Do you think Facebook will ever be discontinued or replaced by something that wiĺl become equally popular?

I’m told it has already fallen out of favour with the hipsters and cool kids. In time it will likely become the domain of older generations, populated largely by tumble-weed and “remember when” pictures.

I don’t think anything is here to stay in the tech world. I’m sure it will be subsumed eventually.

Facebook is already dead, right?
I’m not sure we’ll know what will take off next, but I suspect it will not be a Facebook clone.

I still remember the time when Yahoo! Messager still dominated. At that time Yahoo was everything. Now its popularity has been greatly reduced. So I guess the same will apply to Facebook too.

You know, people always try to find new things to satisfy themselves. Nothing will catch people’s interest forever.

Yes, without doubt.

For sure it will be replaced. Nothing lasts forever in the IT world – except for security flaws and privacy violations.
People are realizing it is a time suck and invasive source of personal information. As it dumbs down and becomes a ubiquitous commodity the technically savvy will be the first to move on leaving behind the less nimble. That will be a signal for the beginning of the end.

What is next? I’m not a fortune teller but here is my guess. It will be something that enables easy communication with friends and contacts while protecting private info. It will not push ads, will not take up so much bandwidth, and will not make suggestions for other contacts.
To decrease the load and increase content quality it might limit the number of forwarded messages (possibly charging a low fee like 1/100 of a cent per forwarded recipient) while allowing original content to be sent for free.

Sheepjournal

Anything is possible. I’m sure there was a time when people couldn’t envision vinyl records going away and look at what’s occurred.

@LuckyGuy “What is next? I’m not a fortune teller but here is my guess. It will be something that enables easy communication with friends and contacts while protecting private info. It will not push ads, will not take up so much bandwidth, and will not make suggestions for other contacts.”

Until it’s owners realize they can make a fuck-ton of money by selling ads and personal data.

It is still kicking but terminal. Just waiting for the next big thing.

There’s the highly-anticipated Ello, which is in invite-only mode right now. But re: protecting private info – how exactly are these projects supposed to make money? People seem unwilling to pay for services they use with cash. They’d rather pay with their data (social signals).

Yeah, Ello sounds like a nice pipe dream that’s inevitably going to smack right into a big brick wall of reality.

@Darth_Algar I figure the existing model will change. Vendors will tire of paying for indiscriminate user clicks and users will tire of news feeds filled with crap. Heck, how many of us already have pop up blockers, Ad stoppers, Ghostery, etc.
The new company will make a 2 x FT of money by charging vendors and users a small fee to send out info. That would reduce the tons of junk that gets sent out. In general when something is free it has no value. Vendors can figure how much they spend now on random click and put some of that into sending out targeted, meaningful info.

As a side note more people will recognize that indiscriminate FB posts can mess up your life by affecting job prospects, dating, and other relationships. The “next big thing” will correct this.

Facebook will probably end but another site will open up for people to tell everyone about their personal lives. I’ve never joined Facebook but I have family members who are not talking now due to things they read or heard on Facebook. Thank goodness I’m not involved.

I’ll never understand why people join these things. I’m a private person and I like it that way. heck there are things I don’t even tell my mother who is up in years. She is 84 and on Facebook if you can believe it.

@LuckyGuy

Users aren’t going to pay to post or send messages. That simply isn’t going to happen. Vendors might pay to send out info, but that’s still the same model we have now. The same model that’s been in effect for all kinds of media for decades – revenue from advertisers.

Facebook will go the way of Myspace. Myspace is still around and like Myspace, FB won’t get discontinued, just at some point it will die a long agonizing fading death.

One of these days somebody will buy FB, and that will be the death knell.

The NSA is probably working on its replacement right now.

I’m more wondering what’s going to happen to the internet, generally. It’s collapse could send the Western world into a dark age.

There is a lot of discussion around data storage right now. Governments are developing, or already have, the capability of storing every communication you make in your life. Will people accept that? Who will have access? How can that information be truly secured?

In the bigger picture, Facebook hardly qualifies as a blip. AOL to-be.

@Darth_Algar “Users aren’t going to pay to post or send messages.” I’m not so sure. It needs to be tried. The model might be we get 500 messages free per month. I’m hoping it will cut off or reduce the likes of Allison, or Britttney, or Claire… with 750 friends each getting a message 15 times per day about every little brain fart and haul that bubbles through their heads. If people had to think for a millisecond before they hit the send button it would reduce the crap.

Email might be the same way. It would reduce spam. You get for example 1000 free emails per month. The person who sends out 1,000,000 at a time would have to pay $1000 for the privilege. Some companies might find it still worthwhile. 1000 people for $1 is not unreasonable.
Right now it costs them nothing so your spam folder likely has 200 or so messages festering in it.

Yes.

I would delete my account if I didn’t have family that looked forward to seeing my occasional photographs of my daughter and landscape/nature photography. I could just switch to Instagram, but the only social media my father uses is my mother’s facebook account.

Social media tends to attract those with narcissistic tendencies and it can be very annoying. I’ve lost interest this year. I’m sure I’m not the only person sick and tired of it.

Of course it will. It’s inevitable.

@LuckyGuy

There’s nothing stopping anyone from trying such a model. It simply isn’t going to work however. People will not pay for something they’ve always gotten for free. Not without some coercion anyway.

I hope so, I can’t stand Facebook.

My vision of social networking in the future will be everyone scattered around different platforms according to their preference, and using aggregators to keep everything together. Facebook will probably never die, there will always be someone still using it – even Myspace is still going – but I think its popularity will continue to wane. But I don’t think there will ever be another thing quite like it.

Ello is pretty lame, thus far. I’ve been on much better built SocNets with privacy settings that didn’t get the attention or funding, unfortunately.

FB will topple eventually, but only as the technology changes. I think it is too big of an institution within SocNets as we know them. If they are smart and can adapt to what society wants – such as the right to use alternate names instead of legal names (which is what has driven the current emigration to Ello) it might stay on top.

We are fickle creatures. Some other nice, shiny internet site will emerge to take the place of Facebook (if it hasn’t already as has already been suggested). The only certainty is things will change.

Facebook is dying, but it’s not dead. Myspace is dead. Twitter is alive and thriving. I agree that nothing lasts forever in Webland. Just look at Fluther for an example. gulp

It will be replaced by 4chan+

Let us hope so. (Responding to the subject question, not the previous response.)

I think, for myself, I don’t mind looking at ads that are targeted toward me. I’d mind more if they tried to have a social networking site that did not push ads but wanted me to pay a fee monthly. That I would not do. Put the ads on my screen – I ignore then anyway.