What I'm saying is -- I don't think the internet itself is old enough that there enough precedent to predict how long a vastly influential internet company like Facebook might last.

It's not unusual for companies to be many decades old -- why does it seem assumed that an internet company that is fairly new today won't be around in 30 years?

Right now, facebook is the rage with kids. That is fine when they are in middleschool and highschool. Honestly, I cannot fathom dragging around every friend and acquaintance I've made with me through my entire life. There's a reason why you loose touch with most of your friends after highschool.

That is the problem with their new messaging platform -- they are trying to mold the way we interact so as to keep users in their walled garden.

This is a good, albeit spooky, move on their part. I wouldnt underestimate the strategery [sic] in this particular play -- especially given the assimilation of the recent goog defectors, including Maps and Wave creator....

This is not a short sighted effort on the part of FB. Sure, Zuck may have a lot of unlikeable qualities etc... but truly, he has done one thing better than any entrepreneur with the same level of skill; surround himself with really really (really rich) good advisors.

It's certainly within the realm of possibility, but it's not likely for a long while.

There was a lot of turnover in search before Google. There was a lot of turnover in social sites before Facebook. So Facebook sticking around would not be unprecedented. All the failed giants of the past eventually fail, except the last one.

On top of that, I think Facebook has innovated (ok, at least iterated) more frequently and intensely on their basic offering than nearly anybody. Compare with Google, where we went from search results with ads to search results plus 3 thumbnails with ads.

Personally, I can't stand Twitter, but I still have an account so I can poke about, see what's new (mostly because I have a professional interest in knowing what's going on in the world of UI development).

I like to think I know a fair bit about cars/motor racing, but I'm positive that the few times I've spoken to actual professionals I come off as a bit of a fanboy who only knows one side of it. I can know all the physiological effects of drug abuse, but I can't know what it is like to be a drug addict without being one... etc.

I work in web development and have had to integrate those disgusting 'like' buttons and examine closely the API for other jobs. All this led me to decide that Facebook is not for me.

So, I follow everything that FB does - I just wont create an account.

I honestly believe that a period of stagnant growth awaits facebook in the not too distant future when a new generation will be reluctant to join as it will be that 'uncool website their parents use...to spy on them'.

Thank you for showing me how to prevent my kid from joining: "Here I want you to make a facebook account so I can keep track of everything you do online and make sure you dont make any weird friends. I also want to check all your wall posts to see what you and your friends are saying. Here is your password."

My favorite thing about this development is that now you don't have to. If you have a friend who only communicates through Facebook, or primarily through Facebook, now you get to use e-mail to talk to them, and they get to use Facebook to talk to you. Everyone's happy.

... Unless they harvest data from your messages that sit on the FB system in your friend's inbox, of course.

I'm intensely jealous of the next generation who will have something like Facebook for their whole lives. They will have the conversational history with the people in their lives all the way back to the beginning: From "hey nice to meet you" to "do you want to get coffee sometime" to "our kids have soccer practice at 6 pm tonight." That's a really cool idea.

Cool, yes, but also a little spooky.

This is one of my absolute dislikes with both Facebook and Twitter - you pile all your data in there, they keep it all and own it all, and make it a royal pain for you to get at it again - even just for simple things like "I wonder when I was in XYZ?" or "What was that link that Matt posted last year?".

I haven’t seen a similar product for Facebook, but Tweet Nest (http://pongsocket.com/tweetnest/) is a step in the right direction for Twitter. It makes it easy to download browse, and search your tweets on your own server. Here’s an example (my own tweets): http://chasenlehara.com/tweets/ [Note: I have no affiliation with Tweet Nest, I just really like it!]

Nearly everyone makes the fundamental pagination mistake (Blogger being the sole exception), but calendar-based archives are a basic assumption that everybody implements. Facebook doesn't expose it in their interface but it's possible through the API. For Twitter it's completely fucked — the only people with access to your old tweets are the Library of Congress.

I imagine there are technical limitations leading to economic reasons for these kind of mistakes. So much data, sitting in so many massive silos, that they must design their systems on the basis of peoples' access patterns only hitting the most recent subset.

That, and the opposite economic reason - that you can charge for the older/richer/more complete dataset.

(EDIT: I know it's odd that I was whinging about the same thing a few posts up. I don't really know what the resolution is for that.)

I think the true reason is really just pervasive ignorance — everybody royally fucks this up and doesn't question it for a second.

If you have N items with M on each page, and the same request for 'page 2' always returns items N-M through N-2M, with the contents shuffling off the end as N increases, you're an abject failure. SELECT … LIMIT M OFFSET N-(P-1)•M is in almost every single web app and totally bullshit. It's incredibly depressing, but we'll probably be stuck with it for at least the rest of our lifetimes.

That doesn't sound at all like a downside.

Maybe privacy is just a construct of modernized society?

But yeah, I wouldn't call it AMAZING.

I don't want my child's privacy philosophy decided for her DEFACTO just because That's the way FB has always done it*

Her idea of privacy should be an informed discernment based on her world view, not simply "Well this is just how it is".

To both points: I respectfully disagree. We know very little about either, but FB has proven it cannot be trusted. Google has been pretty good so far, it's just a potential-looming-menace to Facebook's outright menace.