The only real difference I've noticed in the last, lets say 15 years, is that people have grown up with things now and so they seem "easier" and more "accessible." To some extent that's true, but it's mostly the people that have changed not the products or services themselves.
I don't really believe that any "internet company" is sustainable. The value they add exists at a point in time and decays. Get in and get out. The basic functions are too easy to copy and there's no guarantee you keep your community unless you do so by force.
At some point you either become a media company that caters to specific demographics (the lookalike audience you acquired), or you disappear.
If tomorrow their was no more Facebook I don't feel like it would be a big deal for more than a week or so. After a few hours everyone would have a new solution for photos, messaging, etc.. After a month no one would care anymore.
As an investor I think the thing is to get in early, help built that valuable moment in time in peoples' lives, and then just get out.
Of course there are a million variables. I mean, AIM is still around, right? But it's no longer the "default" IM system, while a few years ago, it seemed to be (to me, anyway).
And I'm not sure Facebook or Google (with its current revenue makeup) is anything other than a media company, nor have they ever not been.
I can easily see Facebook going the way of AOL. In a few years a new generation will grow up with something new that seems easier and more intuitive to them, and Facebook becomes a legacy platform. Maybe they buy a few small media companies that keep the newsfeed interesting.
I just can't see Facebook, Twitter or anything else being "the thing" on a sustainable basis. There's no precedent for that, and it really doesn't make sense to me intuitively.
Year after year, same old "ugly" site, same old boring use case.
I wish I'd thought of it.
Another thing I left out, which I feel is novel, is the wiki. IMO the wiki is one of the few "new" things. When you really think about the wiki it's pretty different form a message board or co-editing a website. It's something else.
I've no interest in the visual based media that's slowly replacing it, but I've always been more of a text person than a picture person anyways. Also I like being able to quickly scan dozens of messages instead of the large amount of real estate a picture would take up in relative terms.
And speaking of the compact size, I find the 140 char limit to be feature, not bug. At least for the people I follow they generally use that as a way to hone their thoughts and not just blather about.
I have my complaints, nothing is perfect but while I enjoy using FB losing Twitter would put a giant hole in my day to day life.
Until then I had also written Twitter off, but if they can monetize Fabric and leverage some of what they've learned about big data and how (not) to scale technical infrastructure, they may be able to position themselves as a technology solutions company that also has a limited character notification system.
Selling B2B has proven itself to be so much more sustainable. Businesses do not like to switch platforms as everything is integrated into their stack and workflows. For consumers everything is just a click away. Not so much for lots of businesses.
Snapchat and Yik Yak are messaging applications, so they attract kids and friends who want to communicate with one another privately. Problem is, messaging apps don't seem to be revenue generators anymore.
Because Tweets are all public and searchable, I would argue that Twitter is a publishing platform. They attract content producers who want public attention: press, celebrities, politicians, brands, etc.--and the audiences who want to hear from these folks. So they should be able to drive a lot of revenue from ads.