You care about Facebook, you just might not know it yet
eflorenzano.com
eflorenzano.com
These are the results from Nielsen research listing the 25 most-visited websites in 2000. Remember Looksmart? Excite (which, BTW, hasn't seemed to have changed it's website since 2000)? These websites were relics of the time when web portals were a big deal, much like how social networking is today. Most of them have gone the way of the dinosaurs.
The crowd always seem to believe that somehow "this time is different". This is a naive behavior that is ubiquitous in finance, business, work, friendships, etc. The fact of the matter is that human nature doesn't change. People get bored of things and move on. The same will happen with Facebook, Twitter, etc. Better things will be made because of it, too.
We still have IM, search, browsers, email, content networks, etc, etc, etc. Some things are here to stay...deal with it.
Do I think that Facebook will be relevant in 10 years? Probably.This is a prime example of one technology replacing another. It's extremely naive to think that it'll stop with Facebook and friends.
Facebook won't be around forever, but it's hard to see how it would be dethroned within the next decade.
Also - all your list of sites really shows is that some sites were able to grow and adapt with their audience (see Yahoo) while some didn't. Going on past performance - facebook is in that category.
However, I agree that since so many people use Facebook, it's a useful and important place to promote your business and for which to offer services.
It used to be that when we released widgets it was important to test on Blogger, Typepad, etc. but these days more potential users are on Facebook than Blogger. Of course, Facebook makes you jump through hoops to integrate anything with their site, but the large potential audience makes it worth it.
What you do is make a fan page for your product, and put everything you've got there. Fan pages are beautifully integrated and give you a lot of control over your audience. I used a fan page of myself to address young campers at a summer program and they're still talking to one another over it.
The big 'hook', the reason it gets so much traffic, is that people use it as a proxy for the wider internet. It's many services funneled through one account. (As opposed to having a gmail account for email, an msn account for chat, a yahoo account for games, a flickr account for pics, a wordpress account for blogging, a twitter account, etc)
But what keeps it relevant tomorrow?
You want to get back in touch with Joe that you knew in 5th grade? How are you gonna do that over SMTP/IMAP? Easy on Facebook.
Or think about it this way: your aunt wants to put out photos of her family's recent vacation for everybody she knows to see. Is she (if she can possibly help it) going to go into her email app (or, worse, webmail) and make sure she's got all the right names with their associated somewhat-cryptic (well certainly more cryptic than a Normal Human Name) email addresses selected from her address book? Her address book (if it's even populated at all) probably doesn't have 10% of the email addresses that she wants to send to. And 1/2 of those are out of date or mistyped.
There's still plenty of room for separate services that do things with more options and with a broader reach. But for the basic cases (which is a LOT), having a single shared service that nearly everybody's on (and on which they don't have to remember a username->Real Name mapping), is a tremendous asset.
The rest of your points were part of my point. "Real Names" vs "usernames" is a temporary inefficiency in the early services. It's a typical programmer's solution causing normal person frustration. No-one's making that mistake again. No-one's going to roll out, say, an email service without a profile page for each account or a White Pages feature. No-one's leaving out simple photo/file sharing, tweeting or blogging as an integrated service.
And everyone who isn't FaceBook has a huge incentive to support the first federated protocol that enables all that. (So they stand some chance at capturing internet traffic again)
Say, Google's Wave.
Does anyone think it won't roll out with support for a profile page, some sort of White Pages feature, simple blogging, twitter-esque status updates, etc? It's already got email/chat integration and simple photo sharing this early. Why in the world would they be testing photo sharing if they weren't looking to do much more than 'Email 2.0'?
I used to think MySpace was for people who couldn't build their own website. With Facebook's success I'm changing that view. It's about the social connections not simply self publication.
I'm certain I'm not the average facebook user, but that's the value add for me.
The only value we may get from facebook is allowing them to publish our events easily. However, their API and their walled garden make that less valuable.
That being said, I don't know how I'd do that, and we don't have facebook connect because the API is more effort than it's worth.
Probably the most attention I've paid to a company beyond Facebook, Tumblr, and Reddit in these last few months has been to a clothing company with an excellent Facebook presence.
I won't ever care. (Oh and by the way: http://www.facebook.com/wwmkc)
Granted I could properly just ignore it most days, but then people would be annoyed that I haven't friended them yet, send me messages that I would have to respond to, etc.
As for the "login using facebook", you can do the same with openid (heck facebook is an openid provider) - but without pissing of the part of your users that don't have an account or don't want to let you know it.