Facebook in 2008... will it keep it up?...

Do you think Facebook will continue growing and growing this year or will people start to lose interest in it?

Or perhaps another social network will come and take its place, in just the way that Myspace took over from the paid for friends reunited and then facebook killed off myspace in short order.

I guess only time will tell but it's interesting to speculate nonetheless...

More generally are social networks online here to stay, or are they a passing fad that we'll all get bored of in time?

Interesting to see what people here think the future of social networking online holds

Tim

Re : Facebook in 2008... will it keep it up?

My feeling is that it is here to stay, it may not keep the market share as it has gained since taking the top spot from MySpace and of course Bebo is still doing not too badly either.

The Internet is starting to have a selection of core services such as Google, Facebook, Wikipedia and YouTube which are going to be here to stay for the duration, withholding any disastrous decisions from some of their founders (Wiki and Facebook in particular have headstrong and slightly mad people running them)

We are still in the very early stages of the world wide web, to be a fly on the wall in 100 years when it is fully developed would be fantastic! Cryogenics for me!

Matt
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Re : Facebook in 2008... will it keep it up?

I am not particularly qualified to answer in that I don't know much about social networks per se, but if it's like anything else it will probably reach a peak and then people will start to use it less...

Then at some stage some other site will pick up the reins.

The only site that has been popular since it begun seems to be the likes of Google and Amazon.

Now will Ebay keep up it's top spot or will something else take over that has lower listing fees and takes a smaller cut? Who knows!

Chris

Re : Facebook in 2008... will it keep it up?

Thanks for those thoughts!

I've read a range of so-called "expert predictions" and half of them seem to think a core ten or so sites from now will stay pretty much untroubled whilst others think they will be usurped and in a few years time we'll be saying "remember that ebay site? no - who were they".

So anyone's guess is as good as anyone elses which at least seems quite democratic.

Whatever happens it'll be interesting to see what develops.

I see Bill Gates has now predicted that the keyboard and mouse will be gone within five years and we'll all be using touch screens and voice commands to control and interact with our machines. Then again this guy did say at the end of the 70s or was it early 80s that no computer would ever need more than a few hundred KB of memory, so it might just be he's wrong again!

Tim

Re : Facebook in 2008... will it keep it up?

Really? Hadn't heard that one before! Just sounds how hard it is to make predictions about the future, because that sounds such a silly prediction now but I suspect many might have agreed with it at the time!

Re : Facebook in 2008... will it keep it up?

I can see Facebook consolidating a bit this year, I don't think it will grow at the same rate just because everyone I know is already on it...

So for me the big question will be whether people will get bored of it when the novelty value wears off, and also I think all the useless applications on there are now doing more harm than good

Sasha

Re : Facebook in 2008... will it keep it up?

The interesting thing will be around facebook for business - will the idea of businesses registering there really take off or will some other site take off and somehow fill that space in a way that none of the business networking sites really do currently?

Chris

Re : Facebook in 2008... will it keep it up?

An interesting question... I suspect it will continue to do well throughout 2008, but later than that it's almost impossible to predict; a year is a long time in politics and even longer when it comes to the internet!

Dan
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Re : Facebook in 2008... will it keep it up?

Thanks all!

Re : Facebook in 2008... will it keep it up?

Well it is hard to imagine it disappearing, though when everyone adds their friends they might use it less... finding old friends was the initial fun of it!

S

Re : Facebook in 2008... will it keep it up?

Finding old friends may have been the initial fun of Facebook but I think it will continue to grow because people will use it more and more as a way of keeping in regular contact with all their friends - not just the ones they've become reacquainted with.
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Catherine Woods. Real Business - Finance editor; www.realbusiness.co.uk