Over the past ten years, at one point or another, AIM, LiveJournal, Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter have all been dominant social networks in my life.

That's a whole lot of volatility.

In middle school, there wasn't a weekend night that you wouldn't catch me at the 3rd Street Promenade. But in high school house parties were where it was at! In college, dancing at eating clubs became the nightly routine. But by junior year I was yearning to break out of the Princeton bubble, to explore the bars and clubs of New York City.

Social spaces get old. They lose their novelty. They become predictable. That's true online and off.

Will Facebook and Twitter eventually lose their novelty to another space? How can they prevent this from happening?

Will they lose their novelty to another space? Eventually, yes. Everything ends. But you moved social networks as everyone else did. However, I think the current big social networks will stick around longer than those of the past simply because of the scale they're now at. Facebook is about to hit a billion users.

I also think these networks are doing a better job at evolving over time. Facebook's mobile growth is now over 2x their web growth. And over half of their active users are on mobile. Mobile has been a weak spot for them but they seem to understand this and are now pouring their substantial resources into it.

If they do it right, Facebook as a mobile social network looks completely different than then Facebook we know now.

To put it another way: new networks pop up all the time. Some catch on — Path is doing extremely well with my circle of friends, for example — but it will still take a long time before they displace the incumbents (if they do at all) because of that scale.

Everyone hangs out there because everyone is hanging out there. That fades if things are stagnant, but the current networks don't seem too stagnant.

I don't consider Twitter to be a social space—primarily. It's a utility for getting (and sometimes spreading) news, information, and entertainment, more than it is a hangout space like the mall. Some people, of course, use it primarily for socializing, and the line is blurry.

As for Facebook, while also a source of information, it is primarily social. Though, one of the things Kirkpatrick wrote about in The Facebook Effect was how Mark was intentional about not making FB "cool," because coolness fades. He wanted it to be boring—but necessary.

That is not to say that these network's popularity is assured. But you migrated from the 3rd Street Promenade to House Parties because that's where your friends were. Knowing you, you probably led the migration, but the proper hangout spot was a matter of age-appropriateness, identity, and "coolness."

These things do effect these networks. It certainly seems among people I know that Path is much cooler than Facebook. But to the extent their value proposition is utilitarian (telling me things I want to know faster than anywhere else, sharing a photo with grandma), they are less vulnerable. (Although, like any technology, they are vulnerable to disruption via better solutions.)

There are two different things I think about here. One is what's cool or whats in fashion, the other is the cycle of tech platforms. In the past these two things have been disassociated but as the lines between media and technology become indistinguishable companies like Facebook are acting as if this is a continuum, and assume you can move back and forth. Its interesting.

What's cool is subject to culture, and by its nature it has a cycle, what most people refer to as fashion. Myspace comes and goes as a phenomena, but Myspace wasnt a tech company, they were media company and once upon a time, cool through and through. There was talk about a MySpace platform but it was never a reality.

Facebook on the other hand does have a platform. A developer told me recently that 70% of US iPhones are auth'd into Facebook at any one point in time.

As @Ev points out the fact that @Zuck didn't want Facebook to be cool. Tech platforms are different. Historically, once at scale, they are pretty sustainable and sticky. But once at scale there is also a gravitational tug to embed them into the technology layer that birthed them. And build on top of them, as they reach scale they become more of a utility.

Apple and Microsoft built huge businesses on top of their platforms by carefully selecting which applications to turn into businesses and which ones to develop as utilities (itunes, office vs. safari etc.). Facebook, Twitter and this generation of social platforms are seeking to employ technology for scale and media for monetization. They want both and they are acting as if they can move up and down this continuum from platform to application, in the past this has chilled developer and builders.

Thread the mobile shift into this mix -- where Facebook, Twitter and others still have to make their products make sense on mobile, when neither of them own an OS. I agree w/ @MG if they manage to that they will look like a very different company in a few years. @Josh I think we are passed the @cool phase of these social companies, the interesting question is in my mind will they become web wide platforms or not.

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