So – here we are on the edge of the precipice.

If you’re looking over the edge, you’ll notice that some things have already gone over. Old world companies, famous banks. You might even see the remnants of the Dot Com boom (and bust) down there too.

But – and here’s the extraordinary thing – we might be about to see a global phenomenon pass by too.

I put it to you, that Facebook is about to die.

Why?

1. It seems like ages since anything new has happened with Facebook. There’s no obvious new features since the palaver with the new interface. I’m sure new stuff has crept in but where’s the fanfare?
2. Spend on on-line ads (banners, PPC) is declining slightly, which is a market saturated with content publishers means there’s less ad revenue to go around an increasing number of sites. This has got to hit a business 100% reliant on ad revenue hard.
3. A true social network like Facebook often resents corporate communications, so a number of advertisers have stopped placing ads there.
4. The ad mechanism seems really clumsy in Facebook and relies on content scraped from individual profiles and not on Facebook user behaviour (I can write any old garbage as content on Facebook, but why not observe my attendance at events or look at things “I do” within the network?

So – with this in mind, I can’t imagine how Facebook can be making enough money to survive. Flickr can monetize through it’s $12 annual fee (small but what a long tail of professional photographers you can pick up). Ning groups can monetize themselves because of their distinctive niche audiences.  Google Groups are really adept at having very contextually driven ads inside them as part of the overall Google ad network (yet another channel).

I give it a year.

And while I’m at it. What’s gonna pay for Twitter?

Will Google buy it? Or someone else? Or wil it die off?

So – what’s the long term thing with Facebook? In the UK at least, this summer should be a real test of the long-term viability of the platform because….. all of the students have left Uni for the summer and are holidaying / working / doing something else other than sitting in IT labs checking their Facebook. With that in mind, we should be reminded of what happened last Christmas. Students went home and in the midst of festive chaos, they kind of forgot about their Facebook and concentrated on Christmas TV, turkey and probably a fair amount of binge drinking. For 2 or 3 weeks, Facebook took a backseat: like a previously well-used toy that was put in the back of the cupboard.

Then on their return, a reasonable proportion just didn’t get back into it and for the first time ever, Facebook UK numbers dropped.

So – will we see a repeat this summer? When Seprtember starts, the returners might just not be as in love with their social platform, and the graduates just won’t have time to play with it. Are we in for another drop in numbers?

I think we’ll see a gradual change in the value put on Facebook by users that we’ve seen with tools such as Hotmail. Once the hottest thing on earth, this now is a useful but not essential tool. It’s no longer considered de riguer (not now my mum has an account there) – it’s just an appliance we use without noticing its specialness. And maybe at that point, that’s when it can become really powerful. The key thing is that Facebook must not take their eye off the ball in the same way that MSN did.