Facebook will disappear in three years

* Friendships change over time, no social network (Facebook included) could crack that.

* "The youth" don't want to be on the same social network as their parents.

* Timeline spam from games was going to kill the network.

* People were uber concerned about privacy and would flock to a more privacy-aware alternative, particularly with employers starting to check up on employees.

* Someone was bound to go and take away Facebook's golden goose - image hosting.

* Mobile monetization was going to be a massive problem for them.

I had other reasons, but I was young(er) and naive(r). They dealt with those threats - by introducing features, having critical mass, changing their partnerships, reassuring users, opening their wallet, and figuring out how to do mobile well respectively.

Yes, free (as in GNU) software is always a threat to people trying to profit from software, but it's no more serious to Facebook in the medium term than any of the above. People are lazy, there's a lot of inertia behind Facebook at this stage, and setting up your own social network-type stuff on your own server is (and always will be) seen as "too hard" for most people.

I highly doubt that they'll be unseated for quite a while (even under the glacially crushing weight of OSS) so long as they keep making the good calls that they've been making over the past few years.

I think a lot of people are getting bored and frustrated with the service, but they have a lot of history on the site, and they don't have a better alternative to turn to. This causes the wrong form of user "loyalty:" they are trapped.

It's hard to imagine a better service coming along, but they can eventually be outdone on the mobile front or their own internal inertia (which it seems they are fighting) will prevent them from being able to compete.

Change happens fast. Something will show up overnight, then BOOM.. the end.

Weren't people saying there was a limit on the number of people you could get into a single social network (like 250k or something like that?) and would never surpass Myspace?

Weren't people saying that Facebook wouldn't figure out mobile monetization?

These types of bold predictions, without really any data or strong evidence, are meaningless and should be down-voted by a tech community that makes changes in the world through science and fact.

Plus, consistently rooting for failure of the thousands of people that work there isn't really cool to begin with.

Nope, don't see MSFT "dying" anytime soon, even if they don't grow by much or even start shrinking slowly.

Obviously what is needed with social networks is inter network communication. Otherwise we risk creating a monopoly.

Please, Yahoo and freaking Ask.com (who even uses it?) are still around, and Facebook is way ahead of those two...

The site disappear already

One data point doesn't really establish an unavoidable trend.

uhhh, seriously? I'm quite literally at a loss for words here.