Venture Geek

I have been spending a bit more time on Facebook lately, mostly out of curiosity — every time I go there I feel old. I seem to be on the cusp of the Facebook generational divide, and that seems to be mostly because I happened to have been back in school over the last couple years. If I had been out of school I may not even be in the gray area.

The Facebook generational divide can be summed up easily: If you are in college or graduated college in the last two years you are very likely to have a Facebook account. If you graduated college more than two years ago you are, on average, not that likely to have a Facebook account. Now, this is based on purely anecdotal evidence, and it seems to be changing a bit as Facebook gets so much attention in the “mass” media.

In my world, LinkedIn is much more popular — on Facebook I currently have 9 “friends”, but on LinkedIn I have over 200 contacts. And that’s not because I haven’t bothered to connect with those same 191 people on Facebook — most of them simply aren’t there. But, for the people I know under 25 or who are still in school, Facebook is an integral part of their daily lives. When I look up my college or my high school or other interest groups I might associate with, the vast majority are people basically of college age. Even in my MBA class, only a handful of my class of 2006 classmates seem to be on Facebook, but nearly all of them are on LinkedIn. But, when I look up the MBA classes still in school today, the numbers go way up — that single year makes a huge difference in Facebook adoption, and that’s why I feel I’m on the cusp of the generational divide.

The fact that all of those people are unlikely to just jettison their Facebook accounts after they graduate is a big part of why the valuation of Facebook is often quoted as a ten figure number. To me, the question is whether Facebook can maintain its dominance as THE place to be for the college and high school crowd, or whether it will suffer from the all-to-common issue of the next generation wanting something fresh and new.

The concept of population pyramids is how I think about this. I first learned about population pyramids in a geography class in college (yeah, they actually taught a geography class in college). Here is what a population pyramid looks like:

In brief, a population pyramid shows the distribution of age groups inside a broader population, where the two sides represent males and females. The question is can the Facebook graph stay triangular (or least rectangular), growing the total population over time, or will it look more like a diamond, as the next generation falls off in their adoption in favor of the next new thing?

I say, let a billion diamonds bloom.

There is a broader question here of whether the low barriers to entry that made Facebook possible in the first place will continue on the Internet, or whether increasing expectations of the kinds of experiences we expect combined with any number of market-based or regulatory hurdles make it tough for the next group of kids with an idea and a computer to create something millions of people use. The whole Net neutrality debate plays into that question in a big way, but that’s another post for another time.