What are your thoughts on the future of Social media?

[Anarky]

I've read some great articles on urging people to leave facebook lately:

http://gizmodo.com/5530178/top-ten-reas ... t-facebook
http://gizmodo.com/5534736/more-reasons ... t-facebook
http://gizmodo.com/5538133/graphic-face ... y-settings
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/14 ... rust_dumb/

I have a friend who works at Myspace still and tells me of the morale there, and I wonder if Facebook will eventually head down that same path as user become fed up with the ever decreasing privacy.

I'm curious when people eventually leave facebook will it be for another big social media site, or will it become fragmented. Will we see more people go to Flickr, Twitter, Linked-In, and other focused social page?

Thoughts?

[SineSwiper]

Well, let me see:

Twitter - Too limited; solely designed for quick messages
Flickr - Only designed for photos
Linked-In - Only for business people or job hunting

So far, there isn't currently a replacement for Facebook yet. MySpace is down in the dumps because Facebook IS the replacement for them. Anybody else still on there is floating on a sinking ship.

Yes, there could be a replacement for Facebook that pops up, but it needs to have most of the features of Facebook and more. That's not to say that the three sites you mentioned are obsolete, but they aren't suitable replacements for Facebook.

[Kupek]

I think Facebook will remain the top place for online social networking.

What FB will never come out and say is that privacy is antithetical to the very idea of FB. Oh, sure, they built their service up on the idea that only people in your network can see various things, but that doesn't scale. Once most people are on FB, including most people you know, basic network effects eliminate privacy.

The internet is an inherently public medium. All privacy on the internet is an illusion. The only way to keep something private on the internet is to never share it. I think people will eventually either explicitly learn this, or just intuitively adapt to it.

Personally, I'm unconcerned about the privacy settings on FB because I've known from the beginning what the deal was. There's not much on my FB page that one can't figure out about me by looking at my public website that I maintain because I'm a researcher.

[Julius Seeker]

Facebook is great as an event organizer; but I am not one of those crazy people who has a friends list of 2500 people, with ~1800 they have never actually met before. I don't play apps, place personal information, and I don't take part in these survey things that bombard it. If you know me well enough to be on my facebook (which numbers less than 200), you know all that personal information already.

I don't think anything will replace facebook anytime soon..... everyone you want and their parents are on there... but then again, I thought the same about ICQ.