I was a facebook early adopter, now what?

There have been a few blog posts already telling us that facebook’s early adopters are leaving. And a lot of discussion on how useful facebook really is… Being somewhat of an early adopter myself I wanted to chime in. When facebook burst into the scene I was still in college. We were added pretty quickly to the then elite facebook network. It was revolutionary, it was everywhere, in the library (not that I frequented that establishment often), in class, in bed, in labs. Everyone was on it; everyone was using it, countless hours a day. Let’s face it; it was the ultimate stalking tool. You could see all the people in your school- what they looked like, their interests and friends. It was a sketchy dating tool – still is for some. But as I got older and graduated – I found myself spending less and less time on it. Not surprisingly – so were my friends – thus the facebook descent begun. The amount of information that I actually cared about became scarce on facebook. I began to visit less and less.
I still visit now – there are two features I find useful. The photo sharing on there and the birthday reminders (immensely helpful to the absent minded {me}). Facebook messaging has completely lost its appeal. Once I get five messages about zombie eating vampires all I can think is how great it would be to send some human eating vampires after the people responsible for these messages.
So am I on some other social network – nope. My friend network is on facebook and that’s hard to relocate to somewhere else.
They haven’t lost me yet and facebook does have time to get it right. They have captured the younger generation but they have to learn how to keep them as they grow older. Because it is when they grow older and get some money to their name, they really become valuable to advertisers. (Advertising is still their business model right? Yea that’s great, 15 Billion seems fair.)
What does facebook need to do? Well here’s my idea of a social networking service/website I’d use actively (at least in theory). Basically take one of the emerging mobile social networking startups and overlay on top of my facebook social network.

• Go mobile. Let me see which of my contacts are close to me physically in real time.
• Give me the ability to easily message them akin to SMS.
• Let me meet new people based on interests, common friends and proximity.
• Get rid of sheep throwing applications. (I only have time to throw real sheep around not virtual ones.)
• Build some useful applications on top of facebook. (i.e. Yelp {leveraging my friends – people I trust}, couchsurfing {again leveraging my current social network, etc..})