Happy Birthday Facebook! And What About Its Future?

This week Facebook celebrated its 10th birthday. To celebrate, they released a Facebook Look Back feature that compiles your time on Facebook to a one minute video. It highlights your pictures and popular posts. The videos are pretty good for being based upon statistics of your account. And now Facebook allows you to edit your video.

Facebook has also been in the news lately because of the mass exodus of teen users. The lack of interest by the new generation brings into question the future of Facebook. Frankly, I don’t think Facebook has anything to worry about for two reasons. The first reason is that the current users have invested years into their accounts, which has been made evident by the 10th birthday videos. For most of us, Facebook is the best scrapbook/photo album we have. When we take a photo, we upload it to Facebook and have been doing so to years. Therefore the more years we invest, the more likely we are to stay and will continue to contribute. If I move to a new social media site, then theyose that history that includes some pivotol moments in my life like the birth of my child and the progression of my career.

The second reason is for communication purposes. Since so many people have accounts, it is the best way to communicate with family and friends on a large scale basis. You post once and everybody knows. (Well that was how it use to work and I am seriously hoping Facebook moves back to this.)

So maybe right now teens don’t find the utility in Facebook, because they don’t want to communicate with family and there are other means to communicate with friends. But once they graduate and they move on in life, nostalgia will kick in and they will join to reconnect or they will start having families and will need to share photos with family. And due to the large numbers of those with Facebook accounts in combination with how long they have had their accounts, Facebook is really the only choice at the moment even if we have a love/hate relationship with it.