While I doubt they will fail, they may become less relevant over time due to people not caring to do search since everything they care about is in their facebook. Why do you use google? Why does your mom use google?
I'll take the contrarian point of view and bank on Facebook's eventually becoming irrelevant long before Google does. Facebook may look like it's poised to win in the short term, but the bigger and more complex the experience gets, the more AOL-circa-1996 it starts to become.
On-demand always tends to beat out kitchen-sink. The question is, who will eat Facebook's lunch eventually? Probably not a "cooler" competitor, as is popularly fantasized, but rather, a meta service of some sort -- not unlike how Google ate the content web's lunch back in the day.
Facebook Connect and the distributed Like platform will become increasingly important for Facebook as it hedges against site fatigue among its userbase. And if, at some point in the future, Facebook's core value is simply as the universal credentialing and friend list populating system for the consumer web and mobile space, that's still a fun place to be. But how monetizable or sexy of a place is that, really? Would Facebook basically be a Paypal competitor (of a sort) at that point? And how loyal will people feel to their Facebook credentials when and if they're sick of Facebook itself? Food for thought.
It's been said many times now, but ultimately, Facebook is Facebook's biggest competitor in the long run. And it's going to be a tough one.
I second the opinion. It's like saying that AOL, Compuserve, and the BBS of the past decade had everything the consumer wanted. Why invent a page ranking algorithm then?
Though a typical internet user does spend an insane amount of time each day on Facebook, the experience is mostly related to 3 things (at least in my circle of friends and relatives): uploading photos, sharing videos and playing Zynga games.
The potential to expand from that point onwards is to base on the "profiles" of the users (and their list of friends) and show targeted ads/ services, etc.? But won't that data gathered by Facebooik still be related to shared videos and uploaded pictures as well as how much score you made on Farmville?
