Ten years ago, when Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook at Harvard, Noah Buyon was only nine years old.
Facebook started out as a site exclusively for college students, so it took Buyon a few years to find out about it. But when his older brothers got accounts, he wanted one too.
"It became kind of the cool thing to have," Buyon says. "I couldn't hold out any more — and I got it, and I've been saddled with it ever since."
That's not an entirely positive sentiment. Now that he's in college, a freshman at Georgetown University, he's been on Facebook for almost a third of his life — and that means he's spent a lot of time on there.
"I'm at the point in my use of it that it's instinctual to just create a new tab on my browser and check my Facebook, usually for no more than 10, 15 seconds, but it's just so ingrained in my daily routine," he says. "It's just one of the most potent distractions you can have."
But there's a reason he keeps coming back, he says: It's socially rewarding. Almost all of his friends are on it. It helps him keep in touch with acquaintances he rarely sees in Japan and Australia and with his parents in New York.
In other words, it's useful — and that's necessary for social media companies these days to survive, says Emily Bell, a digital media professor at Columbia University. Facebook faces competition from dozens of social networking sites and apps that want a slice of its success. If users didn't find Facebook useful, they could easily move on to a different platform.
"As we saw with Myspace, when a group of people just decide that something is better or quicker or easier, there's very low cost now to the transaction of moving between one network and another," Bell says.
The Tipping Point
Conversations about Facebook's future almost inevitably turn to Myspace. The social networking site was Facebook's main competitor in its early days, yet quickly fizzled out as users left for Facebook. To paint a monetary picture: News Corp. bought Myspace in $580 million in 2005 and sold it, six years later, for a comparatively meager $35 million.
So in October, when Facebook admitted that daily usage was declining among its youngest users — kids in their early teens — article upon article began to speculate on whether the site was on the tipping point of Myspace-like oblivion. Some said there are just too many parents on Facebook. It's not cool anymore. Teens are flocking to Snapchat and Instagram instead. (Related note: Facebook owns Instagram.)
But Bell says it might be too early to start digging Facebook's grave.
Many Younger Facebook Users 'Unfriend' The Network Jan. 9, 2014