Did Facebook really lose young people?

Check this video first:

Now, do we really think that Facebook staff did not conduct similar focus groups or done extensive research on what is interesting for different age groups?

Acquiring Instagram and bidding for Snapchat was not a result of some research? Here’s another teenager view on social media: A Teenager’s View on Social Media and part 2: What Teens Really Think About YouTube, Google+, Reddit and Other Social Media

And here’s my $0,02:

Facebook will go away in a similar way to all social media or The Internet for that matter because it will evolve as a platform in such a way we won’t feel it anymore. With the help of emerging technologies it will be so omnipresent in our lives that it will feel like a natural extension of our traditional social interactions. It already does. And we lived the pre-smartphone era.

Facebook changed forever The Internet. Think it about it. Before we were all emailing, browsing, searching, sending email commands to bots to retrieve web pages (helloooo dial-up), but we were never really together. Then we started joining mailing groups and BBSes, checking forums waiting to see if a thread had new answers, but it wasn’t real time.  Then messengers and chatrooms came along and it was great but still not everybody was there or not simultaneously anyway. Now we need complex filtering algorithms to show only what some machine learned that it might be interesting to us. But everyone is here. On one platform or another. On a phone, on a watch or on a pair of glasses.

We all had a personal playground. And we knew stuff about other playgrounds. And sometimes we borrowed or lend toys or ideas on how to organise our playground. But now we all have one big playground that we can instantly travel in within from one corner to another and all the toys are available in infinite stock for everyone.

Does Facebook need to be answering needs of all age groups? It should if it were the only big playground – but it’s not – there’s one for every age group. What comes next is really interesting. Thoughts?

Featured image source: Balakov, Deviantart