Yet another Cassandra is crying "Facebook is dying!"

I remain skeptical about such jeremiads because I find the reasoning to be faulty. Frankly speaking, Facebook is unprecedented, so it's probably wrong to use standard metrics to define whether it is failing. Consider these points:

• Social media is still evolving. We don't yet know what normal looks like.
• Facebook is a behemoth in terms of users, so something astonishing will have to happen to cause a significant migration away from it.
• Given the stock structuring, Facebook is Zuckerberg's show just as he intended.

Bullet 1: Clearly, social media is migrating to mobile with the explosive development of very smart phones and tablets. Whether Facebook can develop or buy the right mobile platform will determine whether it is able to migrate along with its users.

Bullet 2: Slowing membership growth for Facebook is inevitable due to the finite number of people who live on the planet with sufficient access to the internet to make use of it. That does not worry me. The question that should haunt Facebook's leadership and development team is: what is the thing that will cause us to lose members or cause them to spend less time on the site? The absence of a user-friendly mobile GUI for Facebook only hurts if someone creates one that is simple, attractive, and intuitive and does everything that Facebook does so much better than people are willing to try to drag their entire social media world (friends, apps, documetns, images, etc.) to another platfrom and start fresh. That has not yet happened. And unless that alternate choice allows easy importation of all of those things, it is unlikely that large, overlapping social networks are going to up and leave for an unknown.

Bullet 3: Zuckerberg has never put profitability ahead of his beliefs. I am firmly convinced that he has no interest in generating significantly more revenue than is needed to sustain/perpetuate Facebook. Those who saw Facebook as a quick-profit buy or expect fountains of future revenue to gush out through dividends will likely be thoroughly disappointed. It's not as if he hasn't made that clear from the first day on the Harvard campus, so others' dreams have nothing to do with his. His behavior suggests he does not see huge profits as necessary to achieve what he wants: connectedness of the human graph and radical transparency. He is not stupid, he knows that he will need capital to buy things that Facebook needs, but the company is already large and profitable enough to do that.

So, that all said, Facebook is still large, profitable, and seems determined to remain relevant. IPO failings (not of Facebook's making) aside, there is nothing happening below the daily stock market froth to make one believe that Facebook will not remain the social media leader for years to come, especially given its increasingly close relationship to Apple.

As Facebook prompts us on our home pages: "What's on your mind?"