But at it's heart, the similarities end there. AOL wasn't a social network (in any meaningful sense), Facebook is. I couldn't find my family or friends on AOL without having their contact information IRL first. I could meet new people (I guess?), but nowhere near as effectively. I have a Facebook account. It's completely locked down, -you can't post on my wall, leave comments, see my friends, etc. I don't like to do my socializing under a spotlight in a crowded room. But I do like that somehow, many many of my friends from my past, be it childhood, or living in another city, have found me on there, and we keep in touch when pertinent. That's really cool. For the record, MySpace didn't even do that well. I basically use it as an address book for friends and family that does a better job of keeping me connected with them than I do IRL. But none of that really matters, because I'm not the user that Facebook cares about. Who cares, as Dvorak says, that the fastest growing demographic is in their 70's and that anybody with any tech savvy doesn't need to be putting their info on facebook? Most people aren't that tech savvy and that's why Facebook is so big. You'd never even get a shot in hell of getting a site/network that big that consisted of tech savvy people. Furthermore, I think that Dvorak is just plain wrong when he makes the case that making a wordpress site is better. For him maybe, but take a serious user like my girlfriend who owns a retail store, and the Facebook faces page drives customers to her much better than any stand-alone website could because it is part of a social network. She gets faar more bang for her buck. In the end, Dvorak may very well be right that Facebook will fade some day (I'm trying to imagine how it could not), but in the meantime, it just seems to be very effective at what it does, and the service it provides for millions of people. Maybe not for me, or Dvorak, but in a sense, who cares about us? That's not why it's there.