The Magic 8 Ball
Apologies in advance to Mattel (full disclosure – I have a good friend who is corporate counsel @Mattel. Just in case ‘Magic 8 Ball’ as a title crosses that line, he will be the first call I’ll make, that lucky guy).
This ‘predications’ piece here isn’t really about me knowing anymore about the state of online affairs than you do who might be reading this. In fact, you probably know more than I do. If you’re reading posts on Medium, then you no doubt have a good handle about the business of what’s online and social media. In which case it should come as no surprise to you that it won’t be too long now before we begin to see some erosion online by one of the more popular platforms in our time – Facebook.
Think of it like this. What if you could live 300 hundred years. Enough time to notice real and marked degradation or erosion over a long period of time of anything – to witness and visually see real change. What if you placed a wooden chair in the middle of a vacant room. Someplace that it couldn’t be moved or disturbed. You leave the room undisturbed and you’d come back in one year. The chair would appear to look the same. However in 50 years, even without touching or using it, the chair (wood) would begin to look a little more disheveled and worn. In 150 years, perhaps the wood begins to wear and become brittle. In 300 years, the chair might begin to fall apart and disintegrate. Totally normal. But change isn’t too noticeable in a year or two. It takes time. And its harder to see when you are in the same room with the chair all the time. The larger the object, the easier it is to see any change.
The Internet ages in dog years. For every one year, its almost like seven years. Facebook launched in 2004. It’s 9 years old. But it’s really 63 years old or thereabouts. I say this because in only a few more years that’s going to be about the medium age demographic using Facebook. Today, the preponderance of people who ‘check-in’ are over 30, perhaps closer to 35 – 40 or older. In fact, most of these people check into Facebook as much as they check their email I’m sorry to say (email - another online phenomena that is considered ‘old’, but let me leave that’s for another day). A different way of putting this would be that there is hardly anyone who is over the age of 25 that checks in and uses Facebook on a regular basis. 83% of FB users are over 25 and 64% are over 35 - the average user is 40yrs old. Reason # 1: it’s not cool to be using what your Mom and Dad are using and certainly would not want to be seen on FB there when they online and using it too – ack! Reason# 2: kids don’t really use desktops or laps anymore for mainline communications between one another (homework yes but laptops don’t text) – it all about mobile, apps and tablets. Reason # 3: FB already knows all of this and this is one of the reasons they bought ‘Instagram’ to help corral all the minnows (kids) that no longer use FB. This is the first acquisition by FB like this and there will be more to come.
FB will require international growth to stem the tide of erosion. That’s harder to do than over here. Plus, just look at a few other examples; MySpace, Friendster, Orkut, Zanga, Digg, MyLife – I’m sure I missed a few. They each took time to erode. But they also were at the top of their game and now – poof. Gone. The young change their minds like new apps appear on iTunes. A new cool app last week is not this week. And this is all ok. And most of the time, change is a good thing. FB might not agree. But in agreement or not, change happens to everything.
