Social Networks

From The Guardian:

Facebook made a startling admission in its earnings announcement this month: it was seeing a "decrease in daily users, specifically among teens". In other words, teenagers are still on Facebook; they're just not using it as much as they did. It was a landmark statement, since teens are the demographic who often point the rest of us towards the next big thing.

Their gradual exodus to messaging apps such as WhatsApp, WeChat and KakaoTalk boils down to Facebook becoming a victim of its own success. The road to gaining nearly 1.2 billion monthly active users has seen the mums, dads, aunts and uncles of the generation who pioneered Facebook join it too, spamming their walls with inspirational quotes and images of cute animals, and (shock, horror) commenting on their kids' photos. No surprise, then, that Facebook is no longer a place for uninhibited status updates about pub antics, but an obligatory communication tool that younger people maintain because everyone else does.

All the fun stuff is happening elsewhere. On their mobiles.

It's interesting because the thing with personal social networks is that it's about people meeting the people they want to meet, without wasting time with people they don't.

The success of Facebook isn't technological, it's about who joined first. They got Harvard students, people we could best describe as "alphas" in some ways, people that other people would like to hang out with. So then, people in other top universities could join. And because Harvard is above them in social networking, they joined, then other colleges and finally, the public.

But what people don't want is to be bothered. You don't want you mum's crazy 2nd cousin asking why you don't bother commenting on her updates. Or your mum finding out that you got drunk. Or to be bothered by lots of people way down the social scale.

The people who do worst out of this are the people that everyone wants to talk to. So, they move to other networks to get away from people, and with this, others start to follow, until eventually the network has moved elsewhere.

I give it a couple of years and Facebook will be where MySpace is today. And we'll start getting news reports in the Daily Mail about various things people have been getting up to on WhatsApp.