Originally Posted by pornopete

The question is, is Facebook google or yahoo? If you remember in the early days of the internet we were literally inundated with search engines, alta vista, meta crawler, yahoo, hotbot. All of them were heavy hitters competing with each other, rapidly adding content and features. Along comes this little shitty site called Google.

Right now we've had myspace, hi5, friendster, linkedin, facebook, and some others. These, although they do still get respectable amounts of traffic, are all dead. It is highly improbable that they will make a comeback.

Facebook has two threats. The first threat is the unknown. A site can crop up out of nowhere and take over, much like facebook did to myspace. The second threat is much more real, twitter. Although not in direct competition with facebook twitter offer a similar service. Twitter can easily add a few third party farms and not only will 12 year old little girls be able to milk their imaginary cows, they will get updates from justin beiber while they are milking those cows.

I don't see facebook switching to a pay model. That would be a disaster. One of the reasons people preferred facebook over myspace because of the anonymity it provided over myspace. You can look at your old girlfriends photos without her know you that are doing it. If facebook provided a service where users can see who browsed their profiles and looked at their pictures it would be too much of a game changer. Sure they might convert 2% of their users to paying customers, but what will happen to the other 98%? Then again 2% of 500 million is quite a high number.