Facebook hit its 10th Birthday mile stone on February 4th with the release of its Look Back feature which summarizes your main events into a 60 seconds video from when you created your account.
Although I am still on Facebook I no longer use it as the main place to go and do stuff as soon as I am home from work. I have never been a gamer so I find the daily game request emails annoying. I no longer find it to be the best place to go to find out what is happening in the world. The only thing I use it for it to keep up to date with what all my friends are up to these days.
Below is a list of the key dates in the history of Facebook
March 2004: Facebook begins allowing people from other colleges and universities to join.
September 2004: Facebook introduces the Wall, a feature that allows users to leaves messages on other users profiles for all their followers to see.
September 2005: Facebook expands to allow teenagers to signup. At this stage Facebook is still restricted to academic circles but branches out to high schools.
September 2006: Facebook introduces the News Feed, a feature that collectsyou’re your friends' Wall posts in one place for easy viewing.
April 2008: Facebook introduces Facebook Chat. An Instant Message platform to rival MSN and Skype.
February 2009: Facebook introduces Like, a method to allow users to quickly say that they endorse your post.
June 2009: Facebook becomes the biggest social network in America, leaving Myspace trailing in second place.
August 2010: Facebook launches a location feature, letting friends quickly know where they are.
May 2012: Facebook floats on the NYSE. Facebook prices its Initial Public Offering at $38 per share. Trading begins on May 18th.
September 2012: Facebook purchases Instagram for a purported cost of $740 million.
October 2012: Facebook hits the 1 billion active users mark.
Looking ahead to Facebook’s future there have been a few reports in the media recently indicating that Facebook will struggle to grow or even maintain its existing user base over the coming years.
The first article Facebook 'dead and buried' as teens switch to Snapchat and Whatsapp suggests that most teenagers are shunning Facebook for much simpler platforms like Snapchat and Whatsapp.
These new apps allow instant messaging and the sending of photos and videos to groups of friends without all the added baggage that Facebook provide.
It was also suggested that Facebook was losing the younger audience as parents are now catching up with technology and the teenagers are seeing friend requests from their parents.
The second article, which when reading I interpret to be a hoax news story Facebook 'Could Lose 80% Of Users By 2017' suggests that by the age of 13, Facebook will have lost 80% of its existing users.
This study is based on a decline of the number of times the word Facebook and been entered into the Google search engine. Facebook hits its peak in December 2012.
The researchers suggested that the predication could be verified by looking at what happened to Myspace in 2008 - “A similar spike in searches was observed for Myspace months before it hit its peak in 2008, before heading into terminal decline.”
The third article suggests boldly that Twitter Will Live and Facebook Will Die
This biased reporter suggests Facebook will die eventually, it will go the way of Myspace. Facebook will come back incarnated as something else.
He then goes on to say that the newspaper died and came back as Twitter. Twitter is the modern day version of the newspaper. And it will sustain.
After reading this and given the way I use Facebook now I believe that Facebook has peaked and now it will struggle to maintain the same number of active users that it currently experiences.
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