But I like your second point, and refer to it above. Facebook is expanding its services by becoming more content-centric. After all, it’s not shutting down it’s communications offerings! So, good point.

But what expanding its services does — trying to ‘sit comfortably across the entire comms/content spectrum’ — is make the Facebook service more difficult to explain. This is what I mean by a positioning risk. On the Web, the best way to understand positioning, is the short sentence one user would say to another in order to suggest they try out a service. “You should try XXX, it’s the best way to do YYY.” As Facebook expands towards content, the center of gravity of that positioning drifts away from the clean answer: “You should try Facebook, it’s the best way to keep in touch with family and friends.”

I think it’s very difficult to evaluate this shift (or, to use the probably better term used by a commenter below, ‘expansion’) without the data Facebook is seeing. My instinct is that the core user still understands Facebook primarily as a way to keep up with friends and family. And I don’t see any impact on their growth. But, strictly from the perspective of virality, I’m not sure it’s entirely helpful for the Facebook brand to be so associated with lists of articles on news sites. Facebook = news = slower growth. That said, I very much doubt there’s much I’ve said here that Facebook hasn’t considered carefully.

One thing I would do if I was Facebook is to balance the expansion towards Content with a even more powerful push towards Communications. And they are doing this, allegedly, with their email project. But they can probably do more: I’d suggest a Facebook phone.

To the extent that your spectrum is accurate, I don’t think Facebook is “shifting” its positioning as much as “expanding” its positioning.