Until someone is a better social networking site than Facebook, they are in no danger of "becoming Yahoo." And I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon - and maybe not ever. Facebook may become "boring," but only in the sense that all of your utilities are boring. You rely on them, but they cease to be exciting, and instead just become part of the background of things that you take for granted. This is very different from Yahoo, which is boring because it's irrelevant.

I believe that Facebook will keep being somewhat interesting by default due to their alluring ecosystem and viral potential for future entrepreneurs. Most new Apps are built with a clear strategy of broadcasting itself (and showing some of its features) through Facebook feeds. These new Apps have made peoples feeds a lot more interesting. I think Instagram is a good example of this. It made your friends amateur photos much cooler and aesthetically pleasing to look at; thus drawing you to a more interesting Facebook experience.

Their strength lies in their ecosystem and ability to let their users and developers easily create and share content. They have more or less nailed this down already (along with a revenue sharing system to sustain some of their infrastructure costs). At the end of the day, even if they stopped innovating, they’ve done such a fantastic play with their infrastructure, that it ensures that they remain interesting as long as new entrepreneurs keep developing Apps that enhance their ecosystem.

If anything, I think their need to copy and catch up with new breakthroughs from other social networks (i.e. Google+, Foursquare and Twitter) is actually making their product more convoluted and less appealing. Less is more in Facebook’s case. That was the genius of Facebook from day 1. You could strip down Facebook to probably 5 core features and it would still remain relevant and interesting because of others ability (developers and friends) urge to create and share.

Facebook chat is the primary real time chat system that I use these days and has replaced MSN for me and my friends. I recently installed the Messenger app on my iPhone and it certainly has the potential to kill off whatsapp and similar apps due two reasons: all my contacts are already available, and that I can use either my laptop or phone, depending on whichever is available to me when I need to communicate.

Unfortunately I doubt that this potential will be realised. Why? Because I haven't seen Facebook advertise the app AT ALL. (I heard about the app through HN.) None of my friends are aware the app exists and it's such a shame. It wouldn't be hard for Facebook to push their chat service as an alternative to txt/bbm/whatsapp, they already have an ad network in place that they can use for free.

I really hope to see Facebook push their messaging service as a way to communicate not just when you are browsing facebook.com but instead as an alternative to text-based communication methods on phones.

Not realizing its massive potential is a failure.

However, I do not have any issues with the reliability of Facebook chat. Not to say that there are no issues, they just haven't affected me ...yet.

Like Yahoo, Facebook has accumulated a large base of average users. These are the people who aren't early adopters, who aren't concerned with "vision" and who dig in their heels against change.

Facebook has the choice to alienate these folks by adding "new exciting features" or keep these folks and stay what it is. Whatever "vision" is involved, Facebook will likely make a choice halfway between these results and wind-up satisfying no one and so indeed sink to the "status" of Yahoo.

But it seems like this whole process comes because "boringness" makes operators no money even when serves end-users purposes perfectly. Look at craiglist - the most boring, most successful-at-fulfilling-a-need and the least-profitable-relative-to-traffic commercial website in the world.

Facebook's messaging has effectively killed AIM at least for me and everyone I know. Huge failure...

Of course, the article's conclusion isn't based on useful metrics, but on scattershot, poorly reasoned reactions to Facebook's product strategy. Like Google, Facebook is steadily simplifying and unifying their products and as with Google, journalists can't wrap their heads around it.

-Place-tagging is still in Facebook and is arguably more powerful than ever as Facebook has steadily made tagging people with you almost effortlessly easy on all platforms. Facebook's Places directory is probably as complete as Yelp's and they're doing some very interesting A - B user preference polling. I'd have a hard time finding a local restaurant or business without a well maintained Facebook page.

-Every social network has had a hard time encouraging users to "group" so it shouldn't be a surprise that Facebook is iterating/experimenting. Google's implementation really isn't that sophisticated - it simply forces you to group everyone and has a pretty UI. For all we know, this overly-involved friending process is why + is flopping. Smart Lists automate the process to a degree that Google and Twitter haven't attempted.

-Subscriptions looks like another well-measured shot at Twitter. The "subscription" model looks like a much more comprehensible model for following public figures than Pages, which have been quite successful in their own right (see Places).

I could go on, but suffice to say, I find a lot of these criticisms poorly reasoned.

Getting nearly a billion users, being one of the most influential companies in the world and not being exciting enough for tech pundits is an awesome problem to have.

But Facebook didn't their users and especially their sixty billion dollar valuation by being boring.

