Will Facebook last Forever ?

Last night the news about young people abandoning Facebook dropped as a bomb. The article was based in a study of interviews made to teenagers, where they presented a lot of arguments to quitting facebook and social networks in general.

First, I must say that the way we use the expression “social networks” for everything really bothers me. Suddenly everything on the internet is a social network, even the internet itself. Supposedly a social network is something were individuals publicly add each other simultaneously as friends.

Linkedin is the pure social network, which serves the purpose of social networking exclusively. And most people do not spend hours a week in a social network, unless they are something like a head-hunter or a sales person. Most of us are just part of a social network so someone else will find us, or maybe in a certain situation it may be useful to track someone else.
So it is not fair to say that Social Networking is dying, it’s just there when we need it. There is no need to go there every day.

Now, Facebook is much more than a Social Network. It has micro-blogging, picture and video sharing, groups, fan club, and a lot of applications like Quizzes or games.

The great platform for micro-blogging is Twitter, which does nothing else than that one purpose that is micro-blogging. Now, kids and teenager don’t like micro-blogging. It’s usually skilled professionals who use it to share and learn from their professional community. For example, Foresighters use it all the time for trend-hunting. One particular difference between micro-blogging and social networks, is that in micro-blogging adding is not simultaneous. Person A might be following B, without B being following A.
Micro-blogging is not dying either. Sure it has passed that fashion momentum, but now it’s used by who it is supposed to be.
You might want to remember all of this, next time someone says that Google Buzz is a social network.

Now, before I get into the dying of Facebook and Social Networks let me explain the concept of layered information. All of us, at a conscient or inconscient level, assume that some information is more important than other. So, a more important information would be a top layer. It’s fair to assume that most people would have this order: personal talk, phone, email, and micro-blogging. Of course, this is not the same for everyone, as some of us would consider s.m.s. over e-mail and others the other way around.

After all of this let’s look at facebook and bring that question “Will facebook last forever?”. Considering that in internet terms, “forever” means something like a decade.
Facebook is a social network, which represents no reason to visit it often. But then it has micro-blogging in it, with the problem that you don’t choose who you follow. You just choose who is your friend. When we think about all that useless information, there really is no reason to go there, because all those posts about who likes what are at the bottom layer of all the information we receive daily.

A few months ago, Facebook Quizzes were really cool and funny, but we got tired of it really fast. That is something else that will not keep our attention, whether we are teenagers or grown-ups.

Groups and Forums is something that facebook never had great success. A lot of people sign in, or push the “I like” button, but then forgets about it. So that is not the way either.

And now, facebook has something that scares all teenagers away: their parents. In a place where all your friends talk about your personal life, and everybody comments, you don’t want your parents around. It’s not about being a teenager. Nobody likes to have their parents snooping around their personal life. No matter what age we are.

So this leaves one reason to go back to facebook often. Yes, you are right. That reason is Farmville, or mafia wars, or whatever networking-game you are playing.
The problem with networking-games is that they are only fun for a certain amount of time, even when you are addicted to games. This is why we have so many games with a name ending in vile or city. They all want to be the next big game, but always very similar to the ones already existing.

So, if facebook, doesn’t want to perish into oblivience, it has to find something else that Is appealing and great. To survive, facebook will have to find the next big thing in order to call the teenagers back in.

Or maybe Facebook will be the new grown-ups platform, which is the most probably scenario. In the internet world, teenagers are the early adopters, and grown-ups follow them. And big corporations will be there announcing their products and services, and a lot of professionals will try to organize lobbying events, and debate their activities. And we will have a lot of people over 30 playing Farmville.

Oops. That is not the future… It’s now