Facebook 'dead and buried' as teens switch to Snapchat and Whatsapp

These articles seem to keep popping up all the time. They continually ignore the fact that the apps are really for two separate usages. Whatsapp and Snapchat are for people in your day to day lives that you are generally in contact with, similar to SMS. Facebook really shines as a platform to communicate with people who you have lost touch with or are no longer in your daily life. People in the 18 and under age range are generally in constant contact with the majority of people they know, which changes once they go off to college or get jobs in the work force.

Significant discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6965748

Of course, if you comment there your thoughts will be buried in the large thread. You might want to comment on this one instead: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6974137

Or, of course, you can always comment here.

Why is this story here, again? Here you go...

A generation ago a rash of 'Media Studies' degrees started to infect British universities. People joked about how students would be sitting around watching TV all day.

Moving on we now have:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/social-networking

See where this is going? You can now do what is effectively a degree in 'Social Media Studies', or at least be a researcher paid for by funding from the ERC funding body somewhere in nebulous Europe.

I suspect that this 'academic' work is for the purposes of getting more money. Publish a paper, get it cited by every news outlet in the planet, show the likes of the ERC how often it was cited, get more money for more 'research'.

They are the only source for this one new story, even though it appears otherwise, like a consensus of opinion is out there claiming Facebook is doomed (which it is). We then go off scurrying around with our own anecdotes, arguments and counter arguments, UCL then profit from the 'controversy' to get more money.

Not again, please stop it. Even teens will keep a facebook profile to keep in touch with ex-classmates once they move to college/work, their usage patterns of social networks are not black and white.

This all spun from that "research" in UK article.

Let me ask you a different question - why do you want Facebook to fail? You obviously upvote these articles, which rarely have significant datasets (certainly far lesser than fb themselves) and draw some wild conclusions about future of Facebook.

Try to use before 5 Whys[1] technique before you answer, please.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys

I really wonder if those teens realize once dispatched data cannot never be forgotten.

was it disinterred and reincarnated in the last few days, or is this a repost?