But, then most facebook apps are thinly veiled attempts at attention hoarding to try and monetize eyeballs and facebook is just social leverage in that attempt. It’s become so noisy, there’s very little signal left. Eventually people will have much more lightweight social networks where people will have more fine-grained control over what they present to others. Google will probably run the whole thing for free or with minimal, well focused text ads and the social network won’t be in one place but, will probably be more like a widget that you put on each page.

Applications will exist as well and the best ones won’t use ugly, manipulative advertising because as they grow better and more important to people, your friends will start to talk about which app you use.

Open Source apps and platforms will eventually pop up and the low hanging fruit of the social apps world will be swallowed up. Simple calendars, birthday reminders, “Virtual Gifting” apps will either disappear or become part of some sub-network and commoditized.