Comment by adambratt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adambratt | Hacker News Reader

To those complaining about this, you're not the target market.

I was on a train from Chicago to Detroit a week ago and there was a group of about 10 high schoolers sitting behind me. We got talking about iPhone apps and I asked what was popular.

They all agreed Facebook was not as cool anymore and confessed to being addicted to messaging apps that their parents couldn't check up on like they could with texts. Snapchat, Kik, and Whatsapp were among those mentioned.

It's interesting because if you look at these apps in the App Store, the screenshots are definitely targeting that age demographic as well.

Facebook is losing ground fast for this age group. The group that has grown up using Facebook and is now moving on to other mediums. This release looks very promising in helping to win back that interest.

Facebook isn't just losing ground to a specific demographic, they're losing centrality and relevance in a market they defined. While Facebook may be pervasive, it's pervasive in the way that Microsoft Office was in an era of Macs and Google Apps 2 years ago; We all kept a copy of Word installed for when someone emailed us a .doc or .ppt file.

Would love to grab lunch or discuss further where this is all headed from a broader market and societal standpoint, for anyone in the Bay Area.

Wouldn't the better analogy be "pervasive in the way MySpace was X years ago and America Online was, X years before that"? The question is, what's going to replace it? The "instant messaging" market is too fragmented right now (though one could argue the social network space was just as fragmented before FB exploded). SMS has no fundamental single 'owner' to drive change/feature improvements.

You're missing the distinction; Nobody kept their MySpace around or created a new one once is was replaced because it was unnecessary. You could say it's like AOL Instant Messenger, but if anything that's a weaker analogy since nothing really replaced it so much as IM became a commodity.

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