Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has finally admitted that Facebook is no longer cool, and never will be again.
In a long, free-flowing discussion at The Atlantic in Washington, D.C., he was asked if he ever worried that Facebook might suddenly become uncool with teens, and collapse, like MySpace. (Zuckerberg has spoken about this previously on his earnings calls.)
He replied:
People assume that we’re trying to be cool. It’s never been my goal. I’m the least cool person there is! We’re almost 10 years old so we’re definitely not a niche thing any more so that kind of angle for coolness is done for us.
He then suggested that coolness was irrelevant to Facebook, because the platform is becoming ubiquitous like a utility (we noted this thread in the development of Facebook back in July):
Maybe electricity was cool when it first came out but pretty quickly people stopped talking about it because it’s not the new thing, the real question you want to track at that point is are fewer people turning on their lights because it’s less cool?
