I def. see facebook fizzling out over the next 5-10 years as they get more aggressive in trying to wall people into their network and try to weave their way into government and banking.
Eventually, complacency and failure to innovate will probably kill off Facebook. I know it's hard to look at Facebook now and see the possibility that they will be much less relevant in 10 years. But that will probably happen.
Prodigy, CompuServe, AmericaOnline, Friendster, Myspace and to a certain extent even Yahoo and Microsoft. At one point in time they were all pervasive, disruptive, and dominant. And now they've either gone or are having to pivot into a niche to maintain viability at a fraction of their former glory.
The internet and technology will keep growing. Facebook will get marginalized at some point.
I suspect Facebook won't be around in 10 years. Social media sites and services tend not to last forever, and with the way public opinion seems to have turned against the company and the inevitably of a competitor coming along with a new focus/different features, it's almost certain Facebook's days are numbered.
Eventually, they'll be another Myspace. Another Digg. Another Friendster. Whatever.
In the short term, well that's harder to predict. They'll probably get in a bit of hot water over their attitudes towards privacy and the spread of 'fake news' on the platform. They're already being called up in front of governments to answer for their actions, and I suspect things could get much worse for them there.
And then the inevitable will happen. People will keep calling for Facebook to change, and eventually it will. In a way that basically destroys the selling point of the site and drives people off to that hip new startup offering an alternative.
1. FB will go public in the next 5 years.
2. 5 years after that it will become filled with old people.
3. There will be a reemergence of social networking startups trying to displace the then bloated solution with a more elegant alternative.
4. One of these will win and become the next FB.
5. Repeat.
Facebook isn't doomed, they're going to end up like Yahoo, in my opinion. Granted some consider that worse than death.
Their core product is going to grow stale and begin to erode. Younger demographics will abandon the uncool service in favor of the latest platforms. And there will always be a new, cooler service for young demographics to join instead of the network where their parents hang out.
The dominance Facebook once enjoyed will peak and fracture.
People don't stop using Google because it's boring (which it has been for a long time, it's a search engine after all). People will however never start using Facebook in the first place if it's lame. I'd argue we're going to see a lot of that in the next five years, as the first teen generation to have a wide adoption of smart phones comes through, with tons of good apps to choose from. And to the extent that younger users sign up for Facebook, they'll use it a lot less.
Five or six years from now, Facebook will be a slow growing, very mature social network. They'll be profitable, and Wall Street will be bored, and will give them a drastically lower multiple (leaving their stock not worth much more than it is today; $4b or $5b in profit * 20 to 30 multiple). It'll probably stick around in that stagnant shape much like Yahoo has, for a very long time.
I don't think Facebook can survive ten more years without deep changes. Facebook needs your data to survive but they don't bring much value to their users anymore, some people are leaving but many are just getting passive and don't post anymore. This is probably the end of an era and Facebook recent missteps are probably the nail in the coffin.
I can envision facebook taking quite a dip as the batch of new internet users that have joined in the past 2 years get tired of it and find out there ARE other websites.
Having watched the downfall of MySpace, Orkut etc, I thought (hoped) same thing might happen to FaceBook. But now it feels like they are going to be around, for a long, long time. I don't know if anyone is even trying to take on them, Google seems to have given up on their social products. FB might not be fashionable anymore, people might even curse them, but they'll continue to use them at some level :( And they have enough money to keep buying other companies and stay at least somewhat relevant
It feels like only regulators can take on them, but that too is unlikely to happen, except some feeble attempts in Europe
Less and less people are using FB .. perhaps IG and Whatsapp yes, although you have to consider that privacy regulations can only get more stringent over time.
Will they go bankrupt ? I don't think so. Will they be able to grow at the rate of the last 10y? I don't think so.
I expect the Internet and social media is going to continue to evolve and blow past what Facebook was able to accomplish faster than anyone thinks. I don't expect Facebook will last as the largest social network for much more than 5 years. And the reason is simple, it only took Facebook that long to go from 1 million to 1 billion users. It's successor will probably be able to do it in half that time. I bet we're only a couple years away from that eventuality.
Then FB will buy the next FB replacement, and he will be back to square one. At this point I find it unlikely that FB will be dethroned unless government steps in. The lock-in is too widespread, and their cash reserves too large for anyone to threaten their position. FB is not going to fall like MySpace did. The internet has changed a lot since 2005.
I think there’s something important to glean here. We’ve always seen Facebook driving trends in social media (or re-appropriating features from lesser groups). We are starting to see a near constant reactive Facebook. This is the beginning of the end for them.
I seriously think Facebook is going to collapse soon. It's so overhyped it's not even funny -- just look to their stocks to see a prime example. So many people are just itching to get away from it now that it can't last long. We'll see, of course. But it is soon to be a Myspace, et al.
Sure, but how long will it take to topple Facebook? The article talks about 2011. I'd be willing to bet Facebook will still be the largest social network in 2020. 10 years in tech is an eternity, so I feel that that's a pretty strong assertion. To say that some kind of set of open social networking protocol will dominate in 15, 20, 30 years is a pretty open-ended prediction that's hard to argue with.
Facebook will either be killed by something fundamentally better - or it will be regulated to death.
Social networking is emerging as far too important a communication medium for one company to be allowed to dominate. It may take a few yeas for regulators to catch up, but if Facebook isn't unseated by something better and more open, it will get broken up by government or at the very least forced to inter-operate openly with its competitors.
I'm betting something better will come around before the government steps in, but either way I'd say Facebook will be taken down a peg or three within the next few years.
I’d say the fall of facebook will be like the fall of Rome. It’ll peter along for a while dysfunctionally and then there will be a rapid decline when something in the model gives way. There’ll still be vestiges of it across the Internet for many years to come though.
I'm much more optimistic. I suspect increase in social network investments and viable replacement coming out ~year from now. It's not very hard to copy main FB features, but baking privacy in will take some effort.
To be honest, I don't see FB coming out of this. Their image is ruined, now they need a push and will start slowly collapsing. I'm betting on Yahoo-style slow decay.
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