The Romanesque rise of social media over the past decade has whipped Internet users into a frenzy. We tweet, we Like, we +1. But as societies like Rome have learned time and again throughout the world’s history, the quicker the rise means the faster the fall. The Internet itself has become a global society, and social media provides the outlet through which the world interacts.

Do you remember MySpace? If you do, let me save you the trouble of typing it into your browser’s address bar: Yes, it still exists. I deleted my profile ages ago, and I haven’t been on the site in, well, forever. But I still remember a time when it was the hot ticket round the ‘net. Facebook had yet to get its online sea legs and everyone I knew was on MySpace nearly 24/7 (the site was big during my college years). MySpace’s star shone bright, and it rose fast. Then, with the emergence of Facebook, it seemed to vanish into thin air literally overnight.

This isn’t the first time power shifted amongst tech companies. Did you know that back in 2002, Yahoo tried to buy Google for a mere $3 billion? Yeah, that happened – and a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, a search engine named Alta Vista ruled the Web.

The point here is that the Internet is an ever-changing landscape. Social media as we know it is evolving right before our eyes, and though it might be hard to imagine Facebook suffering a MySpace-style demise (unthinkable!), in a few years, it could become a very real possibility. If the tech bubble of the late 90s taught us anything, it’s that Internet companies are incredibly volatile because they exist for and thrive on traffic – and traffic can be translated to consumer confidence, or “votes” for the website in question. Social networks are even more at risk because they are, by very definition, social. If a company like Facebook starts losing users, an unstoppable domino effect could potentially take place that would land them right in the backyards of some of their old, washed-up rivals.

The Stock Market Says it All

If ever there was ever a good measure of trends in the United States (and the world, for that matter), it would be the stock market. It’s how we can define the housing booms and busts, pinpoint the exact time when tech stocks plummeted, and it’s how we know that the crash of ’29 signaled the start of the Great Depression. The stock market tells tales, and the latest from Wall Street is a little story about Facebook:That’s according to a freshly-published post by Forbes. Zuckerberg built up excitement and consumer confidence before his highly-anticipated IPO was unleashed, and investors were whipped into a frenzy by the time shares were officially available for purchase. Zuck and company have been cruising on the fact that they’re 900 million users strong. They used it as their main selling point while coolly glossing over the fact that most of those users are depressingly ad-blind. Forbes and other analysts are predicting the demise of Facebook in a few short years if the push and pull between the company and its shareholders leads to changes in the platform that drive users away. Timeline, anyone?

A 2012 Purdue study predicted that that the number of active Facebook users will catapult to 1 billion at some point this year. Think about that. It would really be a shame if the company destroys such a firm grip on the world’s population simply by tinkering a little too much with privacy settings or layout. Most of the users will still be there if public appeal is lost, but my hunch is that it will become nothing more than a wasteland of barren profiles with very little action. People will simply move on to the next big thing.

Google+ (Oh Good Lord, Not Again)

We all know how eager Google was to get on the social network bandwagon when it saw the massive successes of both Facebook and Twitter. The now-infamous social network, Google Buzz, ended in privacy-violation lawsuits almost as quickly as it had begun. Google replaced its failed attempt at entering the social arena by introducing Google+ (G+ for short) last year.

According to a PC Magazine interview with Larry Page, Google’s CEO, within a month of its unveiling, G+ had amassed an astounding 40 million users. Page noted, “People are flocking into Google+ at an incredible rate and we are just getting started.”

But as the months drug on, people’s enthusiasm for Google+ just didn’t seem to be there. As one tech blogger for Forbes pointed out:

The article went on to point out the same experiences that I myself have had with Google+. I have emails from Google urging me to try G+, and I also have the Google search engine itself to think about. For those of us who make our living online, the Big G has us backed us into a corner. The search giant places precedence on articles and posts that are added to the G+ network, so the chances of our content ranking well are much better if we’re involved. Plus there’s the “real name” reward, in which Google gives points to content written by an author the engine recognizes and can attach to a G+ profile. To me, it all smacks of favoritism and a push to use Google’s products.

All that aside, I decided to give G+ a whirl. To be honest, I wasn’t that impressed. I was confused about the layout, I had trouble navigating, and my attention span was not great enough to dedicate three hours to figuring it all out. In addition, none of my friends were on there – only people from my Gmail contacts that I didn’t feel I needed a social relationship with. So I disengaged – which is what many other users are doing as well, and why not? Everything we need (and all of our friends) are already on Facebook.

The Fall of Social Networks: My Prediction

I’m no fortune teller, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. My take is this: The Internet is not going away. Social networking is not going away. However, I think we’ll see another shift in popularity from Facebook to something else by 2020 if things keep up the way they’re going. When a tech company gets big enough, it goes public, just like any other company. But tech companies need to be edgy, they need to be free to try new things and to innovate and to keep their users happy above all else. The responsibility to shareholders takes away from that ability, and that’s when things change that cause users to leave.

I’m not anti-corporation. I’m just calling it like I see it.

So, what’s your prediction?