Have you seen the recent reports suggesting that the venerable social website Facebook (Yup! Venerable! What is it, maybe 10 years old now?) is no longer of much interest to younger people, but is growing only amongst older users?
I don't find this surprising. After all, the "young'uns" have always trended toward the fresh, the new, the thing of the moment. More to the point, maybe, they also gravitate to things -- be it hair styles, music, or modes of communication -- that adults, especially their parents, don't share. No doubt that's been Facebook's downfall among teens -- too many parents are right there online with them, maybe not always getting the joke, but watching what the kids are doing and saying.
For some reason, parents have not hesitated to do this, not stopping to consider how they might have reacted in their own callow youth if their parents had read their diaries, or listened in on their phone calls. That too is understandable, though. The reach of the internet is greater, and in our eccentric contemporary society, there are reasons to be concerned.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, himself once a "young person," pretty much put his brainchild on a downslope by trying to make the site ever more inclusive, with ever-increasing numbers of users. That's what I would call the commoditization decision -- most new products and technologies end up sanding off the sharp edges of whatever first made them unique and noticeable.
The reason, whether you're pushing site memberships or Triscuits (which now, in accord with the law of the market, now come in a variety of flavored versions), is that you can't make the big bucks if you don't make your product's appeal as nearly universal as possible. That, of course, means lowest common denominator. And it means that it's hard to keep a product's name fresh and appealing.
Youth's search continues.