It’s a parlor game in tech and finance circles: when will Facebook flame out? Its lackluster IPO last year gave plenty of ammunition to critics. Facebook to a lot of us is like a 2000-story building that’s tall and narrow. Its eventual fadeout is like predicting the next earthquake. You know it’s going to happen, you just don’t know when. But cracks are there in the earth and you see some evidence of movement.

Some critics speculate that even though we now live in a “Facebook era,” its days as a powerhouse are numbered. At some point, there will be a social network better and more efficient that people will leave Facebook not in droves, but a little bit at a time which in turn will make Facebook slowly get smaller, ad revenues will slowly go down, and the new one will figure out how to make money on mobile, which Facebook hasn’t yet done

But some technology though leaders beg to differ.

Some say that anybody who says Facebook is going to fade has not done their homework. While some critics point to the demise of MySpace as a key precedent, others are eager to point out that Facebook is not MySpace period!

Key Difference

Proponents note the key difference in Facebook in that it is a platform that today’s companies are building on top of. So if you think Facebook is going to fade, that means Instagram has to fade, it means Highlight is going to fade, and every other app that relies on Facebook has to fade.

Part of Facebook’s success is simply the scale they’ve been able to achieve. Can you tell me about a world where you’re going to rip out Facebook? No one can actually say that because a billion people are on the application every day.

And part of it is their technological acumen as Facebook had the ability to filter out the noise and deliver targeted, useful information. Overall they’re so far ahead of Google+ and Twitter in terms of what the service does, and what it allows their users to do.

For the long-term, people ought to remain bullish on Facebook.

If you think they’re going to fade, then you need to be prepared to say what’s going to replace it. Right now – nothing. There’s no replacement for Facebook, and until there is, there’s no way to say it’s going to fade.