I think that FB influence is largely overrated. As a matter of fact FB provides more convinient way to interact with friends.
If one day FB disappear we can move to another social network. It is very likely that we have our closest friends' emails so we don't loose any actual connections. As far as not-that-close friends are concerned, many of us will be delighted that we don't have to keep them at social network any longer (I am speaking here about people who managed to gather together 500 friend and they don't really know 70% of them, but are just to polite to delete them).
I guess if Dropbox would disappear or Google/Gmail would disappear or Flicker that would be really harmful for many people, but Facebook... Marketing people would be upset for some time, but average FB user will move to G+ or Diaspora or something similar in no time.
In fact, we can see how good e-mail is, despite spam and phishing problems. The point is that nobody owns e-mail, it is open standard. In the IM space we have Jabber, which moves e-mail openess to IM world.
In social area we need similar thing, the closest one is Diaspora, but we need something better. If it will be available then any larger portal would have it's own version, similarly as most portals offer e-mail accounts.
If one day FB disappear we can move to another social network. It is very likely that we have our closest friends' emails so we don't loose any actual connections. As far as not-that-close friends are concerned, many of us will be delighted that we don't have to keep them at social network any longer (I am speaking here about people who managed to gather together 500 friend and they don't really know 70% of them, but are just to polite to delete them).
I guess if Dropbox would disappear or Google/Gmail would disappear or Flicker that would be really harmful for many people, but Facebook... Marketing people would be upset for some time, but average FB user will move to G+ or Diaspora or something similar in no time.
In fact, we can see how good e-mail is, despite spam and phishing problems. The point is that nobody owns e-mail, it is open standard. In the IM space we have Jabber, which moves e-mail openess to IM world.
In social area we need similar thing, the closest one is Diaspora, but we need something better. If it will be available then any larger portal would have it's own version, similarly as most portals offer e-mail accounts.