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That's the question the author of the article asks about the two hotter SNS services in Facebook and Twitter.  The author makes one point where he states, "If a large corporation buys a smaller company, there's the danger that the creative input of its founders will no longer be needed."  That's certainly true because the larger company will want to plant their chieftains into the smaller company to soothe internal egos.  That's corporate politics and that won't change.

Obviously, SNS is a fad as many have come and gone or are bound to go.  Then you started to get niche social networks that focus on a specific area (like Livestrong's focus on health).  However, one of the problems that is specific to Myspace that the author did not point out was how News Corp's focus has been on the media aspect of Myspace, or rather leveraging their previously huge numbers to advertise their media.  Because News Corp had focused on the media aspect rather than the technology aspects, the return rate slowly declined.  The key things that had made Facebook successful compared to Myspace was opening itself up as a platform for 3rd party developers to create applications that engaged its user base.

Myspace completely missed the boat on that one and instead became a glorified GeoCities 2.0 (and we all know what recently happened to them).  This is the exact same issue that Yahoo faced when Terry Semel, a media executive, came in and attempted to turn Yahoo around during the dot com bust.

At the moment, Facebook and Twitter are very technology focused and allow creative developers to build upon their platforms.  Essentially, they've taken the Open Source strategy a step forward.  Now, they don't even have to pay 3rd party developers and can rely on the community to enhance features.  Instead, Facebook and Twitter can purely focus on scalability and functionality that allow 3rd parties to continue expanding services upon it.  Just like how Apache, PHP, perl, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Java and other open source/open standard platforms have allowed 3rd parties to create new platforms, so too will Facebook and Twitter continue to thrive as long as the community continues to support them and these companies continue to remain dedicated to their 3rd party developers (are you listening Apple?!??!?!!?!?!?!?!)

This is why Facebook and Twitter are successful and why more than likely they'll continue to perform well, as long as this vision is kept. The author clearly fails to see that Facebook and Twitter are more than a generic, black and white SNS.  Of course, Facebook and Twitter can easily fuck up just like that if another technologically illiterate baboon swallows them.