Julia Angwin argues in The New York Times today that Facebook is dying. The first thought that comes to mind is “good riddance.” But even though the number of Facebook users is declining, I question her premise — though she concedes that the platform will be with us for many years to come, even as it fades into irrelevance.
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Angwin compares Facebook to AOL and Yahoo, two other services that persist essentially as zombie platforms. But AOL had no real uses after broadband internet came along, and Yahoo was eclipsed by Google, whose search engine was far superior. For that matter, Facebook displaced MySpace, a similar service that wasn’t nearly as good.