Coke's major competitor is not Pepsi, it's water. Coke's biggest challenge is to get people to drink more Coke and less water.
Facebook's biggest competitor will never be another network, it will be "not bothering with a social network." And eventually people will get bored with these things. It may not be the current set of users, it might instead be the next generation of people, just as today's kids supposedly don't use email.
> Facebook's biggest competitor will never be another network, it will be "not bothering with a social network."
I agree that this is their biggest competitor right now, but saying it 'never' will be is a real stretch IMO. Not long ago, we would've said the same thing about MySpace, and look where that ended up. The social networking space is still wearing diapers -- naming the ultimate winner based on what you see today is pretty short-sighted.
A new competitor on the social networking market will compete for almost the same users that already have a Facebook account. It's very hard to find features that will attract people from the "not bothering" group.
Facebook's biggest competitor will never be another network, it will be "not bothering with a social network." And eventually people will get bored with these things. It may not be the current set of users, it might instead be the next generation of people, just as today's kids supposedly don't use email.