tfife@mavs.coloradomesa.edu

The demise of Facebook: could it finally be approaching? In the view of this columnist, yes, maybe not entirely, but the ranks have already began to thin.

This past year the site made a lot of changes, as I’m sure many of you have noticed. You can now subscribe to people, get updates on what photos and statuses friends like and comment on, and the traditional Facebook page was changed to the new timeline. Facebook also began allowing users to create fan pages and accounts with aliases rather than only profiles of real people.

All of these changes were made to try and be more like social media, mega giant, Twitter. Subscribing is just like following, the #Discover tab shows what the people you are following favorite and who they follow. It also used to be the place for anonymous accounts such as Anxiety Problems or Cure Cancer where you could become “Twitter famous” by gaining thousands of followers.

Does this kind of remind you of something that happened a few years back? When the once social networking giant Myspace started stealing ideas from the fresh competitor that was gaining users fast (Facebook) and look what happened to them. It is now a wannabe music site with nowhere near the users or activity it had just four years ago.

Facebook tried to replicate these different aspects of Twitter only the site didn’t do it as well and, in return, has turned our wall or timeline (or whatever it’s called) into something looking more like an e-mail inbox without a spam filter. But instead of emails it is hundreds of mindless pictures either bearing a caption that begins “like if you…” or “like to win…” Some kid or dreamer wanting to be famous posts the first type of pictures and the latter is just another cheap advertising stunt.

This has brought on the same sort of spiraling descent that fell onto Myspace, only it seems to be more due to its own actions and that of its users rather than people falling off to another site. In between the pictures and ads there are still the genuine status updates from our friends that either make us laugh or keep us up to date, but those are becoming fewer and farther between. Part of what brought a lot of people to Facebook was that it was the classier more elite site that made it easy to keep old connections, where as Myspace was just a place where kids could fool around with cool backgrounds and set funny types of moods. Now that vision is virtually all but gone leaving many of us with disdain towards Facebook.

The cool place to keep up with your peers has turned into a network of nobodies trying to become somebodies infused with old family members, “Facebook drama” and advertisements.

To me this is the end of Facebook, but will another social media outlet such as Twitter take its place? Or have we, as a nation, outgrown our social media phase?

#OnlyTimeWillTell