I was a little surprised – especially given the recent launch of Buzz – that Google didn’t seem to think so. Doing some quick googling, I found a lot of two and three year old pouty blog posts like this and this that seemed to reflect the writer’s ennui or desire to be ahead of the curve more than anything else. Or articles from the Washington Post or New York Times that likewise seem more a reflection of a narrow demographic’s hip intellectual consumer restlessness, always wanting the next big thing before the current one has run it’s course. Personally, I think the fact that the 35-54 crowd on Facebook grew 276% in 2009 is a resoundingly loud answer to the question “is Facebook over?”, at least in terms of being hip. The first person who friended grandma should get a special award as the vanguard of the paradigm shift. But is Facebook “over”? I hardly think so. It managed to pull off something we don’t see too often in the tech world: it became a utility. If your network of friends is anything like mine, Facebook managed to dislodge e-mail, texting, and casual phone calls for informal communication in pretty short order. What I have seen in terms of user exodus though, is a certain type of person (myself included) that exhausted the “classmates.com” aspect of Facebook that helped us re-connect with old friends, and then grew tired of the “fun” sort of communication that Facebook engenders. We’ve found most of our old friends, we figured out which ones are worth reconnecting with, and now we’d like a better platform for staying in touch. As anecdotal evidence I’d offer the several dozen LinkedIn requests I and my friends have received over the last couple of months. I secretly hope that the Facebook crew will recognize this, and figure out how to retain users like us. Because although there are still no animated sparkly unicorns saying “THANKS FOR THE ADD” it IS “gettin’ all MySpacy up in that biach”, as a friend joked recently. Mostly thanks to all the late adopters who only recently figured out why no-one had friended them on MySpace for a year. Facebook isn’t going away any time soon, but I’m looking for a change if it doesn’t evolve in the ways I need. What about you?

You might find these handy if Facebook gets any “MySpacier”