> So the question then becomes: if facebook is slowly turned into a contact book and event planner, does that mean the end of facebook? Does facebook require billions of people hitting millions of like buttons and farming animals on their walls in order to live?
It depends what you mean by 'end' but if this is all people do once there in the future, absolutely. There won't be enough daily active users to support advertising, which leads to a downward spiral. People may keep their accounts but Facebook's data (like any social network) is highly temporal - once you stop liking stuff they become more and more out of touch with ad targeting.
Exactly, but the reduced revenue is likely proportional to reduced operating costs. It will be the white-dwarf end of Facebook, but it would never die until someone creates a feasible replacement. Even at a fraction of its current size, being "just" everyone's contact book for one billion users is still quite a big deal.
So it's a definition of when Facebook is "dead" or "gone". It will never go away entirely.
It depends what you mean by 'end' but if this is all people do once there in the future, absolutely. There won't be enough daily active users to support advertising, which leads to a downward spiral. People may keep their accounts but Facebook's data (like any social network) is highly temporal - once you stop liking stuff they become more and more out of touch with ad targeting.