It's likely that it's so fast-growing because it's bringing in the outliers, The unfashionable 'late adopters' that most services would kill to have, and to keep.
This doesn't bode well for Facebook because a huge part of their growth strategy was in getting the exclusive college crowd, then growing that circle to the early adopters, then growing THAT circle to everybody else. Even if they never lose their core demographic (which is to say, the students that made facebook popular, which have almost certainly graduated by now) -- if the exclusive college crowd moves to somewhere else, even just for one of FB's core services, it's a very bad sign.
What FB wants, rather, what it needs, is for people to rely on it for everything. If portions of its service become decentralized elsewhere, and heaven help them if they're able to integrate with each other, then they lose the power they currently have, which is in being able to get a pretty clear picture of your social circle from visiting just one site.
They would want to shoot for what you describe, yes. Any company would want to be all things to all people, to relentlessly accumulate users, never lose one. But nobody will achieve that idealized goal. They'll be faced with choices where they can grow their userbase more aggressively at the cost of some fraction of their faithful early adopters.
Losing early adopters never causes immediate loss of growth. If you play your cards right you will make them up manyfold. Neither does their loss cause immediate exposure to competitors. Early-adopters who left apple, or reddit, or google usually scattered to the winds, spreading out over lots of competing services.
Peter Drucker said the goal of a company is to create a customer. Rephrased, the goal of a company to organize a coherent market out of disparate customer needs. I imagine companies as engines that suck up diverse users one end, cause them to behave in a common manner, and emit users out the exhaust, hopefully at a far lower rate. Discarded users still have to be sucked up by a different coherent engine, which is hard.
Let me know if this comment makes absolutely no sense whatsoever :)
It makes sense, but I don't really know if I agree with all of it. Rather, I don't necessarily disagree, because what company wouldn't want everybody on the planet as a customer -- but I think most companies (at least early on) prefer to have a niche, and dominate within that niche.
The less precise your niche is, or the larger your demographic, the harder it is to precisely deliver anything to them. You can't possibly be all things to all people, and once you've expanded beyond a demographic that you can effectively meet the needs of, then you stop being 'kick ass' for any one person, and start being 'okay' for more people.
For services like Facebook, I think this is the death knell of their offering. What they still have, of course, is the zillions of users. So long as they have everybody, it buys them time.
What I was trying to allude to earlier though, is that if the early adopters that got them popular start going elsewhere, then eventually, so will everybody want to be.
The catch though, is that just like nobody is taking on Craigslist head-on, I don't think anybody can take on Facebook head-on. But, just as Twitter is a viable alternative for status updates, if other, really awesome little things start cropping up for other aspects of FB service, they'll eventually start to erode FB's offerings.
The best thing that FB has going for it in defense of that is their platform, which means that likely, much of what might otherwise usurp FaceBook may well end up just integrating with them instead.
This doesn't bode well for Facebook because a huge part of their growth strategy was in getting the exclusive college crowd, then growing that circle to the early adopters, then growing THAT circle to everybody else. Even if they never lose their core demographic (which is to say, the students that made facebook popular, which have almost certainly graduated by now) -- if the exclusive college crowd moves to somewhere else, even just for one of FB's core services, it's a very bad sign.
What FB wants, rather, what it needs, is for people to rely on it for everything. If portions of its service become decentralized elsewhere, and heaven help them if they're able to integrate with each other, then they lose the power they currently have, which is in being able to get a pretty clear picture of your social circle from visiting just one site.