Sorry, but 'Social' isn't going anywhere. There will continue to be different iterations of Social applications and technologies, but the core will remain. Humans are a social species. This will not change any time soon. Some have a vision of the future where humans are different and technology changes them. All I have seen is humans adapting technology and the world to what they are. The more you align the technology you create with what humans already are, or want, (including design, functions, and features) the more successful and adopted it will be.

Perhaps we can look forward to a future in which the dumb stuff in people's pasts is acceptable.

This has to happen I think. As more and more people start to live their lives online our mistakes are more visible. Everyone makes mistakes and eventually when the vast majority or people make them online it will be much harder to 'judge' them as your own mistakes are also available for everyone to see.

Or perhaps they'll be judged on their ability to learn from their mistakes.

In a word: no.

Social is here to stay. Socialization is the dominant use of all forms of communication, as it always has been, and we are seeing that being (clumsily, haltingly) applied to the web. Things will change, mutate, evolve, etc. but social isn't going away, though a lot of the norms of social on the internet of today may well fall by the wayside, just as other aspects of social interaction in the physical world have as well over time.

"Social" is here to stay, because it's baked into what it means to be human. "Social software" in its current form will hopefully be replaced by stuff that's much better, since FB/G+ etc still do a piss-poor job of capturing the richness of human social relations and activity. But whatever happens, expect technology and social behavior to be more entertwined, not less.

This passes for front page analysis on HN?

I have a feeling the moon is going to crash into the earth soon. It's just too big and too far up in the sky.

How many billions of people are there on the planet? 'Social' is probably the only application of technology that I see applying to every single one of them. While I think what we've seen so far is rather faddish, 'social' will continue to be a massive application for software.

As long as humans are interested in Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, no. It will probably make internet about as noisy as a rocket in a closed room but will not die.