How Gen Y Lost That Loving Feeling For Facebook
Posted by meredith on 04-07-2009Today's Ypulse Youth Advisory Board post is from Libby Issendorf in response to Anastasia's post last week on the social networking fatigue that she sensed coming from Facebook's younger users. Remember, you can communicate directly with any member of the Ypulse Youth Advisory Board by emailing them at youthadvisoryboard at ypulse.com…or just leave a comment.
How Gen Y Lost That Loving Feeling For Facebook
Facebook is my online bedroom–it's where I keep all my stuff. My photos since 2005, my friends' current cities and email addresses, and my correspondence, i.e. Wall-to-Wall conversations and message threads, are all neatly stored one click away. Because of this, I doubt I'll ever close my Facebook account. But I agree that my passion for the service has diminished in the past year.
Facebook has done a great job of evolving constantly to keep its earliest users engaged. I love the new Twitter-like updates and have actually logged on a little more since the redesign, but my overall activity is still down. Instead of signing in multiple times a day and adding content, I'm logging in once a day or every few days, and mostly reading content passively. Reasons for this are:
Not Gen Y's space. I second what Anastasia said about Facebook not being my generation's space anymore. I don't mind that my mom has been on Facebook for a few years, but I hate friend requests from my parents' friends and my business contacts. I know about all the privacy settings, but I don't want to have to deal with them. I just want to post pictures from the bar without worrying.
Friend overload. Another problem is a buildup of "friends" who are barely acquaintances. Seeing activity from people I really don't care about fill up my feed is overwhelming. Fortunately, Facebook took steps to alleviate this by allowing users to hide friends from their news feed, and avoid the awkward defriending process.
Don't make me dig. Last year at this time, I would frequently upload new pictures, comment on friends' pictures, and write on walls or send bumper stickers. I'm still adding and commenting on photos, and increasingly "liking" or commenting on statuses, but I rarely take the time to move away from my home page anymore. I won't seek out individual profiles to write on their walls or dig through bumper stickers to send. Instead, I'm engaging more with the information presented to me in the news feed–friends tagged in photos or status updates. I expect Facebook to show me what's new rather than seeking it out on my own.
Same old events, pictures and inbox. For all their innovation, Facebook has seriously neglected some of its core applications. Photos, videos, events, and the inbox have been untouched for years. Why can't I tag people at specific times in videos? Why isn't my inbox sortable by sender? Why can't I upload pictures in full resolution? Why can't I send automatic reminders when my event is a few days away?
As long as my stuff is there and my friends are there, I'm always going to be on Facebook. But I think Gen Y is ready and willing to migrate to a new social network that has the exclusivity and energy of Facebook ca. 2004.
About Libby Issendorf
After growing up on a farm in North Dakota, Libby Issendorf moved to Minneapolis to attend the University of Minnesota. She discovered her passion for brands and media as a member of her school’s first-place National Student Advertising Competition team. After graduation in 2008, she began her career as a media analyst at an advertising agency. Libby works on media placement and targeting for national brands like General Mills and Land O Lakes. Outside of work, she loves blogging, playing sports, consuming gratuitous amounts of pop culture, the Minnesota Twins, being really geeky with her iPhone, and driving to see her boyfriend, who lives too far away.
Categorized under: Web, Youth Advisory Board
April 8th, 2009 at 9:45 am
About 2 months ago I wrote a post on my blog asking this very question: Facebook: Will Teens Jump Ship with the Rapid Influx of Adults? http://bit.ly/1SaIcN The answers from parents were very divided. But I have a feeling that your first reason "Not Gen Y's space" could be the one that will do it.
April 10th, 2009 at 6:50 am
I agree with peoples concerns over Facebooks positioning and the lack of ownership that teens are beginning to feel.
In the UK, many parents who belong to the early adopters or credible mass market demographic, discovered facebook before their kids. The younger kids were still on MSN and Bebo while the teens were using Bebo and Myspace.
My 16 yearold daughter started using facebook about a year ago and states that she aswell as her friends now only use facebook.
Youth culture is constantly re-inventing itself. The youth market are fickle and will continue to be nomadic in their social networking sites.
Their loyalty lasts until the next network arrives, and I feel the lack of space ownership (ie Kids, in the main, don't want to hang out with their parents) and difficulties in maintaining the privacy you want without offending people you know but don't want to network with, can only speed up the imminent exodus to the next emerging network.
I have my kids as contacts, which at the beginning was a nice idea, however, a recent fallout over a tongue piercing that I had said no to, and my subsequent discovery, through a cryptic status that came up on my home page, that my daughter had got it done on the sly, led to an escalation of issues. In particular, my daughters belief that I was snooping through her profile, led her to block our connection. In fact I made a point of not going through her profile, because I don't want to know all the gory details about her private life.
At the same time I have friends who hardly know my kids, adding them in their transparent need to appear more popular by increasing their number of contacts.
I think it will take many years for a networking site to arrive that will have longevity over fickle trends and offer users the tools and privacy to give them total control.
Great for us all to be able to dream about coming up with a simple brilliant idea that will make us a fortune, crap if you are a media giant who has just spent gazillions on a social network that has peaked, and numbers of people stated as users are actually lapsed and inactive.
April 11th, 2009 at 12:57 am
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