The same exponential social forces that drove Facebook to prominence can turn on it surprisingly quickly and cause exponential decay. If anything keeps them up at night, this is it.

I've refused to join Facebook because of an inability to partition my life appropriately. I have at least three personas I don't want to just run together (family, friends, coworkers, probably an online shard as well). If people as a whole realize they can't express themselves freely with their friends because mom is online, that's going to be a big problem for Facebook. This could yet kill them if they continue to choose not to allow fragmentation.

Also, much has been made of how this young generation has no desire for privacy and can't understand why anyone would want it. I've thought for a while that there is still the plausible outcome where instead of never growing a privacy sense and being unprecedentedly open, that they would instead collectively discover the ancient social reasons for privacy the hard way instead. It will never be a single event that makes good copy, but it sounds to me like we may be down this path now, though still in the early phases.

I find myself nodding along with you, then unable to reconcile myself with the reality: that facebook is a high-growth company, and it's unlikely to become the next AOL for another decade.

Perhaps the answer is raganwald's comment below (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2397934): people find use in it, it's just not the same use we found.

It's likely that it's so fast-growing because it's bringing in the outliers, The unfashionable 'late adopters' that most services would kill to have, and to keep.

This doesn't bode well for Facebook because a huge part of their growth strategy was in getting the exclusive college crowd, then growing that circle to the early adopters, then growing THAT circle to everybody else. Even if they never lose their core demographic (which is to say, the students that made facebook popular, which have almost certainly graduated by now) -- if the exclusive college crowd moves to somewhere else, even just for one of FB's core services, it's a very bad sign.

What FB wants, rather, what it needs, is for people to rely on it for everything. If portions of its service become decentralized elsewhere, and heaven help them if they're able to integrate with each other, then they lose the power they currently have, which is in being able to get a pretty clear picture of your social circle from visiting just one site.

They would want to shoot for what you describe, yes. Any company would want to be all things to all people, to relentlessly accumulate users, never lose one. But nobody will achieve that idealized goal. They'll be faced with choices where they can grow their userbase more aggressively at the cost of some fraction of their faithful early adopters.

Losing early adopters never causes immediate loss of growth. If you play your cards right you will make them up manyfold. Neither does their loss cause immediate exposure to competitors. Early-adopters who left apple, or reddit, or google usually scattered to the winds, spreading out over lots of competing services.

Peter Drucker said the goal of a company is to create a customer. Rephrased, the goal of a company to organize a coherent market out of disparate customer needs. I imagine companies as engines that suck up diverse users one end, cause them to behave in a common manner, and emit users out the exhaust, hopefully at a far lower rate. Discarded users still have to be sucked up by a different coherent engine, which is hard.

Let me know if this comment makes absolutely no sense whatsoever :)

It makes sense, but I don't really know if I agree with all of it. Rather, I don't necessarily disagree, because what company wouldn't want everybody on the planet as a customer -- but I think most companies (at least early on) prefer to have a niche, and dominate within that niche.

The less precise your niche is, or the larger your demographic, the harder it is to precisely deliver anything to them. You can't possibly be all things to all people, and once you've expanded beyond a demographic that you can effectively meet the needs of, then you stop being 'kick ass' for any one person, and start being 'okay' for more people.

For services like Facebook, I think this is the death knell of their offering. What they still have, of course, is the zillions of users. So long as they have everybody, it buys them time.

What I was trying to allude to earlier though, is that if the early adopters that got them popular start going elsewhere, then eventually, so will everybody want to be.

The catch though, is that just like nobody is taking on Craigslist head-on, I don't think anybody can take on Facebook head-on. But, just as Twitter is a viable alternative for status updates, if other, really awesome little things start cropping up for other aspects of FB service, they'll eventually start to erode FB's offerings.

The best thing that FB has going for it in defense of that is their platform, which means that likely, much of what might otherwise usurp FaceBook may well end up just integrating with them instead.

So they are ok with making their tweets and posts on tumblr being exposed to public but they are not ok with their parents being on facebook ??

Difference is that Twitter accounts are pseudonymous and deniable, and your parents probably don't know what Tumblr is...

That said, it first became obvious how big Facebook would become when they calmly ignored the protests of those who didn't want to be connected with their younger siblings at high school and thought newsfeeds were intrusive.

I can assure you that at least some parents do know what Tumblr is.

Agreed. It was the status updates (and pictures to a lesser degree) that made Facebook interactive.

""The freshman aren't really using facebook [to find parties] anymore.""

I built this app to learn Google App Engine http://hello-1-world.appspot.com/about and it will be good for people to find hot spots where people at. But I've been unable to find an initial user who would seed the network. The fact that it has no branding and there is no activity and the purpose is not clear are facts against it.