A web expert has warned that the social notworking site, Facebook, will be mercifully dead and buried within five years. While many of us are concerned that it will take that long, digital consumer expert Jeffrey Cole told a digital marketing forum that in the end Facebook will be no more successful than MySpace and Bebo at hanging onto the fickle teenage audience.

Dr Cole predicted the decline of MySpace four years ago, said it would take longer for Facebook's dominance to be challenged because of its global scale. He said that the site will not be replaced by one big social networking community but it's going to fragment. He also predicted few newspapers in the US would be around in five years' time.

However he said one or two mastheads in each country would survive and become global news brands because, even among teens who did not read the printed product, there had been a flight to quality, reliable online news. Sadly he believes that the iPad will be the dominant tablet device because of the strength of the Apple brand.

He said that newspapers and magazines were never going to prosper on the PC because they're lean-back (media) but the iPad is the most exciting development in the last 100 years for newspapers. Sheesh tablets have been around for years.