Facebook - a common name used in every other household, is the largest social networking website on the planet. And it doesn't get bigger than Facebook. As of July 2011, it has more than 750 million active users and a valuation of more than $75 billion. I could bore you with more numbers but I won't, since they all say the same thing. Facebook is the best of it's kind now, and the best there has ever been or will be in the forseeable future.
However, even the product created out of Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard dorm room has limitations. And we're just starting to see them now. Take the chat feature on the website which enables the users to chat with their friends online. The developers keep reinventing it, and their ultimate rendition has been stamped by its millions of users as trashy and unnecessary again. In order to try and improve it, they have made it worse - thus dealing themselves a minor blow. People are now turning to other chat agents such as Adium or Pidgin, for Mac and Windows users respectively. That's gotta pinch, at least, right?
But then you could argue against this point, since small changes like these have made Facebook what it is now. It has come a long way from the chunky website it was back in 2004, to the sleek and sober website it has become today. The 'like' button for instance, was a small change made a while ago - just a single word added to the other option of 'commenting' on something. However, it changed the way people communicated their feelings online, which is all that social networking is about. In a way it also inspired the +1 project by Google, I'm sure, but they probably won't admit it.
The new photo viewer doesn't seem that new anymore now, does it? When it appeared on the website, the majority of users were up in arms against it, maintaining that adding something to the website which isn't necessary just adds to the clutter. Those same users now find the convenience of browsing photo albums on the photo viewer a god-send, rather a Mark-send. Change is inevitable. So what if the change doesn't seem to be good at the first look, as long as it's not bad it will work eventually.
With Facebook killing competition in every form, from Orkut to MySpace and Hi5 to Google Wave (Google Plus is still a newbie, and we must give it time to make a comparison) there might come a time in the future where it kills itself since it'll only be competing with itself. We netizens don't want that now, do we?
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