us wherever we go.

Read the whole story: Silicon Alley Insider

Comments

[Sundialsvc4]

Pay extremely close attention to this article, gentlepeople. AlleyInsider is, as usual, exactly correct here.

Right now you're used to "a web site," you "come to 'a web site'" and you use (woot! woot!) Google to do "text string searches" for "web sites" and ...

... "aw, c'mon Dad, that is SO 2008. I can't BE-LIEVE we ever used something that limited and stupid."

You might not know it, but every single computer on the Internet is -point-to-point- accessible from any other. (It's a system that was originally designed to handle a thermonuclear explosion.­) So far the only ones who've barely scratched that capability was Napster. And never mind what they did or why they did it: notice carefully what they did because that's the near-future staring you in the face.

It might sound strange for me to say this but: "forget Facebook, AND forget Google!" Mark my words.