Facebook's growing pains are at least in part down to its parents

The above image has been doing the rounds of Facebook and bobbed into my newsfeed just in time for the site’s tenth birthday.

One decade and 1.2 billion active users later, the slightly seedy ‘who would you rather’ concept of thefacebook – comparing photos of female university students – has evolved into the digital juggernaut that is today’s byword for social media.

But Facebook is far from a faultless success story, with allegations of handing over users’ details to third party agencies (including the NSA), a failed bid to purchase zeitgeist social network Snapchat and dissatisfaction amongst users for exactly those reasons outlined in the graphic above.

I’m no Zuckerberg apologist but I find the aesthetic amends that have been made to the site relatively palatable. Facebook is a digital platform. It is part of the technological sphere and as a result will doubtless undergo a raft of iterations during its life; that is the nature of the beast.

What I intensely dislike, however, is Facebook’s ‘mother knows best’ attitude to what we should or should not be seeing. This video from Veritasium outlines the core issue - Facebook would like us to sponsor posts.
Obviously!

Perhaps of greatest concern to the site are the numbers of teenagers who are reportedly cashing in their social media chips and taking their business elsewhere, with one report going so far as to suggest that Facebook may have jettisoned three million US teenagers in the last three years alone.

For the majority, however, the threat to leave Facebook rings hollow. How many of us who are in our late twenties and early thirties – the genuine early adopters of the platform – would actually close our profiles?

I know of only a handful of people my own age who aren’t active on Facebook: one who is hiding out from the Russians – no, seriously, he is – and another who just doesn’t ‘get it’.

The truth is that we’re now hardwired into the Facebook experience.  People’s whole lives will soon be charted via their Facebook page, a portent of which has already come in the form of the little baby found at the very bottom of your timeline, marked ‘born’.  Creepy, no?

Where else would we go? No other social media platform offers the same level of flexibility that you can get from Facebook.  Twitter? Too short. Google+? Just for geeks. MySpace? No. Just…no.

While it has all the makings of a true vox populi, we have to remember that we don’t own Facebook. 

It isn’t ‘ours’ although it’s where we handle most of our social activities and store our photos. It belongs, in fact, to a group of shareholders and I’d wager dollars to doughnuts (or quids to croissants) that what they’re really interested in is ensuring that the ubiquitous adverts are continuing to rake in the funds.

And with the site’s revenues hitting £7.9 billion in 2013 (up 55%) and annual profits totalling £1.5 billion – that’s just over one dollar per user – I honestly don’t think that they give a shit whether we're seeing what our friends post or not.