PC Magazine: Facebook in a Death Spiral

PC Magazine Editor-in-Chief Lance Ulanoff makes a compelling case for how Facebook’s days are numbered.

Despite the social network’s huge popularity today, there’s nothing that indicates it will outlast its time in the spotlight. MySpace, the darling network of 2005, and Friendster, the equivalent of 2002 or 2003, have been fading at least from mainstream media, if not in actual usership (though Friendster really seems dead to us lately).

Ulanoff argues that the recent cry for an easy way to delete Facebook accounts, the Beacon fiasco, and the ridiculous, overly-chatty Facebook applications all give the impression that the network is trying to maintain an illusion of importance—a classic sign of desperation.

The question that comes immediately to mind is whether or not all the hundreds of fly-by-night mobile social networking companies will ever figure out how to leverage the location-based GPS factor in time before social networking implodes, or at least transforms itself again on the desktop.

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