We're all dying, but that doesn't mean we'll be dying tomorrow.
Titles like that should come with a qualifying end-date.
Otherwise it's just about some undefined point in the future.
If facebook is dying I'd like to see some proof. I'm very much of the opinion that facebook is transient, but I'd be very careful to stick an end-date on it smaller than at least 5 years in to the future, and a lot can happen in 5 years.
In my own circle of friends facebook is definitely past its prime, indicating that there is a lifecycle to a facebook account, if that is a universal truth then we should see a downturn in facebook traffic in the next 12 months or so.
It's much easier to predict what will happen than it is to predict when.
For example, I can make the following predictions:
Facebook will collapse
India and China will erupt into violent war
We will experience a water crisis
Oil will run out (that one is actually easier, about 3 decades)
Iran will be invaded
These are all fairly obvious predictions. Sometimes math can be used to zero in on dates, but for most of us around here, we simply do not have enough information to calculate exact dates. We can only speculate.
The article is analyzing the future of facebook, saying today, that it will not be around at some point, which is contrary to many current opinions.
But I say the media will start to discuss an inflection point in Facebook before the end of the summer. They'll talk about how its oldest users are leaving, but its still getting new members. It will talk about a decline in the length of the average lifetime of a facebook account. It will say fewer people are logging in as much. Fewer new apps are being developed. Again, all by the end of the summer.
By the end of this year, we'll start to see lots of "will xyz.com replace facebook?" Apple could launch a social network. Bloggers/journalists will ask, "When will apple create a social network?" They'll start to point out growth in other social networks, they'll talk about where the facebookers are going. All this by the end of 2010.
By the end of 2011, facebook will be passe among the internet elite. The oprahs of the real world will start saying you can interact with them somewhere other than facebook. Commercials on TV will mention some other network instead of mentioning their facebook page like they do now.
By the end of 2012, the blogosphere will be talking about what mark did wrong, why people thought it was different, why it was the same, lessons the new start up social networks can learn from his mistakes.
By the end of 2013, facebook will be a distant memory...
I admire your bold prediction, and I hope we come back a year or two later to see how well your timeline bears out.
Just one quibble:
>Oil will run out (that one is actually easier, about 3 decades)
That would be roughly correct at current rates of extraction, but:
* The oil production rate is going to start declining by 2-3 percent a year some time in the next several years (we've been plateaued at 85 mbpd since around 2005).
* Eventually the energy return on energy invested (EROEI) for oil will hit 1:1, at which point it will no longer be useful as a source of energy - though it might still be useful as a material input.
So strictly speaking, oil will never run out; rather, it will gradually cease to be an important part of the economy.
Production is declining, but consumption is increasing, so it could be less than 30 years. I also believe that oil will be come more valuable as a pharmaceutical base, for fertilizer, and plastics than for energy. We'll have other sources of energy that we will use to extract the oil, so the 1:1 rule may not apply. As long as the energy costs to extract it are lower than its value for all uses, it'll still be extracted.
We can't consume it faster than we can get it out of the ground. This is the main reason the oil price rose steadily through the 2000s and spiked in 2008: spare capacity shrank as demand rose against a maxed out supply until it disappeared entirely in 2007/08. The price super-spike was the market destroying excess demand the only short-term way it knows how.
We store oil and we find more places to extract it. Furthermore, as consumption leads to higher prices, we will produce more efficient and productive ways to extract it.
>We store oil and we find more places to extract it.
We've already extracted the lion's share of the fast, cheap, easy-to-reach stuff. What remains is slower, more expensive and harder-to-reach. Case in point: the deepwater well that's spewing 2,500 bbl of oil a day into the Gulf right now.
>Furthermore, as consumption leads to higher prices, we will produce more efficient and productive ways to extract it.
So I keep hearing. I'm highly skeptical that we can improve technique fast enough to start pumping oil out of the Alberta Tarsands at the same rate that we've been pumping it out of Ghawar for the past forty years.
That's the real issue: whether some combination of conservation, new sources and new techniques can somehow manager to cover the escalating annual shortfall in conventional production, without painful demand destruction via price spikes.
