Will Our Grandchildren Be Asking What The Heck Facebook Was Someday?

Alexia Tsotsis

Alexia Tsotsis is the co-editor of TechCrunch. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the media industry. After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles in... → Learn More

Sunday, July 3rd, 2011

Despite Facebook’s relative lag in its embracing of the music industry, music videos and Facebook seem to be like a thing. The latest and most mainstream of examples is the treacly sweet “Unfriend You” by Greyson Chance, a Bieber-a-like who was fittingly discovered on YouTube.

The most jarring thing about the song? Chance’s normalized and emotional use of the coined term “Unfriend” as a verb.

Seriously through, teenage angst is different now; When I was thirteen I would stay at home, glued by my pink and purple plastic phone (I had coveted second line IN MY ROOM) waiting for a boy to call. In the age of the iPhone, kids can just update their whereabouts on Twitter or Facebook, keeping track of relationships through who’s been Followed and Unfollowed, Friended and yes Unfriended. And don’t even get me started on the can of worms that is Facebook Relationship Status.

But, just as the iPhone has replaced second landlines (which were a big deal way back when), will something eventually replace Mr.Zuckerberg’s opus as the go to conduit for teen feelings? Popdust puts it best, “JT is already bringing MySpace back, so—gasp—will our eventual grandchildren be asking us what the heck something called Facebook was one day? That is not a world we want to think about.”

And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder …

Company: Facebook
Website: facebook.com
Launch Date: February 1, 2004
IPO: NASDAQ:FB

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...

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