Facebook overlooks the fact that lock-in is nearly meaningless on the web, so you can't treat your user base as a given. eBay is ignoring this. Myspace ignored this and they're nearly irrelevant now.

Companies are growing to the multi-billion dollar mark faster than ever. That trend will only continue as technological advances continue. What will happen in the near future as SSDs get better, larger, and cheaper? What will happen as multi-core CPUs continue their progression? As always, single newer machines become capable of replacing multiple older machines. At what point in the future does the equivalent storage, processing, and transactional volume capabilities of an entire datacenter of today fit into a single server room tomorrow? A single rack? A single 1U server? A single VPS instance?

In the not too distance future the ability to host applications like facebook that serve hundreds of millions or even billions of users will be just a click away and cheap enough to fall under the "ramen profitability" umbrella. Giant, billion user apps will be the viral videos of tomorrow. Companies will grow to enormous sizes not in a matter of years or months but in a matter of days, or hours.

What happens when your billion dollar, thousand dev. corporation has serious competition in the form of a 5 person startup?

In a few years it will be glaringly obvious.

Dunno, but if I find out it's certainly not going in a blog post ;)

Developing products with practical value. Early Facebook was a great little tool for keeping in touch with friends and getting invited to parties. They could have built on that aspect and made something useful.

Instead they decided to encourage the kind of spam that generates page impressions that sell ads like a media company... Lucky they're full of clever people, I guess.

It could have been Diaspora but the Diaspora team made such a big public splash and have so many eyeballs now I'm not so sure. Surely somebody at the top of Facebook has got to be looking at that Kickstarter pledge level of $200k and thinking, "Uh, Mark? We have to talk..."