Will Today's Social Media Super-Stars Go Nova?

Will Twitter and Facebook go the way of Netscape, Altavista, and other e-brand stars that once burned brightly in the Internet universe, only to go nova over time? 

• AltaVista was an up-and-coming search engine developed by Digital Equipment Corp, one of the speediest and most popular in its heyday--until Google came along and stole the spotlight. Today, AltaVista is owned by Yahoo! but the site is quite bare-bones. If you "Google" AltaVista, fewer than 22 million results show up.

• Netscape Navigator, once the premier Web browser, was bought by AOL in 1999. AOL (a former big-shot brand that's fallen from its own great heights) ended its support of Netscape in 2008. Now Netscape is simply one of AOL's miscellaneous brands. Ask a teenager what Netscape is (as I did not long ago) and you'll get a blank stare or a one-word answer: "Huh?" When I "Googled" Netscape, only 116 million results showed up--five times more hits than AltaVista, but still not much of a presence.

These two has-been e-brands have clearly been eclipsed by newer e-brands. For example, do a Google search on some of today's top e-brand and social media super-stars, and here's what you get:

• YouTube= 597 million results
• Google = 9.3 billion results
• Twitter = 9.4 billion results 
• Facebook = 11.7 billion results

Although Facebook has 2 billion more results than Google, that's what things look like today. Given the enormously rapid rate of change in all things Internet, tomorrow's results could look very different. 

My prediction is that Twitter will fade before Facebook . . . and Facebook will be eclipsed within a few years by some yet-unknown super-star e-brand that's the brainchild of a born-digital entrepreneur writing code at this very minute.