Yeah it may seem obvious to us now that there is one major social network where people use their real names and the total user base approaching 1 billion, but that was not at all obvious in 2004.

I thought of Reddit. People don't really "hang out" on facebook, and it's more about friends and family, not communities.

Most people have never heard of Reddit. Facebook is a global community that everyone has heard of. And, trust me, while people like you and I might hang out on HN/Reddit - most of the rest of the planet spends so much time on Facebook that they don't even use email any more. Conferencing, chatting, socializing is all done on FB.

You could repeat the same prediction every year, and you'd probably be right everytime.

Nah, mainstream social networks are new.

Yeah, if you're living a decade ago. By 2005, MySpace was such a big deal that if you were a student without one, you'd feel like you were missing out on something important socially, and by 2008, Facebook had pretty much everybody, including grandparents, as a user. Nowadays the center is shifting again, and most of the people I know have started using Tumblr as their social locus, but it probably won't overtake FB. I'd predict something new coming up in the next year or two that ends up overtaking Facebook in market share, but its approach will have to be highly insightful and unusual, nothing like what I've seen yet online. (Path comes the closest, but Path's reliance on smartphones kills their audience; I still have friends without smartphones and I'd never use a platform that shuts out friends for their consumer decisions.)

> by 2008, Facebook had pretty much everybody, including grandparents, as a user.

Not in my circles... Facebook didn't even begin to pop up on my radar until 2009. Social media adoption is extremely dependent on where you live and what type of people you know. Generalizations based on personal observation are invariably going to be wrong.

To add some actual data to this: in February 2009, Facebook had recently surpassed 175 million users[1]. It's now got a billion. So 2008 is definitely too early to place your "pretty much everybody" statement.

[1] http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/02/14/facebook-surpasses-...

Read the title, this is from 2004, which makes it incredibly prescient. Even Zuckerberg didn't realize what a big deal FB was in 2004.

This was written in 2004.

Read the details of the prediction. It sounds to me like he's describing a post-apps API Facebook. Not in so many words; I doubt he was thinking along those exact lines. But his prediction doesn't cover MySpace or Twitter or other social sites quite as well, while he describes Facebook to a T.

More like reddit, no? Or hacker news ;)

I'm surprised that he missed MySpace which was active & growing at the time.

I was thinking more of StackOverflow as an answer to this one.

Same, Steve Yegge doesn't use facebook.