A few years ago I would have made the semi-contrarian point that Facebook[1] was here to stay, for the long-foreseeable future.

I say "semi-contrarian" because remember, even 4 or 5 years ago Facebook seemed to be the latest corporate iteration in an ever-flipping lineage from AIM lists to Friendster to MySpace.[2] So the common gospel was: "Facebook" - such as it was understood - could be toppled any day now. Remember MySpace?

The counterargument was that the market capture was incomparable and the network effect was insurmountable. And that's still true, kind of.

But the way we use Facebook has changed. In short, it's gone from being a single service with a bunch of features to being an SSO gateway for a bunch of federated platforms. And that's not just a change in user perception, it's reflective of a completely different product strategy.

That strategy seems to have worked out pretty well for Facebook so far, and I'm not sure what they could have done differently. But I think it leaves them vulnerable to any one of those platforms, or all of them, being usurped by new kids on the block.

Part of the problem is that none of Facebook's platforms are all that great in their own right.[3] But that alone doesn't make them vulnerable. MySpace proved you can have a terrible product and coast off network effect alone, while Google+ proved that without a network, you have nothing.

But wait a minute. Does any one of these platforms on their own have the network effect that "Facebook" itself once had? I mean, yeah, they've absorbed a greater user share than the 2012 webapp ever had. But that's not what I'm talking about. Is connectivity to "Facebook," and hence its network, a killer feature at this point?

To give one example: I have zero confidence anyone on Groups is a "real person," it doesn't offer any unique features, it's painful to use for anything other than reading a general quasi-chronological survey of recent posts, and it means nothing to me that 17 or 18 "real friends" happen to be a member of the group (how does that help me find a sublet?).

Right now I'm one of millions of people who "just use Facebook for Events and Messenger." Except I don't _just_ message people through Messenger, and I don't _just_ learn about events through Events, and the fact that "my friends" are "on" these platforms seems to mean less and less every day. But I'm still on them... for now... with gradually diminishing frequency... basically out of ambivalence.

Is this product direction sustainable?

[1] Any references I make to Facebook in this post refer to the core service - the website, the app, whatever you want to call it. Not the company, which I'm aware owns WhatsApp, Instagram, etc, and could potentially continue to coast off acquisitions alone.

[2] This is a myopically North American view: in Brazil it would have started with Orkut, in Southeast Aria Friendster held steady market share for quite a while, etc. The point is that we used to consider portal-like predecessors as a litmus of comparison for Facebook’s health, and now that doesn’t seem as salient.

[3] I mean, Groups _barely_ serves its job of being the sort of Craigslist-with-authentication into which it's evolved, in part _because_ it evolved into that role over time. The Events interface is totally cluttered and incoherent, and despite its ubiquity, it seems to get the lowest social engagement of any of Facebook's core products. Messenger is... fine I guess, but I have no strong preference for it over WhatsApp or iMessage, and having hypothetical connection to hundreds of "friends" I haven't spoken to in years isn't exactly a value-add.