I think that fluid dynamics serves as an appropriate analogy for understanding social networking. Companies like facebook interact with a force that's very similar to fluid flow and equally subject to the conservation laws. As with fluids, it's convenient to view your community as a continuum of users whose desires are well-defined individually, but vary continuously between each other because of socialization.
From this, it logically follows that changing one aspect of the system could cause ``unforeseeable'' consequences in another. I hesitate to say ``unforeseeable,'' because really it's a complete failure by the decision makers to understand their community's intra-member interactions. So, claiming that facebook isn't going anywhere is flawed, because as soon as the users' needs change, altering one service could be like closing a release valve and increasing the temperature of water in a pipe: eventually, there'll be an explosion.
From this, it logically follows that changing one aspect of the system could cause ``unforeseeable'' consequences in another. I hesitate to say ``unforeseeable,'' because really it's a complete failure by the decision makers to understand their community's intra-member interactions. So, claiming that facebook isn't going anywhere is flawed, because as soon as the users' needs change, altering one service could be like closing a release valve and increasing the temperature of water in a pipe: eventually, there'll be an explosion.