With Facebook overtaking Google among US internet users last week, the FT’s editorial page reflects on “the rapid growth of a site whose 400m-plus users outnumber the population of any single country except India and China.”
The high-growth phase means that Facebook can take its time developing ways to increase revenues. The key must be to find ways that bring practical benefits to those who visit the site. There is an intrinsic stickiness about a site where users have assembled their own material, but if people stop updating their pages and social networking takes a new form, then winning users back is a hard task.
