Does Facebook have a future?

If you search online for articles about “the end of Facebook” you’ll see that people have long been predicting its demise.
An undercurrent of doubt, especially over its value and ability to generate revenue, has accompanied the brand through every phase of its rapid ascent. But despite the naysayers, the world’s biggest social networking service just carries on getting bigger and bigger.

Last year, it reached 350 million active users, up 200 million in 12 months. And statistics published this week at the tracking site InsideFacebook.com demonstrate a strong start to 2010: another 23 million new users in the first 30 days of the year.
Facebook now has a central place in our culture. Just like Google, it has become a verb: people now whisper “Facebook me” as they air-kiss. After years of asking, all our friends are now “on it”, including millions who aren’t really our friends at all – brands, bands, TV shows and businesses.
It’s normal to see buskers in the Tube displaying badges urging us to join them on Facebook. I even saw a badge like that on the back of a plumber’s van. Surely Facebook has finally, totally made it and is here to stay. But is it?
Probably not. The history of the internet is littered with the bodies of dead and dying social networking services – Six Degrees, Firefly, Friendster, and, closer to home, our very own Friends Reunited. Each experienced explosive growth and appeared to be a permanent fixture, until they were rapidly abandoned for something else. In the history of social networking, the moment of apparent ubiquity often echoes with the crack of doom.
So, why should Facebook be different? Are we seriously to believe that, like Lehman Brothers, it’s “too big to fail”? What could bring it down? And what will replace it?
The thing most likely to kill Facebook is probably Facebook itself – or more precisely Facebook Connect, a feature that allows users to sign in to other sites using Facebook log-in details. It’s a brilliant idea but it also means that I have less and less reason to visit Facebook. And if I don’t visit Facebook, I don’t see their ads.
Of course, Facebook would argue that this doesn’t matter because its true value lies in the social data it still able to collect about me and my mates. Facebook is gambling on owning the one social graph (the data about me, my contacts and what we all do) to rule them all. The problem is that they don’t.
Telephone companies and email providers also have that kind of data – and they have tons more of it. It’s just that they have yet to get their acts together. Now that phones and the web are really beginning to converge this becomes more valuable.
Does this mean that someone, somewhere, is working on the new Facebook right now? Possibly, but whatever comes next will be created by someone who doesn’t even know they are doing it. Facebook never set out to build a better MySpace.

The Telegraph. Feb. 4, 2010.