What Comes After Facebook? (10/27)

While reading the Salon article about Facebook's faults, I found myself wondering what the next best thing might be. The fact that Facebook sees itself as more of a news aggregate than a social network is somewhat shocking and something I hadn't heard about until now. In an age of overwhelming advertising, this makes sense. Its obviously easier to make money off of clickbait-y ads than your friend's birthday party pictures. But still, if Facebook is not willing to uphold the standard of being the almighty social network we thought it would be all these years, what is? Twitter is too fragmented and overrun with ads (to the point where its mobile app is almost unusable), Snapchat and Instagram are too single service, and everything else hasn't yet been widely adopted by such a large swath of the world's population. While the transition from MySpace to Facebook felt seamless, MySpace was nowhere near as embedded in everything we see and do on the internet. So many other sites and apps rely on Facebook integration. Facebook is built into the infrastructure of our daily lives as our modern day town square. It's no longer a craze – it's an institution, which means maybe there is no "next Facebook." While Zuckerberg himself says Facebook will never become a "media outlet" in the traditional sense because they will never produce content, maybe the definition of media outlet needs updating. Maybe Facebook isn't strictly a media outlet or a social network, but something new entirely. Imaging a post-Facebook world now seems impossible, but as the author of the Salon article notes, so did imagining a post-Microsoft world in the '90s. Only time will tell.