One version of the future: "Facebook will kill the phone as we know it"

Here’s one possible scenario that many people I know in The Valley are betting on. The interesting thing with that area is that they have a habit of forcing their will.

Facebook jumped into an already crowded VoIP market with the update of its Messenger app last week. Robert Gaal, of Karma, says the company’s scale ultimately will allow it to kill off the phone.

via The perfect murder: How Facebook will kill the phone as we know it — Tech News and Analysis.

Although scale is important I think there’s a risk of overestimating the power of Facebook. That’s certainly the case if you take the view that Facebook is this current generation’s MySpace — that is, there’ll be another one along in 5 years. The biggest challenge with the likes of Twitter and Facebook is that they’ve hyper-connected us all. So when the next cool tool arrives, it should theoretically be able to garner adoption — standing on the shoulders of likes and retweets — within days and months, rather than years.

The opportunities for the mobile operator to offer meaningful differentiation are dwindling by the day. With each new successful launch and iteration, I can almost feel the stone towers that built the operators crumbling.

What’s your view of Facebook?