Wrinkles at ten.

Ten years is a lifetime on the web. Look where we were ten tears ago and what we have today. Anyone or anything that has survived the changes of the last ten years is certainly older, has a few more wrinkles, has acquired some bad habits, unequivocally outlasted their competition, gained invaluable experience and should know everything there is to know up till now. Such is life for Facebook, the grandfather of all social media sites, celebrating ten years and looking to the future of social media with a maturity to admit there might be a few players worth their attention in the rear view mirror. Admitting to the competition and worrying about how close they really are in that rear view mirror are two different issues and Facebook continues to dominate the landscape, defying the need to be the latest and greatest.

Yet it seems despite one in seven people on the planet being on Facebook, naysayers are predicting a fall and theorising the frayed edges are caused by competition not yet out of puberty in online genealogy. Competition from Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, Tumblr and Instagram style sites, where Twitter at just past seven years old is considered an elder, are gaining popularity but still have a long way to catch the "old fella". LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram and Twitter all combined, still don't have the monthly visitation that Facebook commands, so talk of a MySpace obscurity seem greatly exaggerated. As a famous Elvis Presley album cover once quoted, "50 million fans can't be wrong", showing a love for a music icon, so too do 900 million monthly visitors show their love for an online icon.

One of the advantages Facebook lords over the competition is its ability to mimic and copy the best of the web. It already has a Twitter of sorts woven into its new mobile APP and the introduction of "Paper" will give Facebookers a new version of itself that social analysts declare as better than the original, along with acquiring anything in their path, ala Instagram. This brings with it a generalist view of bringing and being everything to all everyone and when you have over 1.2 billion members, you need to have a helicopter view and be good at a lot of things, without being the current love or a niche trend.

This generalist view and being the globe's meeting point, leads to a ubiquity that Facebook carries over into online life, dominated by others of ubiquitous standing, such as Google, Amazon, YouTube and Wikipedia. It's hard to see masses straying from the above if they continue to innovate, imitate, acquire and stay engaged with the masses. So for all of the talk about wrinkles and slowing down, the ubiquitous nature of Facebook continues to defy the logic that online is all about change and the newest and shiniest grab the attention. While Wall Street will always look to the next great thing, the pillars of the online world continue to hold sway and have become entrenched as bench marks of "blue chip" investments.

I'm sure Mark Zuckerberg never thought he'd be a pillar of Wall Street or celebrate 10 years, sitting in that student accommodation at Harvard University. Happy Birthday Mark, enjoy the attention, you do deserve it, even if some are wanting to deny you the Birthday present of ubiquity.