A business founded on the values of a generation, such as Facebook, has to keep up with, and respect, evolving lives and needs.
The classic example of a company intelligently growing up with a generation is McDonald's and baby boomers.
First, cheap food at drive-ins where teenagers can hang out, check out cars, and find dates. Then happy meals for their kids, who can stay in their car seats in the drive-thru. Now, healthier choices and high end coffee.
Intelligently growing up with a generation, or just trying to stay ahead of plain 'ol American competition?
McDonalds got it's kickstart because it was cheaper and faster (self-service) than drive-ins. Happy Meals kept parents from choosing other burger chains. Salads and low-carb choices came in response to dieting trends. Coffee was upgraded to avoid losing breakfast business to Starbucks.
But I'd wager none of these innovations would have come as quickly if there wasn't a business threat to the company.
You make it sound as if it was bad of them to do so. Any financial organization responds to only one stimulus very quickly, that is financial. If they are responding to such stimuli and moulding their services accordingly where is the harm? The customers are at a net gain anyway.
The author of the original post was saying that Facebook was failing to do exactly that.
Using the McDonald's example, it could be akin to McDonald's making all of their burgers out of ground turkey because they got a huge deal with a turkey meat distributor, the customers saying "no, give us hamburger!" and McDonald's saying "fuck you."
What happens to those customers wanting hamburgers? They go to Burger King.
I appreciate your point, but you are confusing users with customers. For Facebook users are a product, advertisers are customers. Same is true for Google.
The problem is: suppose they weren't making a profit on the hamburger and so serving the turkey was the only way they knew how to make profits. But also suppose that it would be quite hard for customers to switch to Burger King.
Then you have characterized something of the paradoxical condition of the Facebook. Making money while accumulating ill-will.
Well, to make the analogy a little more accurate, suppose they weren't making as much profit on the hamburger as they are by serving the turkey...
Facebook and Twitter both have the problem that they have to justify the amount of investment they raised, and both are doing things that are unpopular with their community (users for Facebook, developers for Twitter) to make a bigger business than the original things that got them popular can sustain.
Thirty-five or forty years ago, McDonalds got caught out serving kangaroo in their hamburgers. Much more recently it was found flavoring the french-fry oil with a bit of tallow, to the great offense of vegetarians and I think a few Hindus.
However, it has always been much smoother at the apology business than Facebook now seems to be.
The kangaroo thing is an urban legend. Think about it, why would shipping kangaroo all the way from Australia be cheaper than locally sourcing beef? Hell, kangaroo in Australia costs more than Australian beef.
And, kangaroo is actually a very lean meat, much better for you than beef. Plus kangaroos are much better for the environment, the don't fart methane, like cows do.
The introduction of healthy choices on the menu back this up. People don't want to eat food that's bad for them. McDonald's can either respond to this or wither away.
But Facebook is really only 6 years old right? That's not really enough time for a generation to grow. I think what we're seeing is that Facebook's user-growth is being driven by older and older people.
I'd argue that the HRB article is right in that people who signed up with Facebook in college six years have since moved on to a professional career, got married, and/or had kids. These are pretty big changes in peoples' life and what they demand changes respectively. People that were sharing keg stand pictures 6 years ago today want to share pictures of their baby running around.
Six years is a lot longer for a 20something than the same six years for a 50something. Both in overall life percentage and in major life changes during that timeframe.
I think it is, in the specific case of the generation Facebook initially targeted: college students in 2004. It's enough time for most of them to get their first job or two, and for some large fraction of them to start building a life with different requirements than college life.
Many of them will have gotten married (median age of first marriage in 2007: 27), and some will have had kids. There's a dramatic shift there: most "family" people I know tend to expect more privacy and control over their lives, and be less focused on expanding their social life and sharing details with their friends. But this is anecdotal, I know: I'd love to see a study on how social networking use patterns change during this age shift.
Dealing solely with information, Facebook has a "slightly" larger problem than McDonalds ever did.
It's not just that the Facebook needs to offer different fare but that the fare older adults want conflicts with the fare Facebook would like to offer in order to become profitable.
The classic example of a company intelligently growing up with a generation is McDonald's and baby boomers.
First, cheap food at drive-ins where teenagers can hang out, check out cars, and find dates. Then happy meals for their kids, who can stay in their car seats in the drive-thru. Now, healthier choices and high end coffee.