It has been 20 years since Mark Zuckerberg first released facebook.com (February 4, 2004) on the Internet from his room at Harvard University (Room H33 in Kirkland House). The first social network, at first only accepting visitors from Harvard, then it took over university campuses and eventually the whole world.
The social network has since changed. Today, the majority of American adults still use the service, but three out of four believe Facebook is "making society worse." But Facebook still generates billions of dollars in ad revenue for Meta. But the influx of new users has slowed to the point where the company just announced it will no longer share how many people are using it.
Facebook feeds are flooded with posts from groups you are not a member of. I personally haven't shared anything on my own page in quite some time, even though I log in daily. I'm not the only one. The majority of adults report that they are now more "selective" than they used to be about what they post on social media.
On the other hand, teenagers are hardly interested in the social network of their parents and grandparents. Just 33 percent of US teens report using the service “always” compared to 71 percent in 2015. At this rate, Facebook's user base is aging very quickly. which has led some academics to conclude that the social network will one day have more profiles for the dead than the living.
Today, Facebook has more than 3 billion users and remains the driving force behind Mark Zuckerberg's universe, even if it is no longer the leading social network. It's just one of Meta's apps. In 2021, it was officially demoted when Zuckerberg created Meta. "Our brand is so closely tied to one product that it can't represent everything we do today, let alone in the future," Zuckerberg said of Facebook. "From now on, we will be first in the metaverse, not Facebook."
If Meta became a company, very few would argue that it is anything close to Facebook. Zuckerberg recently tried to introduce Meta like a metaverse company and AI company, which is participating in the race to create human-level superintelligence.
At the same time, the only reason Zuckerberg's ambitions are still possible is Facebook's success. Meta has lost tens of billions of dollars on its investments in the metaverse and expects to lose even more in the near future. The company also plans to spend billions more on AI infrastructure (AGI – artificial general intelligence it's not cheap).
These investments will determine whether Zuckerberg's bet on the future of social media is correct.
And if he realizes his vision of an AI chatbot, with metaverse capabilities in the future, it will be made possible in large part by the unparalleled financial success of the oldest and most boring part of his empire.