Facebook - at this moment - has one of the most amazing web development teams on the planet (if reports are to be believed). They do a lot of slick development with relatively few people. But how long can they keep that up now that they've stopped being "the thing that's happening??

I would wager that from a data point of view, facebook page views and retention is likely to be stronger than ever.

Step 1: the cool kids spot a new place and start hanging out there.

Step 2: the first signs of the popped collared masses show up, pushing the cool kids out as they realized the lame-streamers have spotted the new venue.

Step 3: the masses start reviewing the venue on Yelp and in local hipster papers claiming it is the hot new spot.

Step 4: the suburbanites located a 30 minute drive from the venue (without traffic) read these reviews and start frequenting the venue, causing long line-ups outside.

Step 5: the masses proclaim the venue to be uncool and/or played out and move on to the next best thing.

Step 6: the venue becomes filled with 30 and 40 something divorcées who are trying to be cool and crossing their fingers that they win the lottery so they can avoid having to do the whole Match.com and eHarmony thing.

Step 7: the neighbourhood that the venue is in becomes fully gentrified and the venue is sold to some entrepreneur who wants to make it into a Starbucks or fake Irish pub.

Facebook's history follows this same pattern:

Step 1 (2004-2005): The place for cool university kids.

Step 2 (2006-2007): The 20 somethings show up and proclaim how awesome this new phenomenon is. Not to be out-done, they claim ownership to the new network, and get their friends to start checking it out every so often instead of MySpace.

Step 3 (2007): The young professionals show up and start discovering that their old high school sweethearts grew fat, old, and unhappy. They revel in the spectacle. The cool university kids start complaining that the place was better when it was just Stanford, Harvard, et al.

Step 4 (2008-2009): Your mom, dad, uncles, and aunts show up to the show. With every Like from their mom, 20 and 30-somethings start cringing and trying to figure out how they can lock down their privacy settings. Word starts leaking out about how the cool kids are now using something called Twitter.

Step 5 (2010): The first murmurings about it being cool to not be on Facebook are actually taken seriously as every 50 year old and their day job at some boring Fortune 500 company setup shop with a Facebook Group and a QR code advertisement. "Quit Facebook Day" becomes a movement. The cool kids, having adopted Twitter en masse, now start being over-run by the 20 and 30 something professionals who are desperate to find their new fix.

Step 6 (2011): With most actual action happening on Twitter, Facebook is relegated to the social networking equivalent of having brunch with your friends. It's no longer the cool party spot. It's just a place you go to brag about that other cool thing you were up to the night before.

Step 7 (2012): Facebook announces its IPO and officially becomes the Hotmail of Web 2.0.

I believe you could apply the same logic to almost everything but Google is still the cool kid after all these years as is Manchester United, right?

Step 6 has definitely already happened. Remember what is cool is not necessarily what is popular. Cool is the derivative of popularity though. At any given time, if you want to find out what will become popular later on, just find out what's cool. Twitter has 106 M users vs Facebook's 500 M as of 2010. It's clearly not as popular as Facebook. But Twitter's growth has been faster (and more sustainable than Google+'s initial exponential growth) than Facebook's was. The trend is keeping up and as much as we can laugh and joke about the utility of Twitter, I'd say that it is already at Step 4. You already are finding people that want to move onto something else that's cool (which IMHO is what drove the initial adoption of Google+).

We can relearn all of these lessons or we can just admit that we're really doing social businesses and these sort of things have been around for a long time. How they work is well known. Just, up until this past decade or so, we'd never seen them in the technology space.

2/3 of restaurants fail outright soon after opening. The other 1/3 tend to be profitable really quickly (running a restaurant is tough and you can't run it at a loss for very long). You'll see successful restaurant owners start another one within a few years, because the old one is starting to get stale to people. Besides, around that time usually the star chef decides to move onto something better too.

Dance clubs fall into a couple of categories IMHO. You have the smaller spots, which can and do thrive. They hold about a 100 or fewer people, are often started by one really savvy entrepreneur who just wanted to create a cool spot (sound familiar to hackers and OSS? :-P). Then you have the bigger spots. These are cavernous mega clubs, and in my experience they're often in one way or another linked to organized crime and/or money laundering. They'll garner a lot of attention through PR, celebrity sightings, and marketing, and eventually implode under a pile of debt. How you can pile up debt selling alcohol at $7 a shot and several hundred dollars a bottle, I'm not quite sure. Read about Peter Gatien, one of the more notorious club owners in North America. Jay-Z has rapped about him: "Me and my operation, running New York nightscene, with one eye closed, like Peter Gatien". The whole business is about shifting debt like a hot potato. It's disgusting.

