"More than 200 million people—about one-fifth of all Internet users—have Facebook accounts. They spend an average of 20 minutes on the site every day."
And more importantly in this article, the point that Facebook sees itself more as a rival to Google than as a rival to other SNSs:
"We never liked those guys [Google]," says one former Facebook engineer. "We all had that audacity, 'Anything Google does, we can do better.' No one talked about MySpace or the other social networks. We just talked about Google."
The ultimate direction of Facebook is as an alternative model for the web to Google and its approach to organizing the world's information. But, the real question is: is this model possible? For one thing, will the social network model scale, and especially will it remain human, community-like, or will it come to feel inhuman, monolithic, and autocratic?
In this regard, I think that readwriteweb has got it right:
These are the diminishing returns. The more the model scales, the more it will irritate users, and the more users will switch off, and the sooner growth will slow down and reverse. As with email, Facebook can "make up for this with volume." But unlike with email, which is virtually free, Facebook has to pay money to serve each user.
Sorry, "Coca-Cola wants to be your friend" is in no way an enduring revenue model. If it sounds phony, maybe that is because it is phony.
The one lesson from social media marketing is that authenticity matters. What no one has shown -- and methinks this would be impossible -- is how to scale authenticity.
