I case of such companies like Facebook there is no point to say that they are dead. In fact there are 2 Facebooks: Facebook as a company and FACEBOOK as a presence in modern culture. The second is much more important, then the first one. For many people FACEBOOK is the way they act on the web and communicate with others. Even if Facebook is not growing any more (or even shrinking) it still the only medium that has a digital picture of relations between 1 billion people and that makes is something more then just a company. Of course if I were 16 now, I would not be on Facebook, because in this age you have a lot of things that you wish to keep in secret. But still Facebook is one of first app we install on a new mobile device.
I do not see any comparison between Fb and Microsoft or Fb and Apple. Facebook do not produce any goods etc. It just mapping relations and other features of people into digital data.
>Of course if I were 16 now, I would not be on Facebook, because in this age you have a lot of things that you wish to keep in secret.
Someone on here the other day made a comment about the whole teenager thing and it was a pretty good one. It was to the affect of: teenagers don't need to be on Facebook yet because they still see all their friends and social circles, that becomes more difficult to manage you as move away for college. So perhaps that's when they may turn to Facebook when they need a more centralized way to do chat, pictures, statuses, etc.
I have a 16 year old sister. She was on Facebook and then deleted her profile. She deleted her profile at about the same time she went from being semi-awkward early teenager still shaking off her Russian accent (we adopted her) and became one of (what I am guessing based on her friends and the things she does) the coolest kids in her school.
She is probably doing lots of things that I don't want to know about. That's cool and Facebook gets in the way of doing that.
Or maybe in fact something completely opposite is the case: relations between teenagers’ social circles are so difficult to map (there is so plenty of inclusions, exclusion, intersections and other Boolean staff) that Facebook is not able to manage it ;-)
