Are We in a Social Networking Bubble?

"In the early phases of a technology wave, massively powerful gathering forces exist below the surface, but only a handful of visionary technologists, entrepreneurs, and investors really see what’s starting to happen."

As someone who might be considered "visionary" in that I bought many domain names way back in the non-obvious mid 90's I don't even agree with what this statement says.

You think something is going to happen and you take a gamble that you are right and try to limit your downside risk. If you knew you were going to be right you would gamble even more. But rest assured that for that gamble to work out many things would have to happen and the payoff is certainly not quick and certain. Most importantly if enough people take enough chances in different areas statistically some are going to be correct in their assumptions because of things beyond their control and many will fail for the same reason.

And statements like this stating that you should stay away from the froth and "Generally, [you] are better off finding the next gathering wave and a blue ocean of opportunity" are worthless. Essentially find something new to gamble on and you might be the one that guesses correctly about the new new thing. If it were only that easy. It's not.

I agree with you. To me, Facebook's success has been from their ability to become the internet's "telephone book."

You're probably going to have a really hard time building a better telephone book, but the telephone book didn't stop email or any later forms of communication from coming to be.

A friend told me one time about a theory he read about, that has to do with how the brain interprets goal accomplishment with sharing your goals. Apparently, the idea is that if you go around telling people about your goals the brain gets the same kind of "high" as if you had actually accomplished them. This diminishes the likelihood of you completing them because in your mind you've already gotten the benefit and the rest is just a lot of extra effort.

I wonder if it's the same thing with Facebook and other social networks. By "socializing" on FB the brain gets the same kind of high as if you had actually spoken to the person, thus making you feel satisfied with the social interaction so you don't seek them out.

Google, Facebook, iPhone, Android, Tumblr, etc. had markets that seemed all stitched up (i.e. search, social network, smartphones, iOS dominated smartphone market, blogging).

I would hazard a guess that in 2012-2014. Facebook would have taught the mass market of the concept of social network and grease up adoption of more specialized ones thereby widening the addressable userbase for players that have a great product.

We can see this happening with Instagram, Pinterest, Etsy, Reddit which are all social networks with 1 or few social objects at the center.

For example, Facebook has 800M and Instagram has 15M. thats 1.8%. I would guess that as Facebook gets more and more bloated - that ratio (1.8%) will get bigger as more & more users will need a more insular group and specialized features. In turn, niche social networks will have a higher ceiling of XX% of 800M/1B total social-network-exposed people (courtesy of Facebook - the social network gateway drug so to speak)