to the thread creator:
what does the potential sale of face book have to do with...
trying to get out of taxes?
here's an idea: if one doesn't like paying us taxes, one does not have to live in the us.
as far as facebook goes, I agree it probably is a fad. myspace might be too. a few years ago it was friendster. before that people hung out in other places (irc, yahoo game/chat rooms, usenet, etc). today its myspace & facebook.
The issue with social networking sites is that it there's a limited window in which to capture new customers (primarily college aged kids). once ppl leave college, they don't tend to keep up to date with the latest web stuff.
So if today there was a better social networking site, it probably wouldn't get many converts from the 20+ crowd since all their friends/network is already established on myspace/facebook/friendster, but the 19- crowd will jump to the new site (at the start of college you meet a shitload of new ppl so joining a new social network site is easy because no friends network has been yet established).
A similar issue as this is AIM vs Yahoo Messenger. Yahoo Messenger is far superior to AIM, in most people's opinion. Yet AIM still holds the greater number of people. This is because all your friends are already on AIM (I use AIM more than Yahoo because of this), so you continue to do so.
However, in developing countries (eg India/China), more people use Yahoo Messenger than AIM because they don't have to worry about chatting with all the people who joined AIM back when it first became popular. Likewise I don't have numbers on this, but I'd venture to say Yahoo is competing better in the under 18 segment against AIM than it is in the over 18.