Facebook has been on the way out for a while but they managed to leverage themselves by having a commenting system (which for some reason sites like Techcrunch prefer over Disqus) and their base has no alternative to move away to.
(Still no idea why Subjot could not monetize, Twitter is more spammy than Facebook if you just hate the follow sections and Diaspora and G Circle are too different for FB's main core audience.)
Other services are also being threatened to be bought out and have no way to monetize while Facebook is established.
This is the hip
direct competitor to Facebook but I don't think many could understand it. I certainly don't:
https://path.com/Others are moving on from social network to services like Pinterest but Pinterest is not a fully opened service with a built in social network interface yet.
Every other services has the same problem. Some are moving on to Instagram and Instagram alternatives but there's really no bridging social network that is fast to replace plugged in services when things like the Instagram scandal hits.
It's just really tough right now to move away from Facebook because Facebook has become a walled garden much like Yahoo but Facebook has captured the more hard core casual connectors such as FB logins, commenting, game hosting... if it was smarter at chasing the Yahoo Mail audience instead of the Gmail audience ...FB might have surpassed Google.
Right now there's three things FB is not a walled garden of:
-Search: and I don't mean Gmail but Netvibes/Yourversion/Trapit like integration
-Mail: It needs a dumb Ymail and Gmail import
-To-do list/Public question: Learn from Quora's mistake
Fix these three and they only have to mimic Evernote's product placement and they're the web.
The key though is that there's
zero real competition for Facebook much like DuckDuckGo may compete against Google Search but not Google Image Search or Google Alerts. FB's competitors are stuck at going back to the social network model while FB should be treated as much as a social network as it is treated like Kongregate.
So long as that keeps happening, people don't care for ads. Ads and spam only matter to casuals when there's a non-ad/non-spam alternative. It will get much worse if Facebook finally has a browser.
You have to give Facebook credit though. That's as Amazon as you can see and Amazon is cutthroat at making you ignore their spam. By having those stars, they are channeling some of Amazon's "I'm fine with that" good feeling interface instead of the spam-feel of Google's ads.
