Facebook's Future...

...But what are the alternatives to Facebook? Twitter has been on a roll over the past year but its functions remain very limited compared to Facebook. This could be an advantage, though, as its limitations mean it is harder to humiliate yourself in a short tweet than in a Facebook wall posting. LinkedIn is popular for business contacts but is otherwise dry. Several start-ups are hoping to exploit the lingering suspicion about Facebook's attitude to privacy. Diaspora is an open source effort led by students at New York University to create a social network with much higher privacy standards, which also makes it simple for users to move their personal data to other networks, not easy with Facebook.

It may be a small venture which usurps Facebook, perhaps a retailing site which starts with a shopping social network then moves outward. More likely it will be Google, which fears that Facebook will soon create a map of the internet, based on user data, to rival its own search engine...

from ThisIsLondon

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Comment: Or how about a social retailing site (Cheep!) combined with Google? Because one thing's for sure - Google TV's adoption of Blinkx Beat has put to bed the myth that Google would never deal with the likes of Blinkx because they'd just do it themselves. So how about the power of Google's search with the social ecommerce of Cheep? Combine Google's volume of search with Cheep's monetisation (assuming it works as planned, of course), and you have an absolute goldmine...

Wild speculation on my part, of course, but then again much stranger things have happened...