Is Facebook The Last Great Social Network?

Ten years and billions of wall posts and embarrassing selfies later, Tuesday marks a full decade of Facebook's existence on the Web. From a Harvard dorm room project to a social network with more than a billion registered users, Facebook has evolved to help people connect with their friends around the world—despite its fair share of missteps and controversies.As we look back at how Facebook changed our lives—it has, whether or not we want to admit it—we must consider the massive scale to which it grew. And, by doing so, Facebook changed the social nature of the online landscape in ways even founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg couldn't anticipate.“It’s awesome that there’s this utility and community at our school, and one day someone will build this for the world,” Zuckerberg said at the Open Commute Summit last week while describing a conversation with his friend in the early days of Facebook. “It didn’t occur to me it could be us.”

Facebook can lay claim to almost every personal aspect of its users' lives—from helping high school friends stay connected to documenting every literal step of our babies' lives, to even being our one-stop social login for other apps and websites. Facebook is now such a part of the social fabric that it’s unlikely we'll ever see another all-encompassing, dominant social service quite like Facebook.

What Facebook has built will be its legacy: The last big social network.

In 2004, we needed Facebook. In 2014, we don’t need another one.

Google knows firsthand just how much people want, or rather don’t want, another social network. Google+, the company’s attempt to create an online identity to rival Facebook, has largely failed, in part because people are happy to stay on Facebook (but also because it’s pushing features that alienate more users than they attract).

As for Facebook, it's likely we'll see the largest social network splinter even further as the platform continues to evolve. It's not because users don’t like Facebook as an online identity manager, but rather because the world is becoming more digitally literate and we need more specialized apps and resources to reflect our specific needs and interests. A full-service social network isn’t needed anymore; a variety of apps are.

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Facebook helped pioneer the social web as we know it, helping us connect to friends, family and acquaintances in ways we could've never predicted. And although consumers are the fuel for Facebook's success, at the end of the day, it is Facebook that does the heavy lifting and organizes, stores and manages our information for us.

Zuckerberg’s vision for Facebook far exceeds simply "a mobile-first company" that empowers people to connect with one another. Zuckerberg sees a world with Facebook on every mobile device, where your Facebook ID enables apps and websites (powered by Internet.org) in countries across the world. He sees Facebook as the portal for the next billion people to connect to the Internet.

In the future, there might be a hub that organizes all our data in a master directory of our online lives. Wearable computers and connected home technologies could be connected to this hub, just like the friends we have across the Web. So why couldn't that hub be Facebook? We've already trusted it this long.