You're thinking kids jumped on Facebook because it was hip. It's not - it's cool. There's a subtle difference.

When MySpace got huge, it was because of the social tail. Big bands joined, lots of kids joined to talk to those bands, those kids' friends joined, till every high schooler was a member. Facebook didn't get to succeed in a void. MySpace pracitcally did, because Friendster was fairly minute when MySpace got big and Friendster was a sterile, inept social network. Facebook entered a stuffed market and beat the company with the monopoly, because they, not MySpace, understood how to make a social network, and they understood what people wanted out of such a web site. Now that they've got it, they're not going to lose, period, unless something happens to disrupt how people live lives. Their monopoly is as real and impregnable as Google's.

I was there at the center of the transition, and I can say firsthand that the approach of high school students to MySpace versus their approach to Facebook was entirely different. They joined MySpace for boredom and to show themselves off. See Ze Frank's episode where he mentions MySpace and freedom of expression: It's something like that. Kids would use MySpace to show off their crappy, unreadable pages, because MySpace wasn't ever about the information on those pages, it was about expressing yourself, regardless of if anybody else really cared, and they didn't.

When people used Facebook, they still used it partly to alleviate boredom, but much more importantly, they started communicating. Facebook's central model is the newsfeed. They had it long before any other site. After Facebook added it, then came MySpace, Twitter, Tumblr, and even the smaller things: Flickr's contact tracker and similar ways to follow friend activity. Facebook was the company that realized a social site had to be not just about giving people a way to connect, but about pushing the connections. When I update my status on Facebook, all my friends see it. When I upload a photo and tag a friend, all my friends and my friend's friends see it. In essence it's a bunch of connected pulpits. If a friend of mine takes my picture, I don't need to point it out to all my friends, because it's pointed out automatically. If I post on a friend's wall, other people can join in instantly.

Because Facebook's based on privacy, there's no risk if you're half smart about it. I can do anything you want to and you'll never see it. Hell, I can insult my family members while they're friends with me if I've put them on Limited View and they'll never see me complaining about them.

The thing is, social is not "cool". It's a way of living. For people who use Facebook at all, the site has become a central part of communication, same thing as talking on a phone or texting or emailing. Are cell phones not hip any more? They were around when I was a little boy, and they're still around today. Facebook is a success on that magnitude. It created and defined the methods of communication that we now take for granted, and it's still ahead of the game. Did you know that before Facebook, there was no such thing as "wall-to-wall" view? You'd have to follow a conversation by reading two profiles at once. There were also no social tagging systems in place. Facebook came up with that. And poking got made fun of then and gets made fun of now, but I got hook-ups because of poking and I suspect high school kids are still taking advantage of that.

Facebook is a global site. It doesn't try to be edgy; its only innovations are the enormous ones. It's simple. People miss how simple it is because it does so fucking much. But my 50-year-old mother knows how to upload photos and write notes and post on walls. So does my 75-year-old grandfather. My 14-year-old brother just joined, not because he thought it was cool but because his friends were all talking on it. I have no family member over the age of 10 who doesn't have a Facebook account. Furthermore, I've got friends who all experiment with cutting-edge applications and sites; I experiment myself; there is nothing coming up that's taking on Facebook. The closest is Loopt, and the only people I know that use Loopt use it as a Facebook app. More than half the people I know that use Twitter use it to update their Facebook status. Twitter's not a direct competitor to Facebook, mind you, but a lot of the people who comment here don't remember that. To them, a huge millions-person application must compete with a similar site that offers similar functionality. It doesn't. Twitter is public; Facebook is not.

Facebook's privacy was its killer feature when it started; it still is. Even with its push for public profiles now, it understands that people use Facebook to be part of an isolated community that they care about. The people who go public aren't changing that at all. In a sense Facebook's eating its cake and having it, because it has sacrificed no functionality to appeal to the attention whores, but it's given them what they want, probably because casual users are benefitting. I no longer use Flickr or Vimeo: I link people to my Facebook photos and videos. It's great because I can link you to my photo albums if I want to, but you can't see my face outside the photos I make public; you can read my comments on them, but you can't read comments made by friends. There are no leaks in the system. I can be public and my friends can be hidden and we still use the same site.

Because of the app plugin system, nobody has a thing to gain by avoiding Facebook's walled garden. Digg has a Connect With Facebook button prominent on its site. It loses nothing it had before, and it gains Facebook users; if I'm a Facebook user, I can use Digg without having to get a second account; I suddenly use Facebook even more than I did before. I use Delicious and Last.fm and they both tie in with Facebook. My friends that use Delicious and Last.fm both use it through Facebook. It's brought us closer together online. I made a new friend out of a casual acquaintance because he saw me listening to a song on Last.fm by a musician that he liked that I didn't know he liked.

The point I'm trying to make here is that these things are part of living for me and my friends. It's not something we use because we think it's rad and unique. We use it because it provides us with a convenience. It's no longer addictive, even: With their last redesign, Facebook removed almost all the things that were irritatingly engaging. I don't get app requests or see people I don't want to see. I can block it all off. I can also, however, talk to any one of my friends without knowing their IM address, I can invite them to anything going on (an acquaintance of mine invited me to a hypnotist show he's putting on out of the blue, and thanks to Facebook we're suddenly talking a lot about things because we've found something to talk about), and I can do nearly anything I want to. People use Facebook notes to blog now, they store links on it, they keep their family photos there. We never once think of it as "using Facebook" just as we never consciously notice we use Google instead of Yahoo or Bing. So when those 8-year-olds grow up, they'll join Facebook despite their parents using it, because using Facebook doesn't mean ever once seeing your parents. It means seeing your friends, and being involved in their lives.

tl;dr

I disagree with what you said.