#christianborys

[christianandrewborys]

Andrew Kong of Who Knows Inc comes in to talk about the corporate world versus the startup community and how satisfying it is to completely change your life

[christianandrewborys]

We Grew Up On Facebook

I completely grew up on Facebook. I'd known that for a while but only really realized it after watching a Ryerson student film about social media which premiered at TIFF this year and went viral. Many of my generations formative moments are on Facebook. I distinctly remember when it first came out in 2005. A friend of mine in Waterloo was talking about a girl he liked, and said something along the lines of 'yea, and she posted on my wall!'. I looked back at him with a blank stare and his eyes lit up when he registered that I'd never used Facebook. He then he made it his goal to get me hooked. Now, if you were in university in 2005, you know that getting someone hooked on Facebook was easier than skipping class to play Mariokart. It caught on so quickly. I mean it literally spread across campus like a plague. Maybe it's because discovering its best use case for that point in our lives only took a few minutes. We could find the hottest girls in our school, and every other school. Back then, if you walked into any classroom, 9/10 students weren't using their laptops to take notes, they just had Facebook open 100% of the time. However according to Business Insider, it's quite different now. Now university students are dropping off like flies. Any rational person could see that Facebook losing its strangle hold on this demographic was inevitable. Teenagers do horrible things, and love taking pictures of themselves doing it. All they want is the swiss bank account of social media products, a secure venue to share idiotic pictures with their friends. As soon as you introduce the potential of mom grounding you over what you've posted, it's game over. I think that point came along years ago. Sure people stuck around on Facebook but their behaviour changed dramatically. The only reason they didn't flee en masse was because there was no other product as magnetic as Facebook was in its infancy. Enter Snapchat. I see how people use Snapchat now, and it's with the same sheer and utter joy that Facebook once enjoyed. Snapchat just brings out the happy in everyone. They have no qualms about the repercussions of their actions because they don't really need to. There are no preachy posts from 'friends' to roll their eyes at. No baby pictures. Just the stupidity of your youth on display for your friends to laugh along with. The funny part to me is that Facebook's messaging threads are pretty closely related to Snapchat. My friends and I all stopped posting to Facebook's walls a while ago. I've even installed an extension so I don't see my news feed at all. We may only use messaging threads, but we use them all the time. We get to share stories and pictures amongst ourselves, and we're comfortable being ourselves because we know no one else is seeing the content. Great! So what can Facebook do with its strength in messaging? Nothing. Can you imagine it brought ads directly into private messaging threads. They'd be better off pre-emptively cancelling user accounts. But we're still there. We're all still logging in and using the platform, and Facebook's engineers are probably working as hard as they ever have to figure out what to do about it. What might that be? Who knows but for now they're just going to pump you full of more ads! Is Facebook dead? Well as long as people are still distracted enough by their product to walk off a pier , I would say they've got a chance to right the ship.