Quote from Specterx:
I picked up a bit of FB today for a long-term investment.
I'm pretty agnostic about the short to medium-term direction (out to a few years perhaps), but it's a possible a bottom could be close. The sight of bagholder retail investors buying a speculative growth stock at $40 and then rushing to sell at $20 never ceases to amaze - as though the company's business prospects have actually changed in the last four months.
The bottom line for me is this: I joined FB when it was still restricted to Harvard, Yale, and Stanford and I've been on it for over eight years. Not a heavy user by any means, but judging by my newsfeed all the tales of people dropping off, etc. are way overblown. Everyone in my age range (26-28) and younger will most likely be social-network users for their entire lives. At this point Facebook would have to really screw up to get somebody like me to switch to an alternative, which is why efforts like Google+ have fallen flat despite FB's PR troubles over the years.
In other words they have a de facto monopoly, and it's really only a matter of time until somebody figures out a way to really monetize all the free content and data being generated by FB's users. Zuck's controlling shareholding is quite likely to be a positive in this context, as it frees him to ignore Wall Street's whines and focus on evolving the company.