I think "socialisation under the umbrella of a facebook type environment" was inevitable one way or another. The advantages of an efficient system for socialising with a centralised online persona system are just too huge to forgo. I'd be interested to hear what you consider might have been alternatives, but personally, I think the economics lead inexorably to a free-to-play ad-supported system such as Facebook. Show me the day when you can convince a couple hundred million people to sign up for a paid social network product and I'll eat my hat. Show me the day that an open-source community can compete with a for-profit business in terms of attracting the best talent willing and able to slave away for hours to build great products, and I'll eat my hat.

I don't think it means the end of individuality as we know it. We've had ad-supported newspapers for hundreds of years now and people seemed to manage okay.