Facebook, the wind seems to whisper, isn’t cool anymore.
Upstarts like Snapchat and Tumblr—websites that appeal more to today’s youth— are seizing coveted turf from the world’s biggest social network. In its annual company report, released this February, Facebook acknowledged having trouble luring teens into its net.
Around the same time, the Pew Research Center published the results of its study, “Coming and Going on Facebook,” which suggests that grown-ups, too, are disenchanted. Adult users, wising up and realizing Facebook is mainly an irritant, take long vacations from the site or board up their pages once and for all, the study shows.
Then, just when the sky over its Menlo Park offices couldn’t get darker, Facebook’s director of product, Blake Ross, announced his departure from the company. In his farewell letter, Ross said he began to doubt Facebook’s future after reading a Forbes article in which teens dissed the social media behemoth, calling it “uncool.”
The year of the snake has not been gentle with Facebook.
Facebook’s race is run, analysts speculate. The thrill, after nearly 10 years, is gone, they say, as more of us display symptoms of “Facebook fatigue.” Giddy conjecture as to how the site’s fading “coolness” changes the game is spreading like a rash.
The temptation to agree with techie fortune-tellers who say Facebook has begun its initial, flailing descent is hard to resist. On the ground it certainly seems that the social media giant is losing its sheen. It’s not unusual anymore to hear people grumble about Facebook. But letting the supposed decline of Facebook’s “cool” tell the whole story feels somehow deficient.
To begin with, Facebook isn’t “cool.” Not only that, but Facebook can’t be cool.
“Cool” is a tricky colloquialism to nail down but, in the end, you often come up with something like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography: “I know it when I see it.”
But I think the controversy over Facebook’s “cool” was settled for us last May when Mark Zuckerberg took his brainchild public. First and foremost, Facebook is a corporation, and is therefore, by chain rule, incapable of cool.
Separate the website from Facebook’s corporate, profit-maximizing lizard brain, and you’re left with something like an empty warehouse in cyberspace. Facebook lets users do all the work by decorating a small, whitewashed, virtual cubicle with stuff the user likes. Without us, there isn’t much Facebook to speak of. The website at the center of Facebook Inc. is no more cool than a blank canvas.
The “cool” debate is a red herring. Commentators attacking Facebook’s “coolness” are really questioning the site’s popularity, but the two are hardly synonyms. Think back to high school: Were the popular kids cool?
Coolness notwithstanding, we’re talking about a website that reaches more than one-seventh of the Earth’s human population monthly. That kind of reach made it possible for Zuckerberg’s holy terror to rake in almost $4 billion in revenue last year.
Twitter, the second-largest social media website, only boasts 200 million active users.
Figures like the ones needed to describe Facebook’s popularity are far enough out of the ballpark to be almost completely meaningless to me. For a better sense of scale, combine Tumblr, LinkedIn, Twitter and Snapchat (four of the next-biggest runners up—not including Instagram because Facebook owns that one). Added together they don’t even approach half of Facebook’s Internet popularity.
Facebook, at the moment and for the foreseeable future, is too big to fail.
Still, in a world where fortune smiles on the huge, nobody roots for Goliath. The bigger something is and the higher it climbs, the more eagerly we anticipate its fall—and rightly so.