Facebook will be worse than an abandoned shopping mall

Facebook will be worse than an abandoned shopping mall, and Twitter is doomed – or so sayeth my favorite comic, Patton Oswalt. (While it may seem to strange to cite standup comics for business insight, I submit that there’s nothing more comical than most of mainstream business television right now.) As such, I thought that his announcement that he is joining Twitter contained some cutting analysis on the future of social networks and the stability of their business models in an era of ultra-easy product substitution:

So, I’m joining Twitter this Saturday.

And, eventually, whatever replaces it.

I was on Friendster. It collapsed. I jumped on MySpace, and now it’s pretty much an abandoned shopping mall. I still get about 30 Friend Requests and 15 messages in my Inbox every day, but they’re all mailing list bullshit for bands I’ll never listen to, or porno-bots promoting some young Eurasian hottie. Even the comments are clearly all bot-generated. An abandoned mall still had trash, heating and cleaning services drop by, I guess.

I’ll still update my calendar and galleries here, but that’ll be about it.

Don’t feel bad, MySpace. Facebook is also, clearly, on the way out. Constant spam ads, weird privacy wormholes — yuck. Any social networking site, like a great punk band or TV show, has entropy and collapse built into its biography.

Remember how fun Friendster was for those three or four months?

His scenarios, however, are my favorite:

And Twitter will collapse, too. What will replace it? Here are my 3 predictions:

BlipBlap: Basically Twitter, but only 17 characters allowed, and no vowels. Xclnt!

Wh1ff: The first-ever “scent site” — you update your status from an “odor board” of 170 different scents. “(Snnnnnnfff) Patton had chili for lunch and he’s somewhere humid.”

DanzaQuip: Every single status update on this site is first sent to Tony Danza’s personal e-mail. He then decides which ones to post, and is the only one who can respond or comment. (*This site will replace the U.S. Post Office in 2027)

Really, is it any stranger than a prediction that 400 million people would voluntarily post embarrassing photos online in an ultra-complex social web of their coworkers and former elementary school classmates?