On the death of Facebook...

In the coming years we will see the slow death of Facebook, in the same way we saw the death of myspace five years ago. This death has been building slowly but as with all social networks, it was inevitable. You can see a definite increase in the number of articles titled "How to delete your Facebook" or "How to escape Facebook and still have a social life", titles which point to a severe concern that Facebook has supplanted "normal" methods of interaction.
There's certainly an increasing number of people actually doing the deed and *gasp* removing themselves from the advertisers clutches. This suggests to me that people have grown tired of Facebook, as you would expect they would. I can think of only 3 people though who have actually removed themselves. One of those returned with a newer minimalist profile and no personal information.

So; why are people leaving? There seem to be a multitude of reasons, some centering around the gradual removal of privacy, others around decreases in functionality. I would suggest another, boredom. People tend to get bored with just about anything given enough time. A constant addition of new features, unless truly revolutionary, is never going to change that. In my estimation I give your average social network 5 years of true popularity followed by another 5 years of slow crash.
Take myspace as a test case; Started in 2003, it peaked in popularity around 2006 and slowly crashed until it was overtaken by Facebook in 2008. Now commonly the only time people refer to myspace is to check out bands. Certainly there are people who still have myspace pages, mine's probably still there, but I would imagine the majority don't maintain them and more than likely forget they have them unless reminded.

How is this relevant to Facebook? People left myspace once there was a more functional competitor, in this case Facebook. They didn't abandon it straight away, they kept updating their myspace's until gradually Facebook integrated the useful functionality that myspace had and people forgot they used anything else. Perhaps another factor may have been Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation purchasing myspace, people don't like to feel like they're buying into a media institution.
The suggestion here is that people are unlikely to jump ship until there's an effective competitor offering at least the same if not better service for less. Being a free service therefore means you've got to convince people they want to be involved, why they want to sell away their details to your site. Facebook succeeded because it offered more functionality than myspace (events, better photo management, better status updating etc) and conversely less (simpler friend management, no garish themes etc).

People are already beginning to strain against the yoke of Facebook despite the lack of an effective competitor. Why is this? The same reason people left myspace, a combination of boredom and changes that didn't add to the functionality of the site. Remember the ability to tag your friends in photos on myspace? A notion facebook did vastly better and something that frankly wasn't needed.
The same thing is occurring on Facebook; the constant layout changes, adding the ability to like individual comments, claiming your friends used the friend finder service. None of these add to the functionality of the site and actively detract from the use. How would you like it if someone kept rearranging your room and putting your things in places you didn't expect? This is how I would describe the constant layout changes. Regular users will be mildly annoyed and irregular users will be downright frustrated. The golden rule of software usability (if I remember Jakob Neilsen rightly) is "Put things where users expect them", so why would you shift all the primary functions from the bottom of your main page to the left-hand-side without warning?
Now I don't presume to suggest a better idea, no doubt Facebook have numerous highly paid usability testers and developers.

I've considered deleting my Facebook page as well but I haven't done it for a number of reasons. I'd be socially isolated as people don't invite non-users to partys, gigs etc simply because they forget people don't use the service.
Plus as a recent migrant to a new country it's useful to have about as a networking tool and to get to know new people. Finally, much as I hate to admit it, using facebook is well ingrained into my routine at present and I'm not sure what I'd replace it with.
In saying that, I have noticed a massive reduction in my usage in the last year and that of my peers. There are people I'm friends with who I'm fairly sure haven't posted anything publicly in well over a year.