Social businesses have a finite amount of time with which they are fashionable to the masses and under which their growth is distorted. That first explosive growth trend never repeats itself ever again, which is probably what Facebook is trying to contend with right now as it decides when to go public.

If I were Mark Zuckerberg... I'm clearly not anywhere as brilliant as he is... but if I were in his shoes, I'd take a page from other successful social entrepreneurs. Start something new that's cool and is not Facebook-branded. The trick to social businesses is that the entrepreneur should be the brand. Facebook should be a Zuckerberg product in the same way that 69 Royal Hospital Road is but a single Gordon Ramsay restaurant. Zuck should have a portfolio of social sites, not one fucking behemoth that, when it fails, takes him down with it.

I use FB to keep in touch with those I might not otherwise. But FB's messaging is horrible. I hate the fact that they keep all your old messages in a stream. Last week, I sent you a funny NSFW photo and this week I want to discuss business.

I don't want "messaging" to be a constant chat log. I want a UTILITY like gmail that works extremely well and allows me to contact friends & family in a central database.

Instead I get "Attachment Unavailable" when sending messages -- with no way of fixing it or understanding why.

I used to marvel at how awesome, efficient and effective FB was at design and coding. But now I'm more shocked at how stupid some companies could be like FB, eventually devolving into an AOL-attitude of stupidity.

Facebook = AOL of 2010s, it's better coded but equally obnoxious

Let's put some numbers around this interesting statement. Are there really a lot of people who find the atmosphere on Twitter much nicer than the atmosphere on Facebook? How about Google Plus? How many people find its atmosphere much nicer than the atmosphere on Facebook? And for the most important numbers, how much revenue is each of those companies gaining from the people who like each company's atmosphere best?

P.S. I like Facebook very well indeed, because my international network of friends is largely all there. I use Facebook much like a social linking service (not too differently from how I use HN), posting links I find interesting to invite comments from friends, and posting comments in threads about links posted by other people. The intellectual tone of the discussions I encounter on Facebook is very high--although that surely mostly has to do with how I met many of my friends. We (all my various friends and I) devote time and effort to cultivating a respectful atmosphere of people expressing frequently wildly varying opinions, as long as everyone is civil and everyone is encouraged to look up facts. That's like being invited to graduate seminars (a real-life experience I have had) on interesting subjects at any hour of the day that is convenient for me. As long as Facebook can monetize enough, somehow, to allow people like me who don't give it money (but arguably do give it content) to meet one another there, Facebook will be part of my life for a long time. After all, my FRIENDS are there.

After edit: regarding the comment elsewhere in this thread about the submitted article,

This is a poorly researched article that takes a few anecdotes

I can't say I necessarily disagree, but note for the record that most blog posts are poorly researched and mostly based on anecdotes. In actual fact, on HN poorly researched blog posts tend to be much more upvoted as new submissions than professionally written research articles. It's a rare case when a general readership of a website (e.g., HN's readership) prefers discussing careful research to discussing a few anecdotes.

Another comment asks,

Are people excited by search?

I was very excited by Google when it first became available. (I discovered Google before it was publicly announced, by noticing what search engines were spidering my personal website back in the 1990s.) Google's results were so plainly superior to those of Excite, Lycos, and even AltaVista (my previous favorite search engine) that I soon told all my friends about Google. Search results that turn up reliable, accurate, readable links are always a pleasure. The way to do better at search than Google does would be to somehow serve up better results more consistently--that would be exciting, if it is possible.

You are forgeting a fifth of humanity (China).

Facebook may have no vision. (I actually think they do. Even if it's not very clear or savory.) But facebook certainly isn't dispensable. The analogy would be much more complete if you imagined that Yahoo was the only main email provider, emails didn't get exchanged between servers and in order to get an email to yahoo mail users you had to go to Yahoo to mail them. That's about how dispensable Facebook is to a lot of people's private lives.

I for one haven't noticed a change at all on my Facebook... I think the "boring" aspect maybe a tech related issue where people expect to see something crazing happening every week. I know I often open up Hacker news and go "ooohhhh nothing to see here today", which is more a sign of my indulgence in news as opposed to article nothing happening out there.

Facebook can be replaced by a new social network. For the moment, however, there is no compelling new vision for social networking (and I fully agree that facebook will not be replaced by facebook++, but rather with a reimagination of the concept)

Mentioning "lax patent laws" seems misleading, or am I missing something here?

