27 December 2013

Is Facebook "dead" ?

An article in The Conversation offers that opinion:
This year marked the start of what looks likely to be a sustained decline of what had been the most pervasive of all social networking sites. Young people are turning away in their droves and adopting other social networks instead, while the worst people of all, their parents, continue to use the service.

As part of a European Union-funded study on social media, we are running nine simultaneous 15-month ethnographic studies in eight countries. What we’ve learned from working with 16-18 year olds in the UK is that Facebook is not just on the slide, it is basically dead and buried. Mostly they feel embarrassed even to be associated with it. Where once parents worried about their children joining Facebook, the children now say it is their family that insists they stay there to post about their lives. Parents have worked out how to use the site and see it as a way for the family to remain connected. In response, the young are moving on to cooler things.

Instead, four new contenders for the crown have emerged: Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp.
There's more at the link about the reasons this change may be occurring.  Of interest to me is that if Facebook is dying, that status has not yet been updated in the equity markets -


- because short-term out-of-the-money put options are very inexpensive.  I've just fired off an email to a social-media-savvy 17-year-old relative for advice, but would also appreciate input from (young) readers of this blog.

12 comments:

  1. Young twentysomething reporting in. You might consider getting a Tumblr account. Tumblr combines the traditional blogging model with a Twitter-like approach, which includes tags, following and being followed by other blogger, and reblogging in the manner of retweeting (thankfully no character limits).

    It couldn't replace Facebook for me because Tumblr makes no distinction between friends and people you enjoy following, has no easy way to announce and organize events, and lacks real-time chat. I suspect that Tumblr could make an excellent supplement for tywkiwdbi, though, and even allow you to replicate your blog if need be.

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  2. I'm celebrating 20 years on the web now (1993!), so I've seen the rise and fall of many internet phenomena.

    Where are they going? I haven't heard of anything that might be able to replace facebook, except Google+. And Google quickly burned themselves on not allowing anonymity and linking everything while risking your account to be closed. (While closing other services with just "a few million" users...)

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    1. I don't count Tumblr as either a blogging option (comments?) nor a social network (no such options). Livejournal is dead, isn't it?

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    2. I still use Livejournal ;) In two days it will be my 13 year anniversary ...

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  3. From a financial standpoint, I wouldn't pretend to offer advice, but I would definitely look at Facebooks other investments and purchases before writing the entire company off as dying. They could reinvent themselves as times change (although I also understand how difficult that usually is)

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  4. We are the people our children warned us about!?

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  5. There was a study done some time ago (more then 20 years at least) among, I believe, College Economic Students, or something like that, who were trading on some fictional, limited, petroleum stocks. The idea behind the study was to see what would happen when a widely traded resource ran out. As I remember it, the price of the stock continued to rise until the very last minute before the oil ran out. This was because each person believed that he or she could make money, even though they knew that the oil was going to run out soon. That could be why Facebook stocks continue to do well, for now at least.

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    1. Opps, forgot. It was so long ago that it was in one of my college psych textbooks from the 1980's if I remember correctly.

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  6. I trust someone's pointed you to this by now.

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    1. I hadn't seen that report, but had seen others indicating the same, and emphasizing that adult penetration was rising (so to speak). And I've noticed the market's resilient response the past two days.

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  7. Not sure that I count as "young", but I do see a decline in use although not a significant one yet.

    Snapchat is definitely on the rise amongst my younger acquaintances.

    Personally I have found that Facebook tends to make me less happy when I read it so I changed my password to a random string I don't know, copied that random string into my password safe, and only check it for messages/news once or twice a week now.

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  8. Young people might keep their facebooks, but they don't put as much information on there anymore. Most use snapchat. Because if you send a snap, it disappears after a bit. Having a documented history associated with everything you do (as in facebook) isn't really desirable to youngs.

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