Douglas Rushkoff makes the point that it’s not that MySpace lost and Facebook won. It’s that MySpace won first, and Facebook won next. The longer the company can maintain the illusion of great profits without alienating its user base, the longer they can delay the inevitable decline. But given that Facebook has already begun cashing in its chips, that moment has quite likely arrived.
The actual peak is probably 2012 on the day of the IPO or the day after.
I definitely think that Facebook is stronger and more useful than Myspace.
However, Facebook claims 500 million users, so how much longer can they have high speed growth when there are 2 Billion internet users in the entire world ?
Also, the vast majority of the most active and most profitable users are already on the system. How much revenue opportunity is possible in some of the developing countries ?
There is also the vulnerability of not being able to increase market share from near 100%. Market share can only go down. China can also get more aggressive supporting the domestic system like they helped Baidu against Google. Other countries could do the same thing.
World Population by Region Internet users Africa 1,013,779,050 110,931,700 Asia 3,834,792,852 825,094,396 Europe 813,319,511 475,069,448 Middle East 212,336,924 63,240,946 North America 344,124,450 266,224,500 Latin America/Caribbean 592,556,972 204,689,830 Oceania / Australia 34,700,201 21,263,990 WORLD TOTAL 6,845,609,960 1,966,514,816
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Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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