What is after Facebook?

From 7/18/2018

The way it seems most think the main reason most are on Facebook is everyone is on Facebook. Once something "better" gains some market share people will just shift their time there.Not remove their accounts just stop checking and updating them. Just like when people "moved" from MySpace to Facebook. That just has just been the way of the internet.

It is not a question if Facebook will go away. Yahoo Groups is still around for example and that was way pre MySpace. For that matter Match is still around after being sold to almost everyone at some point and that goes back to before the internet to the BBS days. Once you get to a certain point it seems like there is always funding to keep going.

The questions are, where will be the next place the most people spend most of their time and when will it be recognized as THE place to be?

LiveJournal was getting traction for a bit there but the whole being Russian based thing kind of killed that.

Currently I'm hearing of people going to MeWe though so far it seems to have less users than Google Plus. MeWe is basically just Facebook profiles, messenger and groups without ads. They hope to get you pay for upgrades over the free services to pay the bills. Seems to be just people and groups. No fan pages means no companies though and that might be their down fall since people seem to like that they are often heard by companies when complaining about them on Twitter or Facebook. Not to mention that kind of leaves out artists too. Though I guess you could sort get around that with a group based on the artist(s). Also it does not seem have an API or to work with anything yet. So for instance if you post to Twitter you can't get it to post to your MeWe account too. That is what mainly kept Google Plus from taking off so again it might be deal breaker for many. But then there is no real reason they can not add these features if enough ask for them.

My personal feeling is it is almost impossible for anyone starting out to compete with Facebook at their level of features but people are getting REAL fed up too so things will probably fragment for awhile. Using one site for this and another for that. For instance, getting family and groups to move to MeWe or similar leaving Facebook increasingly more just companies and artists kind of like what happened to MySpace. Then at some point some one will start adding features to head back to doing what Facebook does. For the most part. I'm guessing with freemium business model similar to MeWe's as that seems to be the industry trend now.

I'm actually kind of amazed Amazon.com has not jumped in here yet. Selling you stuff is getting to be less and less of their business They run the cloud for a good chunk of the internet already and they have already seen the future in streaming. While most content providers are increasing pulling their content to exclusive sites Amazon started partnering with them to give users one place to view, search and pay for them all. Not to mention their push into automation. Note MeWe is hosted in the AWS cloud.

Update 10/22/2018

Not much has changed other than Google announcing it is giving up on Google + and Facebook stopped letting IFTTT post account status updates. You can still post to pages for now at least. (Note only one page per IFTTT account. To post to multiple Facebook pages requires multiple IFTTT accounts.) The overall feel now though is that Facebook will end up being your only real choice and it will probably lose features you use now and gain some you do not want like the Portal which seems to confirm the rumors about Facebook that worry the most people. That it is trying to monitor you 24/7. Not just track your web usage but listen to your conversations and with the Portal even literally watch you.