But in the process, they will have explored every feature of it, added dozens of third-party apps, started using it in ways the developers never intended, and possibly created a few competitors.
The point of the article, as I understood it, was to not let "But it'll be obsolete in five years!" be a reason to keep you from learning something new. Of course it'll be obsolete in five years. Chances are, your job will be too, and we'll all be using some website or technology or whatever that hasn't been invented yet.
FWIW, I have a FaceBook account, a MySpace, 2 Livejournals, 3 PlanWorlds (that's an Amherst-only social network), 2 Bloggers, a DeadJournal, a GreatestJournal, a uJournal, and a Plog. I don't use all of them regularly, but I do keep up with a good half-dozen or so of them.
I really don't feel as if I have lost the taste for learning new things.
You know, I practically missed the whole internet for a similar reason. When I was a kid, I screwed around with 1200 baud modems (ATX? ATH? I forget) until I managed to LOG ON to local BBSes. Oh, yeah! You could set that sucker to xModem down a game and have the world's 573rd best tetris clone in just 17 hours (unless your mom picked up the phone--eventually I trained her to ask first.)
Well, it got pretty damn boring. Eventually, I gave up, and when people started talking about AOL, email, etc, I was like "whatever, dude." I didn't actually have an ISP account until...2001 maybe?
The reason I don't have a facebook account is that I used to have an Orkut account and eventually got bored with the whole thing. Perhaps the class of 2007 was too young when Orkut came out, so they try Facebook instead - eventually they might get bored, too, only time will tell.
Maybe Facebook is so much better than Orkut, but in the meantime there are so many other things to do.
Btw., I am over 30 and I am still reading articles like that, which basically refutes the article's thesis.