a brief history to social networking and why facebook changed

I wrote the following for a thread in a group on facebook of people whining about the new facebook layout and thought i'd stick it up here:

The creation of social networking massively alters the way the internet works and is structured. All of a sudden thousands of people start using the internt in a way that radically alters it's use and within a year or so Millions have caught on. It started with profile based social networking popular with the younger generations who spend alot of time at home farming through profiles and commenting on people. This then evolves due to myspace's use of html programming meaning people can customise their profile. Before not to long you can the myspace subculture emerging who are all expected to have certain photo angles and certain things in their profile. The complexity of profiles become absurd and thus facebook is born

Facebook took the profiling idea then got rid of all the bullshit, giving a simple uniform profile that is easy to navigate. This leads to a massive rise in older users who due to media attention want to join the social networking trends however don't want to join all the children on myspace. However due to this massive rise other people cotton on to the fact that millions of adults are now using facebook and so the use of application becomes absurd, taking social networking back to the stupid days of myspace with 1,000,000 boxes on your profile (and i think i can comfortably say we all hated that ) all of which are trying to gain money out of the new chic craze of social networking.

This presents a massive problem for facebook as it means there is a rise of younger users on the site who think they are more grown up if they use facebook and but can still ahve all the stupid little boxes on their profile. Which may lead to a decrease in adult users.

Layout change no. 1 is born and it pisses everyone off because no one likes change. It rnders alot of applications useless but means everyones profiles are uniform again. meaning both the older generation and the younger generation are appeased. the older folk like simplicity the children like their fun little boxes.

This secured facebook again looks at social networking and sees a trend which follows the modern contempary lifestyle. The lifestyle of the buissness man or woman who lives a life on the go. Mobility in technology is becoming more and more essential. the iphone the blackberry the NC10 netbook the macbook air. Everyone wants to tap into this mobile way of life. and socil sites which follow a microblogging form become more popular i.e twitter, anyone can logon update and see instantly what everyone else is doing in seconds and it's fantastic. They can update their life in teh cloud whilst queing for a starbucks in between meetings. Facebook though will suffer if this trend is to continue.

Hence this recent change. The new homepage means anyone can tap into the 'instant' networking craze where ever they are. whilst when at a more static location such as a desktop can also profile browse. The result: instant networking on the surface- more taditional profile networking as a foundation

which is a logical move. Facebook is just following the trends of society. Just most people don't seem to get that.

Thank you for reading that if you bothered too, i appreciate it

tl;dr: they're following the trends of social networking