The IPO has done a lot to convince me that Facebook is a fundamentally slimy company. Regular day-by-day use of Facebook convinces a lot of my friends of the same thing. So why are we using Facebook day by day? Because we think we can catch up with one another's news and have interesting discussions on topics we all enjoy at the expense of Facebook's investors.
This has been done before. A lot of my friends used to hold their noses and gripe about AOL, but use it daily. AOL was founded in the 1980s, so it has reached the twenty-five-year age referred to in another comment in this thread. AOL is still in business, amazingly, although it is now far from being the dominant company in online interaction (that would be Facebook, these days). I've said it before, and I'll say it again: "Facebook will go the way of AOL, still being a factor in the industry years from now, but also serving as an example of a company that could never monetize up to the level of the hype surrounding it." I could be wrong, but that's my sense of where Facebook is in the market.
Agreed about AOL, and I'd cite Compuserve as an additional example. Fundamentally, I feel these companies are the online equivalent of shopping malls - consistent, curated, and safe. They even have the same sort of controversies: controversial photos of breastfeeding Moms on Facebook don't seem all that different from kerfuffles over breastfeeding in a mall food court. In pg-speak, facebook would be more of a cathedral than a bazaar, but I'm not quite ready to equate shopping with religion :-)
I don't think there's anything wrong with this; I'm not a shopping mall type consumer, but I enjoy wandering one now and again and can see the attraction. From an investment standpoint, it strikes me that the value of brick-and-mortar shopping malls is very much a function of the diversity and quality of the tenants they can attract, making Zynga the equivalent of the 1980s amusement arcade.
This has been done before. A lot of my friends used to hold their noses and gripe about AOL, but use it daily. AOL was founded in the 1980s, so it has reached the twenty-five-year age referred to in another comment in this thread. AOL is still in business, amazingly, although it is now far from being the dominant company in online interaction (that would be Facebook, these days). I've said it before, and I'll say it again: "Facebook will go the way of AOL, still being a factor in the industry years from now, but also serving as an example of a company that could never monetize up to the level of the hype surrounding it." I could be wrong, but that's my sense of where Facebook is in the market.