Why Are We Still on Facebook? : The New Yorker

Why Are We Still on Facebook? : The New Yorker: Today, Facebook celebrates its ten-year anniversary. To be honest, I didn’t think it would still exist. Apart from photographs and school affiliations—and the blue-and-white color scheme—few aspects of thefacebook.com have survived. My first wall post, from one of my closest friends, came on September 11, 2004—just over half a year after I’d joined—and was a joke about the nature of the wall. None of us were quite sure how to use this mysterious new white space in the middle of our profiles. Facebook hasn’t entirely abandoned the wall, but the concept has mostly been replaced by the news feed. The site long ago shed its Harvard-only roots. The feature that used to allow people to organize themselves into “groups,” which once seemed exciting and fear-inducing (Oh, please, ask me to join your group! Come on, you already asked my roommate!), was replaced with a newer, more news-feed-friendly version. I’m no longer a proud member of the Coalition for High-Heeled Women on Cobblestone, I’m sad to report. And although the poking feature still exists, it has been buried behind the site’s more useful tools. Despite all the changes, however, one thing has remained the same: the reason people join in the first place.