However, AOL at its peak had 30 million subscribers. How many does Facebook have?
Since 2001 internet use has made the share of AOL much smaller and still everyone needed to connect. There are many users since who have never seen AOL services in use, including myself.
However, internet adoption in democratic non-banning societies is going to slow down (saturation) and Facebook is going to be even more integrated. And since we mostly communicate with people from the same country and even from the same city, growth in non-Facebook countries is not going to matter.
What I would like to happen is that Facebook becomes obsolete or too annoying (like MySpace).
I don't know how many customers Facebook has. Do you?
It's certainly less than the 30 million customers AOL had. (Customer defined as someone who pays for service).
Facebook has it's place for the people who like safe, controlled and easy. Like 30m AOL customers. MySpace was never safe, barely controlled and not really easy.
AOL lost out because its model was broken - most people found the winder web more interesting than it's curated pages. Facebook doesn't curate it's own pages. It's a microcosm of the web. It is not going to fail in the same way as AOL or MySpace.
I for one am happy for all this stuff to stay on Facebook, and for the wider web to contain the heavy-weight version.
However, AOL at its peak had 30 million subscribers. How many does Facebook have?
Since 2001 internet use has made the share of AOL much smaller and still everyone needed to connect. There are many users since who have never seen AOL services in use, including myself.
However, internet adoption in democratic non-banning societies is going to slow down (saturation) and Facebook is going to be even more integrated. And since we mostly communicate with people from the same country and even from the same city, growth in non-Facebook countries is not going to matter.
What I would like to happen is that Facebook becomes obsolete or too annoying (like MySpace).