I'm not too sure. I think there's a lot of value in a centralized identity management system. Facebook seems to have filled that role. I can see a near future where it acts as a sort of SSO for the web. That doesn't necessarily sound like a $550B company, but could still be worth quite a bit.
I wonder if their rampant quest for click-money (annoying users with constant emails, useless spammy notifications, ads, sponsored content) is going to poison that well, though. I anecdotally know a lot of people in their early-mid twenties who have already deleted their accounts. If too many people start doing that, Facebook loses its one trump card.
Similarly, tv channels on YouTube (for the UK, see BBC, C4, E4) appear to be jumping on the bandwagon with clickbait, videos empty of genuine content, misleading titles and clips repeatedly churned through different videos.
This appears to have short term benefits (huge view counts), but surely it turns people off long term and impacts the brand.
Don't know why this is so downvoted much. Just because Facebook evaporates doesn't mean the very concept of "social graph" will go down altogether with it.
Facebook will probably be replaced with more flexible identity and social graph architecture that's more decentralized.
It's different from McDonald's because humans have to eat, and McDonald's can always pivot or acquire other companies to provide the type of food that's more in vogue, but what Facebook has created is equivalent to a nightclub. When a nightclub loses its reputation it's very hard to recover.
There will always be a market for a dominant social media platform, just like there will always be a market for a dominant search provider, os, office suite, document interchange format, etc. All tech with a wide reach needs uniformity.
Whether or not we have reached the maturity with social media to make facebook as difficult to unseat as apple, adobe, microsoft, or google remains to be seen. But they will not just evaporate like the wonky myspace of old. Times have changed.
I personally think they have reached that level, and also do not use them because I greatly dislike social media in just about any form. But I am self-aware enough to know I am part of a tiny minority.
