By Joe Mont, TheStreet

It must feel pretty good to be Facebook. It has some 700 million users worldwide, out-clicks the rest of the Web, including Google (GOOG) -- Google -- and buzz has even started about using Facebook as a search engine.

But there remain skeptics. Some might point to MySpace, since in 2007 an estimated one in five Americans used the site, or even to Friendster, once 100 million-strong and now with about 1.5 million users since rebranding as a gaming site (and expunging all older user profiles and content along the way).

What did in Friendster, aside from some internal politics, was failing to listen to user feedback, and to some that sounds like Facebook now.

While Facebook has scale and the vision of maverick CEO Mark Zuckerberg, its leadership also faces the need to innovate, add features and boost revenue lest it grow stale, bloated and underfunded. Yet every change is met with overstated horror by users enraged that someone messed with "their" Facebook.

Almost every aspect of the service is scornfully picked apart -- game-related spam, privacy controls, hijacker apps and links and the stream of banal posts from "friends" about their kids' post-nasal drip, Zumba classes and all-caps rants about Obama and his ties to the Illuminati.

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Facebook does not fare well in the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), a national indicator of customer evaluations of goods and services among U.S. households. The index was founded at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business.

"In 2010, Facebook debuted with an ACSI score of 64 -- the lowest of any measured Web site," an analysis of the data reads. (By comparison, Wikipedia scored 78, the best showing, followed by YouTube at 74.) "This year, Facebook makes a modest gain, up 3% to 66, even though -- or perhaps because -- its user numbers have exploded, reaching almost 1 billion. But considering Facebook's low user satisfaction, its current size dominance cannot be taken for granted in the future."

Facebook's pitiful showing over the past two years puts it in the bottom 5% of all measured private-sector companies and in the same range as perennially low-scoring airlines and cable companies.

"Facebook is a phenomenal success, so we were not expecting to see it score so poorly with consumers," says Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results, which worked with ACSI on the data. "At the same time, our research shows that privacy concerns, frequent changes to the Web site and commercialization and advertising adversely affect the consumer experience. Compare that to Wikipedia, which is a nonprofit that has had the same user interface for years, and it's clear that while innovation is critical, sometimes consumers prefer evolution to revolution."

"They're in a situation where satisfaction is very important long term, but while there is not really a viable competitor it isn't going to change a whole lot of their business," he adds. "In other words, if you don't have any alternatives you are going to put up with the challenges."

Freed draws a comparison to America Online.

"AOL (AOL) is another company that, years ago, early on in the measurement of the ASCI, their scores weren't very strong, but at the time they were pretty dominant. As alternatives came about they lost their way pretty quickly because they weren't doing a good job of meeting consumer's needs," Freed says.

Did someone say alternatives? The analysis has one in mind.

"For companies that provide low levels of customer satisfaction, repeat business is always a challenge unless customers lack adequate choices, as in the case of near monopolies," it says. "It is possible that Facebook's gigantic user base in and of itself might provide a certain monopoly protection. The first test of this notion will probably come from Google's recent launch of Google+, a social networking service aimed at an audience similar to that of Facebook. If there is a battle for social networking preeminence between Facebook and Google, it will likely center on user satisfaction."

The launch of Google+ has surely been the biggest -- and most well-funded -- challenge to Facebook's social media stranglehold.

To be sure, even the few who cheered on Google+ unreservedly were rocked by what the vast reaches of the search engine's own domain brought forward Wednesday: a report from Computerworld that brokerage and investment banking firm Stifel Nicolaus was downgrading a "weakening" Google to a hold from a buy; and a far more damning piece by Michael Degusta at theunderstatement.co​m, with the simple headline Google's Management Doesn't Use Google+. As PCmag summed up the research:

In the three months since Google+ launched, only three of the 12 members of Google's management team have posted on G+ . . . Just two of Google's senior vice presidents have posted since August. Degusta argued that Google's senior vice president of social and head of Google+ Vic Gundatora is one of the only vice presidents that has made a serious effort to use the service, with a total of more than 150 posts. SVP of Chrome Sundar Pichi is the only other exception to the norm, with a total of 58 posts . . . Even Larry Page isn't using Google+. He's only posted seven times, and he hasn't been active on the site yet this month. Co-founder Sergey Brin has posted slightly more, but only 15 times. Former CEO and current board member Eric Schmidt hasn't even joined the site yet. None of Google's board members have posted on Google+.

Don't count it out. Abandoning invitation-only and inviting the general public to join Google+ likely brought users to 50 million, says Experian Hitwise, and took the system from 54th in the social networking and forums rankings to eighth.

"Google+ is an interesting challenge to Facebook," Freed says. "They are not really a serious competitor until they get the network large enough to be viable. They are seeing great growth in adoption, but it still has to grow a whole lot more before people will abandon Facebook. But if they do become a viable competitor, Facebook is going to have some challenges because of their lack of satisfaction."

Competitors smell blood in the water. The open, nonprofit network social media site Diaspora, still in development, has considerable buzz for its un-Facebook-like dedication to privacy and user controls. And Hi5, a social network once given up for dead, is once again gaining momentum with a gaming focus. Tumblr, with its constantly refreshing stream of content, is thus far mostly a youthful addiction, but could broaden its audience. Twitter and the business-focused LinkedIn (LNKD) have carved out markets that can either ultimately supplement Facebook or replace it, user by user.

Flying under the radar are niche social networks, many of them adding features to specialized Web sites.

"I think the niche social media networks could be, and are in some cases, very powerful," Freed says. "I saw a stat when Facebook hit 500 million members that there are another 500 million members of niche social networks as well. They might be as small as fly fishing enthusiasts, but now you've got people who are there for exactly the same reason and their interests are aligned and all that."

These sites, and other upstarts, may want to start rooting for Google.

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"I think if Google+ does create some fragmentation in the network, it will open the door to others," Feed says. "They will all look for a unique way of looking at the world to try to entice people to come over. In general, one of the great values of Facebook is that everybody is on it. As it gets fragmented, the whole value of their social network is going to decline."