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I see where you're coming from re:Facebook's money. I never gave it much thought what Facebook was doing: I just sort of innocently assume businesses will find a way to survive somehow. So when I was thinking of you saying Facebook wouldn't last, I was thinking only in terms of eyeballs and not in terms of making money. What you just mentioned - MySpace's design-rot - was what made Facebook the superior site once they opened up past colleges. I think that that, along with Facebook's feed, are the two core parts of the social network business, and once Facebook had that, they made themselves hard to unroot by some follow-up act.
I wrote on this at some point when I was at Mashable - when we were all theorizing as to what Project Beacon was going to end up being. My theory, which was way off as it turns out, was that they were building an offsite behavioral ad network that webmasters could use in the same way they use AdSense. They're slowly crawling to this now, I hope, but they're a long way from it, and it's the one killer app that could strike a blow at Google's AdSense and capture a SIGNIFICANT share of the worlds web ad market.
Huh! I'd never thought of that, but you're right: Implemented right (that is, actually getting ads that people click on), they could provide a moderately attractive, supremely targeted ad network. I could see myself using that on a site.
All this to say that Facebook may be great and all, and they may have the greatest momentum ever, but if they don't get serious and look at the BASICS of how their monetization model works, they're not going to get anywhere. I've been banging this drum since early 2007, and it's frustrating as hell to see so much squandered opportunity.
That makes sense. I'm very sorry. I thought you were saying something other than what you were actually saying.