Facebook's future

There is a moment in The Social Network, the film about the founding of Facebook, when Mark Zuckerberg is invited into one of Harvard University's exclusive undergraduate clubs and realises that the key to creating a desirable network is exclusivity. If you invite everyone, no one wants to come.

In six years, Facebook has gone from being a network for just Harvard undergraduates into one for more than 500 million people but today it is evidently no longer what it once was. It has all the intimacy and exclusive cachet of a shopping mall on a weekend afternoon.

So what comes next? Does Facebook stick around and become to social media what Amazon is to internet retailing and Google is to search? Or does it fall as fast as it rose?

Silicon Valley believes Facebook is at the start of a very long and profitable run. Investors are calling social media the biggest revolution in technology since the arrival of the internet. Last week, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Byers, the venture capitalists behind Google and Amazon, announced a £160 million fund to invest in social media start-ups. Facebook is among the investors. At the fund's launch, Mark Zuckerberg said every industry could be revolutionised by social media.

It is already happening fast in online gaming, as with Farmville and Mafia Wars. But Zuckerberg and others think industries ranging from music to retailing will soon be similarly transformed as more people share their tastes and recommendations in a far more dynamic way than they do today.

For example, the latest version of iTunes features the Ping social network for sharing music and Spotify is now awash with social media functions. Forget message boards and Amazon reviews. Soon you will be able to tell in real time what people you trust like and dislike, buy and don't buy, and behave accordingly. In this world, Facebook, or whatever is your principal social network site, becomes your main entryway online.

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. Already, on Microsoft's Bing, when you enter a search term, you can find out what your Facebook friends liked about whatever you're searching for. Exclusivity long since ceased to be an issue. What matters now is whether a network's use of data is useful and life-enhancing or creepy and invasive.