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This is the internet. Facebook will be lucky if it survives past the current generation, much less generations. It was only a few years ago that myspace was all the rage. Its not my intent to bash Facebook, but things change so fast in ways not many can predict.

The internet is also relatively young. Is it not unreasonable that the pace of change might stabilize over time, and a few long-term players will emerge?

What I'm saying is -- I don't think the internet itself is old enough that there enough precedent to predict how long a vastly influential internet company like Facebook might last.

It's not unusual for companies to be many decades old -- why does it seem assumed that an internet company that is fairly new today won't be around in 30 years?

I don't doubt that some internet companies will be around in 30 years. I just don't know about facebook, because they are company based on social interaction. The way we interact with each other on the internet changes often.

Right now, facebook is the rage with kids. That is fine when they are in middleschool and highschool. Honestly, I cannot fathom dragging around every friend and acquaintance I've made with me through my entire life. There's a reason why you loose touch with most of your friends after highschool.

>I just don't know about facebook, because they are company based on social interaction. The way we interact with each other on the internet changes often.

That is the problem with their new messaging platform -- they are trying to mold the way we interact so as to keep users in their walled garden.

This is a good, albeit spooky, move on their part. I wouldnt underestimate the strategery [sic] in this particular play -- especially given the assimilation of the recent goog defectors, including Maps and Wave creator....

This is not a short sighted effort on the part of FB. Sure, Zuck may have a lot of unlikeable qualities etc... but truly, he has done one thing better than any entrepreneur with the same level of skill; surround himself with really really (really rich) good advisors.

Facebook is the rage not only for kids but for a lot of people. My friend is an ENT who works at the hospital. The running joke is the only way to get a nurse to know what you need them to do is to communicate with them on facebook.

Sure it will. But the post isn't about which companies will survive. It's about which will win.

It was only a few years ago that Google search was all the rage. :)

There was a lot of turnover in search before Google. There was a lot of turnover in social sites before Facebook. So Facebook sticking around would not be unprecedented. All the failed giants of the past eventually fail, except the last one.

On top of that, I think Facebook has innovated (ok, at least iterated) more frequently and intensely on their basic offering than nearly anybody. Compare with Google, where we went from search results with ads to search results plus 3 thumbnails with ads.

I beg to differ. MySpace had maybe 75 million users at peak. Facebook has 500 million active users right now and is growing. That's 25% of the total Internet population. And they have a smarter distribution strategy (those widgets are everywhere), making them harder to just disappear suddenly.

It's certainly within the realm of possibility, but it's not likely for a long while.

Just curious, if you've never had a Facebook account how can you have an informed opinion on their product?

Personally, I can't stand Twitter, but I still have an account so I can poke about, see what's new (mostly because I have a professional interest in knowing what's going on in the world of UI development).

Using a product is not an absolute requirement for forming an informed opinion on it. There is enough literature and information out there that one can casually gather an insight into how Facebook works, what their policies are, and empirical observations about how it is used/experienced by others around oneself.

It is important to note however, that all that data gives you a very limited view of it.

I like to think I know a fair bit about cars/motor racing, but I'm positive that the few times I've spoken to actual professionals I come off as a bit of a fanboy who only knows one side of it. I can know all the physiological effects of drug abuse, but I can't know what it is like to be a drug addict without being one... etc.

I am very familiar with the site.. I just choose not to have an account. 98% of the people I know have accounts, and interestingly there is a group of people I know that are of the same mind as myself; have never had an account - and wont have an account. Additionally - they are all techies.

So, I follow everything that FB does - I just wont create an account.

I'm in the same situation re not having an account.

I work in web development and have had to integrate those disgusting 'like' buttons and examine closely the API for other jobs. All this led me to decide that Facebook is not for me.

>They are building for the COMING generations

I honestly believe that a period of stagnant growth awaits facebook in the not too distant future when a new generation will be reluctant to join as it will be that 'uncool website their parents use...to spy on them'.

Unfortunately, the aversion to being spied-upon is also being bred out of the gene pool at a rapid pace.

Teenagers don’t care whether people who will not tell their parents (i.e. the overwhelming majority of people on Earth) know that they were drunk last night, they do care whether their parents know. I think that’s actually an important distinction.

Nah, I think the socializing aspect will outweigh the lack of privacy.

>'uncool website their parents use...to spy on them'

Thank you for showing me how to prevent my kid from joining: "Here I want you to make a facebook account so I can keep track of everything you do online and make sure you dont make any weird friends. I also want to check all your wall posts to see what you and your friends are saying. Here is your password."

If your kid doesn't think to him/herself "fine, I'll make my own account" then they're either far too young to be on facebook or a moron.

>I have never, nor shall I ever, had a FB account.

My favorite thing about this development is that now you don't have to. If you have a friend who only communicates through Facebook, or primarily through Facebook, now you get to use e-mail to talk to them, and they get to use Facebook to talk to you. Everyone's happy.

... Unless they harvest data from your messages that sit on the FB system in your friend's inbox, of course.