Facebook can't keep up the rate of new user acquisition it has enjoyed for the past couple of years forever - and as the userbase collectively ages, interest wanes, pageviews decline, and revenue drops off. Right now, it looks like they will inevitably be caught in the same race to the bottom, doing whatever they can to scrounge up page views, that Yahoo is in.

They have become too confident because of their numbers - size doesn't really matter. Despite having the largest user-base online, they have been unable to convert users from any of these smaller services they've attempted to copy. That's because people still go on Facebook for the same reason they always have, to check up on their friends. That's what they did best, and what they need to continue doing. Most of these extra services like "deals" and "seamless messaging" have generally been flops because people aren't unanimously going to switch over to Facebook for them when the originals (Groupon, cell phones) began as providers of said service and therefore have a committed user-base. Every tech service introduced into the world either succeeds and generates a user-base, or fails and disappears. The services Facebook is trying to copy and replace have stood the test of time.

However I don't agree that Google's hangouts "upstaged" Facebook-Skype because usually when I, like most people, use video chat it's with one person anyway. It's hard to catch multiple people who I want to talk to who are online with nowhere to go or nothing to do at the same time for more than a minute or two. Perhaps Hangouts is more impressive to hackers and tech pundits because of its maximum capacity, but to me Skype is all I will ever want because it follows the always-valuable advice, "Keep It Simple Stupid."

This is advice that Facebook needs to learn to start following again. It did so in the beginning, but all the money and engineering power have somewhat blurred their vision. As an example, Twitter is the most excellent company I can think of that follows K.I.S.S. An x-y graph of simplicity and success would have time-tested services like Twitter, Foursquare, and cell phones looming over everyone else.

I think they have leant a bit on this front, the subscribe and the enhanced lists are there for those that want them but try to stay as far out of the way as possible for the general crowd who would dislike them being forced in as a key component.

What I look forward to is a proper rollout of credits, I think at the moment Facebook apps appear similar to me to a lot of the free apps on the app store, of questionable quality and loaded with ads. Once there is an easier path for developers to monetise apps (and probably improvements in the process of making an app docs and stable api wise) I think we will see more quality, useful things popping up.

The vision should be a little bit broader (and scarier to those invested in it and its clones) - OK, every teenager in the world already has a FB page and uploaded some photos of herself and exchanged some stupid messages with so-called friend. Wow-impulse has faded away. Now what? ^_^

Don't even try to say 'the next facebook' - it will be 'just another social site', af FB was for MySpace or Livejournal's addicts. ^_^

What it could be? Ok, something like a cam on your clothes to broadcast 24/7 via some G5 GSM directly to some datacity which sends it back to your personal 3D movie hall (forget Youtube with a that crappy flash player)?

No, I don't think so. The time of the mass-exhibitionism in the net is, it seems, over. ^_^

Or Facebook will, anyway. Assuming they're still in business.

If you think the idea of Facebook eventually going bankrupt and deleting their archives, or selling those archives to a recycler in a fire sale, is somehow ridiculous I invite you to contemplate the fate of Geocities. Or Netscape, or Sun Microsystems, or the decline of Yahoo.

Is there anything in Facebook's terms of service where they even promise to preserve any of your data, let alone allow you to download it free of charge in perpetuity? Perhaps the ultimate fallback Facebook business model will be to erect a firewall and charge folks tolls for admission to their own cherished memories.

In 2004, Facebook wasn't garbage. It was simple, it served a purpose very well. It changed the social experience of being in college, a sharp contrast against "social" today which is largely irrelevant to having real social experiences. Facebook is what it is today because of the momentum it established while a social networking site for colleges, in a time when it actually served its purpose very well.

At any rate, I agree that "social" is a very boring space right now. I find most of it anti-social. It's an excuse for not being social: if you put everyone you meet in your Facebook "friends" list, you have an excuse for not keeping in touch with people.

I lost most of my interest (although I still use it daily) when they added the news feed. It took away the importance of profiles and took away the fun of "stalking". It used to be a regular problem that people would spend too much time poring over profiles. Now I hardly ever get past the first 20 posts on my news feed. Maybe I just grew up. Of course the news feed is what turned Facebook into what it is today.

So facebook definitely has a narrow age range appeal but it hasn't gotten better or worse.. It's just that people outgrow it while others grow into it.

It's the most important tool in my digital life and it's not even close (sorry gmail:>).

I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm simply raising a counterpoint.

Flickr and MySpace come to mind, too.

Generally, don't let a user pollute other users' posts/streams/walls with ugly invitations, apps, or animated glitter.

Many people have no taste or lack the ability to judiciously use such features. If you let them, your site will quickly become garbage.

Google is the internet but Facebook is what you do on the internet.