Last week, I wrote about the past — Myspace (My_______) — and how it gave way to the new kid on the block — Facebook.

Back then, Myspace was the ruler in the world of social networks. It blew away all other competitors and had the most users by a huge margin. And then it died. Almost just vanished as everyone migrated to Facebook.

Will Facebook do the same? Will it simply vanish away, all but completely forgotten in a few years?

Of course, today’s Facebook is leaps and bounds better than the Myspace of yesterday. It looks better, it integrates better, and most importantly of all, it works better. Even in the very beginning it was a better than Myspace. Perhaps then, that’s why people started migrating from Myspace: Facebook was simply better.

Where Myspace had horrid user-made pages, Facebook had unified and significantly less clustered pages. Where the user-made pages expressed personality they also made it impossible to find any information about someone. You’d have to look through the virtual snowstorm and the weird cursors and the flourescent marqees to find anything. Facebook just made it easy.

Perhaps a social network would simply have to be better than Facebook in order to beat it. Just as Facebook beat Myspace by being better, perhaps the next social network would just have to be better designed.

It turns out that this isn’t so easy. Though Facebook isn’t perfect, it’s pretty darn good. It would be very hard to make something significantly better than Facebook, and only settling with something that is only a little bit better than Facebook will not work. We can look at the recent example of Google + to see how something that was better than Facebook failed. It had everything: amazing multi-way video conferencing, uncompressed pictures, even a cool new way to control who sees your content called Circles. However, it flopped, not able to convince Facebook’s users to make the move to Google+.

Perhaps, then, privacy issues will eventually bring Facebook down. Just as the accusations of facilitating the distribution of pornography caused users to shy away from Myspace, perhaps the frequent perceived privacy violations will cause people to start moving somewhere where their rights are better respected. But then, we run into the same problem: unless the privacy violations are flagrantly ridiculous, people will not go through the hassle of changing their entire way of connecting with others.

It seems to me that, short of terrible business decisions on Facebook’s part, Facebook will not really be “overthrown.” The only thing I believe will work is a slow, creeping sneaking up. A social network entrepreneur must work from the bottom up, becoming a discussion platform of choice for a core group of people (say Beiber fans), and slowly reach out from that core group. It must essentially follow the steps of Facebook (targeting college students and slowly moving out) in order to beat it.