
The beauty of facebook is that the user and his entire social network are locked into the site; peoples social and business arrangements evolve around the site, so if you don't join, you miss out! After all no one wants to be an outsider!
Facebook creates permanent connections - even if you offer the user something better, they will not come to your site as facebook has already taken you friends, family and acquaintances as captives!
What can a new site offer that facebook doesn't already offer? With a new web 2.0 start-ups starting every day, facebook can offer an application to its users that encapsulates each new start-up
For example: A new mentoring site - Horsesmouth.co.uk - just add a facebook mentor application. A new web tv station - Joost.com (in Beta testing) just add a facebook tv application.
Futureproof?
Perhaps...or perhaps not..?
However...Think about facebook.com to come in five years time... You have a 1000 friends in many different networks, 50-100 message everday (including one to one messages, requests, events, wall to wall, jobs, for sale, music downloads, business and messages related to applications) This is on top of sifting through your daily emails....
This leads to...Information overload!
If facebook give users the ability to manage who can contact them, with friend and spam filters then the beauty of facebook.com - (where your contact list and networks grows) comes to a complete halt and you are left to fend with managing the large numbers of friends you already have.
Fine...you are not going to be bombarded with friends requests anymore - but you will struggle in being able to answer the large number of messages you receive each day.
For a permanent solution...
Goodbye facebook.com
Welcome...?