One question on many people’s mind is where next for Facebook? It is still growing every day, but at some point there has to be saturation, and it will also have to start competing with true challengers. Every other big social networking site has declined after expanding fast, so will Facebook prove to be any different?
The thing is, Facebook seem almost unbeatably strong at the moment. The main thing people want from a social networking site is to be able to find all their friends easily. No one is going to transfer to a new social site unless a large number of friends already have, so you get a chicken and egg situation. Facebook became popular to start with because it was so much better than other options – and it was restricted to only people with .edu emails, which made it seem more attractive. It’s difficult to see how any other company can replicate that.
There is an open source version of Facebook being released, but unless it is standardized it’s hard to see it making an impression. Most people don’t want to be hunting for the correct version of software (you only have to look at the different Linux distros to see that), so they will have some big challenges ahead. Getting people to change from Facebook to an open source version – especially when it is likely to be an inferior product due to the smaller budget – is going to be extremely difficult.
Another thing I don’t think many people realise is that a significant amount of accounts created on Facebook must not be real people. There are a huge number of spammers who can create hundreds of accounts using automated software, so how many of Facebook’s subscriber count is real people is difficult to say. I don’t know whether they include only active accounts in the statistics or whether every account is included.
It would definitely not be a bad thing for Facebook to have some real competition though. With all the privacy issues surrounding their advertising platform and API, you’d think that people would already be looking for an alternative, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.