There was a comment that struck me as a little odd, and a lot revealing, in the official Facebook announcement by Joel Seligstein (http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=452288242130):

I'm intensely jealous of the next generation who will have something like Facebook for their whole lives. They will have the conversational history with the people in their lives all the way back to the beginning: From "hey nice to meet you" to "do you want to get coffee sometime" to "our kids have soccer practice at 6 pm tonight." That's a really cool idea.

Cool, yes, but also a little spooky.

And my fear over such a future, as a father of a 6-year old, is based on the track record they have with users' privacy.

I don't want my child's privacy philosophy decided for her DEFACTO just because That's the way FB has always done it*

Her idea of privacy should be an informed discernment based on her world view, not simply "Well this is just how it is".

Privacy aside, have you ever tried to look something up from a few months ago, let alone (hypothetically) 20 years ago?

This is one of my absolute dislikes with both Facebook and Twitter - you pile all your data in there, they keep it all and own it all, and make it a royal pain for you to get at it again - even just for simple things like "I wonder when I was in XYZ?" or "What was that link that Matt posted last year?".

I assure you someone, more than likely Google, will one day develop this. Greplin could also position themselves in this space?

I think it can be a pain to get at the information at facebook.com and twitter.com, but both have APIs that make it relatively easy to pull out information.

I haven’t seen a similar product for Facebook, but Tweet Nest (http://pongsocket.com/tweetnest/) is a step in the right direction for Twitter. It makes it easy to download browse, and search your tweets on your own server. Here’s an example (my own tweets): http://chasenlehara.com/tweets/ [Note: I have no affiliation with Tweet Nest, I just really like it!]

Those APIs are only superficially easy, especially in the case of Twitter — their API is purely based on a hideously broken pagination model that counts up from the present, and is cut off completely at 3200 tweets for your own account and 800 for others. It's completely impossible to access anything older than that through any means!

Nearly everyone makes the fundamental pagination mistake (Blogger being the sole exception), but calendar-based archives are a basic assumption that everybody implements. Facebook doesn't expose it in their interface but it's possible through the API. For Twitter it's completely fucked — the only people with access to your old tweets are the Library of Congress.

fundamental pagination mistake

I imagine there are technical limitations leading to economic reasons for these kind of mistakes. So much data, sitting in so many massive silos, that they must design their systems on the basis of peoples' access patterns only hitting the most recent subset.

That, and the opposite economic reason - that you can charge for the older/richer/more complete dataset.

(EDIT: I know it's odd that I was whinging about the same thing a few posts up. I don't really know what the resolution is for that.)

Except that the technical limitations favor correct pagination — it's perfectly cacheable unlike the idiotic model: http://www.dehora.net/journal/2008/07/20/efficient-api-pagin...

I think the true reason is really just pervasive ignorance — everybody royally fucks this up and doesn't question it for a second.

If you have N items with M on each page, and the same request for 'page 2' always returns items N-M through N-2M, with the contents shuffling off the end as N increases, you're an abject failure. SELECT … LIMIT M OFFSET N-(P-1)•M is in almost every single web app and totally bullshit. It's incredibly depressing, but we'll probably be stuck with it for at least the rest of our lifetimes.

It is a truly remarkable engineering achievement that Facebook has managed to implement a less functional search feature than Google Reader, which ironically, holds the unique distinction of the least searchable system that I interact with daily. We have extended conversations on Reader, mostly related to recent papers that someone shares, and the comments are not searchable so you have to guess keywords in the title to find old threads. I assume they will fix this eventually, but it's a major usability problem at present.

That is going to be a crazy new world. But, if nothing is private, I doubt privacy will matter all that much. Just look at stone age tribes. Not a lot of privacy there, and people don't really care.

Maybe privacy is just a construct of modernized society?

I don't want to live like a Stone Age tribe.

Only because you know there are alternatives; the next generation won't.

I grew up in a third world society and I actually prefer the freedom to what I'd have to have endured growing up in Western society.

And not per se new. I imagine most people don't do it, but I (and I'm sure plenty of others here) have been logging all of my IMs, emails, etc. for at least the past 10 years. Truth be told, it isn't that useful.

The iPhone logs all my texts. I've had an iPhone longer than I've been dating my current girlfriend (dating over 3 years now), and it's a little fun to scroll all the way back to the beginning. :)

But yeah, I wouldn't call it AMAZING.

I don't how great that will be. It's painful when I go back and read the emails I wrote in college, especially the ones to girls. It's the ultimate cure for hubris.

It's the ultimate cure for hubris.

That doesn't sound at all like a downside.

Better the devil you know than the devil you don't. We know next to nothing about internal Google, whereas we have a fairly good idea of internal Facebook.

Reductio ad absurdum: you'd prefer to have Hitler over that kid-who-looks-like-they-might-be-a-bully down the street.

To both points: I respectfully disagree. We know very little about either, but FB has proven it cannot be trusted. Google has been pretty good so far, it's just a potential-looming-menace to Facebook's outright menace.