The Beginning of the End for Facebook
Posted at 7:32 PM Oct 01, 2008
By Bonnie Ruberg
Life is hard for old people on Facebook, at least according to Salon. Of course, by "old people" we mean anyone over 30. Apparently they overshare in front of bosses, they mention their sex lives to their nephews, and they accidentally pass along totally embarrassing videos about bowel movements to everyone they know. Fun.
I couldn't agree more with Salon that 1) this has been the year of everyone who's too old for Facebook signing up for Facebook and 2) that a large portion of those people are utterly and hilariously incompetent when it comes to social networking. My own mother, who literally doesn't know how to hang up her cell phone calls, has a Facebook account. My mother. To me, this can only mean one thing: the beginning of the end.
Let me be clear: Facebook is dying. It's not because wildly popular games like Scrabulous are getting shut down by Hasboro. It's not because the recent redesign is pissing off stubborn users. It's not even because the Web 2.0 wave, like the dotcom bubble before it, has finally crested and is ready to crash. No, the socially networking giant took its first, official, terminal breath when my elderly family members started to join -- and yours, too. A few months ago I even began getting calls from Florida, where my retired grandfather wanted to comment on my most recent status updates.
As the average age of Facebook users gets higher, what once felt like a pseudo-safe haven for college students who wanted to broadcast their lives to a few hundred friends has now become an open-door disappointingly similar to real life. Once your boss joins the site, for example, you're left with the decision: censor yourself in front of your friends for the sake of the older generation, bar those you love or fear from seeing parts of your profile... or just move onto the next big thing for people under 30.
