Epic, in current internet meme speak, means great or huge. When they say that they're worth $15B and the reality strikes and they lose $10B off that valuation, the fall will be huge (especially to investors).
Having used Facebook exactly once to get at the thrift documentation, I won't miss it. However if it sinks it could take a good chunk of social-network investor confidence wiith it.
That said I think there are plenty of things Facebook could do to stave off a total collapse. Based on the success of the scrabble application, if I were them I'd make a big effort to become more integral to the online gaming community.
Part of me wants to be quick on the jump here and say Facebook can salvage the scraps by getting rid of the applications, but that'd be fallacy in it's highest regard. Applications for me are less about how annoying some of them can be, and how poorly they're implemented.
Those that require you to send invites to friends before you can make use of it, or simply requiring you to add the application just to see how someone has ranked you compared to the rest of your friends should get a slap on the wrist. It kills usability, and it hurts. I'll never use these apps, I'm just curious to see what my friend is trying to tell me.
Then again, at the same time you have applications that say you have a message waiting for you, when it's really nothing more than an invitation from someone else. Borderline Spam Marketing from your friends. And when your friends Spam you, what asylum is left?
I think both are true. He also had dreams of going IPO and being bigger than google. In the end, he just runs a site where people can send messages to each other.
10 years from now, facebook will be forgotten and social networks will seem even lamer than they do now. They are easy to build, and really they come down to this:
messaging platform (like email except not as well developed)
shared address book that allows you to navigate through to other people's address book (friend list)
*basic personal website where you can easily put pictures and text up and have comments.
They consider themselves a platform for apps, but the apps are pretty lame, and just waste time.
"10 years from now, facebook will be forgotten and social networks will seem even lamer than they do now."
Agreed. The only thing these applications really do for people is to make it easy to stay in touch with their friends without resorting to more standard internet techniques such as instant messaging, email and personal websites.
Those are not things you need a specialized web application for and sooner or later the "average internet user" (the core consituency of these "social apps") will figure that out.
When that will happen exactly is simply a question of marketing. It's a lot easier to sell the proposition that "here's our social app, you can use it to let all your friends know what you're doing and it's going to allow long lost friends to find you" than it is to sell something like Wordpress, which, together with Google, can do the same thing.
In ten or twenty years everyone's just going to have a blog of some sort and we'll be using Google to find people. Facebook will be history.
what "easy" means anw?
there are other challenges in a succesful social network or any other web service. Most web services technically can be leveraged to "easy" for a good hacker, but thats not the point.
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, "epic" originally meant "story or poem", which later became "grand or heroic". On the internet its meaning has shifted to indicate general extremeness -- much like the word "awesome" did in the 80's.
