@ MrJones2015:

Yeah, but you don’t want to get to close to them when they sing because you can mess up their performance. :P

@ Liudvikas:

Well, IRC is still around but it caters to niche crowd. The Youtube thing is mostly about privacy I think. Folks who’ve been on Youtube for years but don’t use G+ are annoyed they have to link up their accounts and reveal their full name. Trolls are upset that they have to set up a separate trolling accounts and etc…

@ Philipp:

Yeah, I think you have a point here. When I first got on FB it had a clear purpose – it was to connect with people at your university. You could type in a course code and get in touch with class mates who were also using the service. Then it became this all-purpose thing.

@ Travis McCrea:

Which one? The New Yorker and Guardian articles seemed legit. The digital trends link might be iffy, but I didn’t want to link directly to the pic upload site because average age of snapchat user + leaked risque nsfw pictures = trouble.

Your link was to a satirical article… just FYI <3

I thought about deleting my Facebook profile recently. I have never been a great fan of it and never used it heavily. I think it is because I am a Unix kind of guy: If I have one problem, I want to have one good well thought out (is there a better word for durchdacht in English?^^) tool that solves this problem in a elegant and efficient manner and not a big blue-white pot of glue that does a bit of everything but the most things not right and nothing efficient.
Twitter (I want to share my thoughts/Links with people I like) and Reddit (I want read about and discuss the things that people with that share a specific interest of mine and learning English grammar the hard way ;-) are really good examples how this Unix philosophy translates to the web.
Now, that everybody uses the web and everybody with a good idea can bring his app to the mobile stores of this world and a good chance to reach a critical userbase I think (read: hope) that there might be more of this small tools and less market share at the great social networks.
There might even be another point: To use a tool specificly designed to solve your problem you need to be educated enough to analyse what exactly your problem is (and why you should care).
If you are a forty or fifty something person and never cared much about technology (your daughter set you up your email and a PC once and you check your mail nearly every month) until recently (by that I mean that recently for old folks, not 2012), but now you really want to start this internet thingy.
Where will you go? Facebook! Why? Everybody is already there. What do they do there? You don’t know but since they ARE there, there must be something, right?
This is where Facebook is really strong from what I can see (I have no hard data to back my claims up) and this is why it is doomed. Because not only are the teenagers leaving because Facebook is not cool in their mind (damn right they are) but because older folks will start to learn about technology and dump Facebook for some other tool.
Btw. does anybody want to create a startup for a social service with a strong focus on old people with me?^^

I feel nostalgic about IRC, I hope that comes back, but probably I’m just too old at the ripe age of 25.

As for regular social networks, I like google plus (I don’t get all the hate about that youtube thing), but I’m too friendless to bother spouting stuff where only NSA can hear me.

“They view Zuckerberg’s service as a waning empire on a downswing – it’s the titanic minutes after it hugged the iceberg. You don’t chain yourself to a singing ship.”

Why not? i like singing ships ;)

Btw great post, love the first picture