I realize that it’s difficult to anticipate history, but do you think references to Facebook would necessarily date a fictional work? In other words, is using Facebook like roller skating (i.e., something that will probably lapse into nostalgic obscurity) or more like driving (something people will, more or less, be doing for the foreseeable future)?
Specifically Facebook or social networking in general (Myspace, Facebook, Google+, Twitter etc)?
Technology moves quickly. I think Facebook will be replaced. By what, I have no idea.
It’s not likely to go away any time soon given its size. But you never know how things will develop and every work gets dated somehow. Is dating that big a deal?
Start here.
All the current Internet darlings are priced at many times what Google earns. They are terrible investments.
I think it will evolve and morph into some form of social networking that becomes the norm… If only I could predict what platform that would run on…
How will social interactions online evolve?
What enabling technologies shape and support those evolving interactions?
Can Facebook stay positioned as the innovator of new interactions (via innovative enabling technologies) AND as the provider of ther underlying eco-system in which those actions occur?
Welcome to Strategy 101. 
Facebook is rapidly going the route that did in MySpace. Remember MySpace? It was that social networking site that not less than ten years ago was a huge rage, while Facebook was a distant second to it? Then it got overloaded with advertising, spam virus emails, and crappy, unnecessary redesigns that were more of a headache to users than a benefit. Then one day, all of a sudden people in droves began abandoning MySpace and switching over to Facebook. Well, surprise surprise, now FB is exactly where MySpace was when it jumped the shark. Now I see more and more of my friends using Tumblr rather than FB.
Perhaps social networking sites are like pop music groups and will inevitably follow the same course trajectories - they start as as cult sensations among hip younger people who are “in the know”, then they gradually grow in popularity until they eclipse all other sites, and then become bloated dinosaurs that get met with scorn & derision for their excessive baggage, ultimately they are replaced by newer, flashier sites that “speak to the newer generation.”
As I see it, all existing social network sites are extremely ephemeral. Think Myspace. It may be that there will, at some point, be a Google of social networking, but we are not at that point. Facebook is an infuriating piece of garbage that barely works, and I think their shoot-from-the-hip approach to privacy will ultimately be their undoing, unless boredom sets in first. Twitter is just silly. All other existing sites are also-rans.
Everything becomes dated, of course. Things having to do with computers just become dated more quickly.
“You’ve got mail.”
We still have e-mail, but AOL is long gone.
Absolutely. Mention FB in a work that’s set more than a few years into the future, and you’ll end up looking just as silly as the writers that depicted the Soviet Union existing in the 21st century.
Sure, it’ll become dated. Remember how in old movies, getting a telegram or a long-distance phone call was the signal that a BIG EVENT was taking place? Western Union (akthough it doesn’t send telegrams) and the phone company still exist, but pop culture doesn’t care.
More to the point, How I Met Your Mother is already treating Barney’s blogging and Marshall’s web pages as quaint rather than hip. Compare those to texting, which the show treats as routine.
I think Facebook now has about ten times as many users as MySpace did at its peak. Which doesn’t mean it’ll be here forever, but it does mean it’s not likely to stall and shrivel the same way.
I keep having to check the dates on the posts in this thread as I read it because otherwise I would swear it was a zombie from last year.
MySpace was sold less than two weeks ago for $35 million.
I realize you’re only using Google as an analogy here, but Google+ is getting up and running pretty damn quick, and the integration with existing Google services is a real factor in its favor. Unless Google somehow dies, I have a feeling that any evolution of the online social network is going to happen through them.
AOL is still around; they just bought the Huffington Post, but they’re not the big deal they once were, that’s for sure. But I get your point by saying they’re long gone (from relevance).
Social networking as an idea/concept will be around for awhile, even if Facebook itself won’t be.
I agree with the majority of your post, but not the bolded part. You may think that it’s silly, and I’ll admit that until I joined it a few months ago, I felt the same way. But Twitter is a huge deal, and to date there’s nothing like it (with the exception of Tumblr, which uses a similar approach but for publishing). Traditional social networking sites focus on bringing you closer to your established friends; Twitter, in contrast, serves to connect its users to each other on a far broader scale. It’s viral social networking, wherein a post made by a random person can strike a chord and end up being visited by millions overnight, or where a celebrity (be it a “real life” celeb like Ashton Kutcher or an “internet famous” person like Jonathan Coulton) can and will directly interact with his or her fanbase by the thousands.
Does it have its negatives? Absolutely. There are days when I fear that Twitter is turning our entire world into a textual popularity contest. Then I get into a tweet conversation with one of my favorite science policy writers, with whom I otherwise never would have been able to speak, and I realize once again that we are living in the motherfuckin’ future.
An independent estimate puts the current membership of G+ at about 10 million and growing rapidly.
A lot of people loathe Facebook and were looking for any excuse to jump ship to a better service. Among the tech industry circles I hang out in, membership in G+ is exploding.
Except Google+. As I’ve posted in other threads, one of the main advantages of G+ over Facebook is how well it supports asymmetrical relationships.
From a strategic point of view, it will take more than Facebook becoming the noisy, ad filled wasteland for booty calls and crappy indie bands that MySpace was. Something actually has to come along to replace it. Everyone is familiar with the “Crossing the Chasm” technology adoptation model, right? Whatever replaces Facebook has to have something so cool that it has to attract the mainstram majority who are already heavily invested in Facebook. Otherwise you end up with a small group of hipster nerds playing with it for a few months until the next hip new thing comes out.
That’s why predicting the next Facebook is so difficult (if you can do it, you’d be a billionare). It’s not enough to look at crappier versions of the same product. You need to find a product that strikes some sort of chord with people where they feel like they are missing out if they don’t have it.
Obligatory XKCD:
(see the hover text especially)