Facebook. Parents have flocked to it and continued their embarrassing tradition of creepily commenting on everyone’s photos. People keep inviting each other to endless time-wasting games and spam all their friends with events. And businesses have finally mustered up enough courage to join the network.
But it’s too late. Facebook is already dead.
The teens who spurred the popularity of the site have now moved on to Twitter, Instagram, and other more simple sites. These sites often limit users’ abilities to compose annoying, novel-sized posts that drive their friends crazy. New sites also have made it more acceptable to post updates more often which increases the time users spend on the sites. Most importantly, these sites use hashtags that allow users to incorporate comedy into their posts and connect with others feeling the same way about a topic. Facebook copied this and incorporated hashtags last year, but it really was #toolittletoolate.
In a study by Princeton, Facebook was compared to a disease which rapidly spreads, then suddenly dies off. As more of people’s friends join, they are likely to join and as more friends leave, more people are likely to leave. Princeton projects that Facebook will lose 80 percent of its user base in the next three years as it continues to bleed users and gradually reach the end of its lifespan. With Facebook’s continual loss of users already, it feels like a graveyard while scrolling down your bare news feed that only includes weird comments from your grandma, advertisements, and whiny friends from middle school.
Between Facebook’s outdated, complicated feel and its disease-like structure that causes it to die just as quickly as it grew, I’d say it’s time to stop trying to bring it back to life with updates. Time of death: 2013.