By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla
In a blink of an eye, Facebook has turned 10, and the company that’s changed the way we interact, communicate and keep in touch with each other celebrates its success while looking at the future.
Like it or not, Facebook has endured against the competition by constantly evolving and pushing boundaries.
Notorious for making changes and asking permission later on, Facebook has become the single most visited website or service and with 1.26 Billion users (with Canadians being the most active users in the world, yeah really). In Canada there are 19M people that use Facebook every month, 14M of them come back, every single day.
Not bad for “The Facebook”, a site went live on February 4th 2004 in Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard University dorm room, and since then has grown to become a global -mobile based- service with more 1.2 billion monthly active users.
Facebook first caught on with the university crowd before exploding and eventually vanquished early social network competitors like Friendster or MySpace. In 10 years, Facebook has in many ways replaced instant messaging, email and other forms of internet communication services like newsgroups and chatrooms.
Easy to use and engrossing, Facebook’s teen demographic changed through the years and now older users including baby boomers and even seniors have taken to Facebook to keep tabs on friends and family and it has often become the best way to communicate.
This is because Facebook constantly evolved to include chat functionality, work better on mobile phones and even went so far as to launch a few mobile handsets like this one and this one, which put the service front and centre of the mobile experience.
Mobile has been a necessary yet elusive objective for Facebook. They need to get hardware running Facebook as an app or OS seems like a struggle so Zuck and company need to find better ways to make it seamless since most users now access the service from their mobile devices.
Facebook also has some challenges retaining younger users, millennials seem to be happy to connect outside of Facebook through mobile chat services like BBM, WhatsApp, Viber, Snapchat and other services. Why? because they associate Facebook as a service used by their parents, so it is uncool for some of them. Besides, who wants their mom and dad to be monitoring them on FB? Social media services tend to lean towards specific age groups, interests and even nationalities.
One thing that transcends these categories is mobile. Everyone seems to want to access their social networks on smartphones and tablets. Facebook bought Instagram for $ 1Billion, just to hedge its bets in the ever-changing mobile landscape.
What’s next for Facebook? They’ve launched a new app for the iPhone called Paper (which is available in the US only). Facebook Paper reformats Facebook for Mobile and in a look and feel that’s in tune with 2014, Apple’s iOS 7 look and feel and the design language people have come to expect. It is a great start, but is it enough to keep Facebook feeling current and retaining user interest in the years to come?