My sense from studying this stuff of the past several years is that we're going to spend a long time behind the eight-ball, lurching from economic crisis to economic crisis while our real living standards are slowly ratcheted down.
> My sense from studying this stuff of the past several years is that we're going to spend a long time behind the eight-ball, lurching from economic crisis to economic crisis while our real living standards are slowly ratcheted down.
I don't think I'm very happy about that vision, but I suspect it is on the money.
There's not really any other option within the current environment of quarterly reports. We have to think with more vision.
The best solution would be to stop using oil as an energy source now with any purpose except to get us over the hump. We don't even yet know how to get over the hump, realistically. The options are solar, wind, and gravity and all of those options require so much energy that we could exhaust remaining supplies making them productive enough to satisfy us all. It will take a lot of solar panels to cover the sahara, connect it to the grid, etc.
In the meantime, we're powering inefficient combustion engines and growing corn to, you guessed it... power inefficient combustion engines...
The best - and by "best" I mean "most depressing" - thing about ethanol-from-corn is that it's a net energy sink. It actually takes quite a bit more energy to grow and process the corn than it produces in ethanol. There's on way an ethanol industry would even exist without the colossal American subsidies to the corn industry.
Not to mention the fact that the ethanol itself has a lower energy density than gasoline, so mixing it in with gas is simply diluting the energy of the gas.
I'm not so sure about that one either (though I can see why the GP might think there would be, given the fact that they are in relative proximity and both in ascendancy), but those alone are not reason enough.
I'd hate to lay odds on a Pakistan - Indian nuclear exchange though, or the next time a nuclear weapon is used against a city, too many unstable characters are already in possession of nukes or will probably get them within the next 30 years or so.
Seoul? Islamabad? Teheran? Bombay? Cairo?
The mind reels when you think about the consequences of a nuclear exchange in those regions.
I've always been very much shocked at the ease with which the US decided to try its nuclear weapons on populated areas, the 'we saved lives, the war ended sooner' argument doesn't hold water in the context in which it is usually given.
But in the longer term, it may have helped to stave off use by a whole raft of nations after world war II, given that the horrors of the aftermath were known before more powerful devices were built.
History is fickle that way, we only get to see one of all the possible future threads.
It's certainly not inevitable, but there are a number of factors, including the massive resources each country requires as industrialization continues and the standard of living increases, political interests and influence in smaller border nations nearby, directly shared borders, and some amount of history
Two largest populations and growing. Shared land mass. Declining resources -- many of which are only in China. Water is running out. Energy. There's a possibility it may be contained to an economic war, let's hope. They are more advanced and conscious societies than the west, so they may have the intellectual aptitude to avoid violence, but when people get hungry and thirsty, they get more aggressive -- naturally.
While recently there has been a flood of such articles and most of them are full of bs, I think this one collects a lot of good points. Their rich functionality is starting to eat its own tail.
FB will not die tomorrow for sure, but the way people use it will for sure move them outside its frontpage. FB first focused on the 'fb connect', now on the api, like button, etc. - they will stay for long as the backend for social connections and data/media collection, but people will roll out of their frontpage sooner or later. The same factors that made the website so amazing, now are making it confusing and harder to use.
I doubt Microsoft will "die" in the sense of going bankrupt and ceasing to exist as a company. However, it seems clear that Microsoft is already "dead" in the Paul Graham sense:
Similarly, MySpace is already dead in that sense, though like IBM it seems to have carved out a niche as a useful home page / event listing / music player for small and independent bands.
Titles like that should come with a qualifying end-date.
Otherwise it's just about some undefined point in the future.
If facebook is dying I'd like to see some proof. I'm very much of the opinion that facebook is transient, but I'd be very careful to stick an end-date on it smaller than at least 5 years in to the future, and a lot can happen in 5 years.
In my own circle of friends facebook is definitely past its prime, indicating that there is a lifecycle to a facebook account, if that is a universal truth then we should see a downturn in facebook traffic in the next 12 months or so.