Cells in a petri dish can exhibit a behavior where they grow quickly, consuming the sustenance where they are, and expanding outward in a rapidly growing ring, as the middle starves, until the landscape is consumed and everything starves. The XScreenSaver "GLCells" [1] is a simulation of this effect. By all the simple metrics like cell count or cell mass, everything looks great... until it's not.
A biology expert may be able to tweak this. If this phenomenon has a specific name, that would be even better, but I doubt I can google it up.
(Incidentally, I'm just offering this up as a term. I think the title is premature; it has not been proved that this is the case for Facebook. If we are going to speculate that they may in the future not be able to continue making money as they are today, they still have a lot of runway. I'm not itching to buy shares, but I wouldn't personally guarantee they won't be able to make money.)
Cells in a petri dish can exhibit a behavior where they grow quickly, consuming the sustenance where they are, and expanding outward in a rapidly growing ring, as the middle starves, until the landscape is consumed and everything starves. The XScreenSaver "GLCells" [1] is a simulation of this effect. By all the simple metrics like cell count or cell mass, everything looks great... until it's not.
A biology expert may be able to tweak this. If this phenomenon has a specific name, that would be even better, but I doubt I can google it up.
(Incidentally, I'm just offering this up as a term. I think the title is premature; it has not been proved that this is the case for Facebook. If we are going to speculate that they may in the future not be able to continue making money as they are today, they still have a lot of runway. I'm not itching to buy shares, but I wouldn't personally guarantee they won't be able to make money.)
[1]: http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/screenshots/