| Gretchen, stop trying to make Google+ happen! It’s not going to happen!

In case you hadn’t heard, people hate the new facebook. If this is news to you, then you don’t have facebook, and therefore don’t exist in real life. Even though your nonexistence is shameful and pathetic, I envy you for not having to read what is essentially the same facebook status posted 200 times in 1 week by 50 different people. They’ve declared the death of the facebooks. All the facebooks.

But before we write off facebook as quickly as we did Lindsay Lohan, think back to a time when facebook didn’t have a feed or status updates. If you don’t remember, then you either didn’t go to college or didn’t go to college in the past decade. Ah, yes, circa 2004: the first Grand Theft Auto with a black male lead, a new Green Day album that you could listen to without being a stoner, the first year in the war for oil, Mean Girls (*omg gay squeal*), and MySpace. ‘Twas a grand olde time. MySpace was huge. In 2005 NewsCorp (Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, Ganonodorf etc.) even paid about $580 million dollars for it because they KNEW this was going to be the future of the internet. They later dumped it for about $35 million.

MySpace was great and everyone loved it. Except that it wasn’t and everyone hated it. Nobody wanted to admit MySpace was a totally creepy concept and was super annoying. Really, if I wanted to search for new friends within 5 miles of my home, I would go outside and talk to them (or if you’re gay and have social anxiety problems you use Grindr). MySpace was like the neighborhood watchdog site where you can put in your address and see all the pedophiles who live in your neighborhood (neat-o!), except with MySpace you could send them messages and (if you’re lucky) get molested/left for dead in a dark alley. Ugh. I miss the Bush era.

But even pedophiles had a reason to hate the ‘Space. Really, how are they supposed to get off to some 12 year old girl’s bikini pics when their computer is about to crash trying to simultaneously load 167 images of Hello Kitty with Bye Bye Bye streaming in the background?! The internet was different back then, kids. Most people didn’t have ultra-efficient macs that run forever and are awesome in bed. We didn’t have the option to purchase different internet speeds based on our income. It was like, you got cable internet, and when more people in your neighborhood got cable internet yours got slower. This is why you told everyone how much cable internet sucks and not to get it because the DSL thing was SO the future. That was how you got all the bandwidth to yourself (my preeecious). Times were tough.

So then Mark Wahlberg invents facebook, right? They were all, like, exclusive and shit. It was only for college students (so if you got a message from some pervert, it was a friend of a friend who was age appropriate, at the very least) with a valid college e-mail address. Better yet? It was only for select colleges (Penn State!) so you weren’t going to have to look at your friends that enrolled in The University of Phoenix every day and get sad. No, this was for the upper echelon of the 18-24 crowd. Your profile wasn’t just some amalgamation of cats, pokemon and Insane Clown Posse. It was an organized, yet personalized, reflection of you. …and all the pictures of drunk you. Because we all know that’s the most accurate portrayal of your college existence. But who cares? Nobody knows it’s you, and even if they did, only your college-age friends can get facebook. This is awesome!!! Vive La Facebook forever!!! Right? RIGHT??? Ugh. You know what happened next.

Facebook got really big really fast. It’s like when Lady GaGa launched her first album and you thought she was totally balls-to-the-walls crazy cool, and you were like “I’m going to a Lady GaGa concert.” People were all like “Lady GaGa? Is she British? I don’t get it.” Then two years later she’s everywhere you turn, putting out mediocre music that’s just enough to get by and stay near the top, and every poser you know is in love with her. Sooo over that bitch. But, anyway, that’s what happened to facebook. First they slowly opened facebook up to more colleges, then all real colleges, then community colleges, then high schools (wtf), and at some point they were just like “fuck it, just let them all in.” So they did.

If that weren’t enough, it got to the point where the major facebook updates seemed like a daily thing: Guess what, facebook user? People can tag you in pictures now so everyone knows that was you throwing up in the litter box! You know what else, facebook user? You have a “like” button now, so you can officially tell the world “I approve of this.” OMG and you know what else?! Now facebook tells EVERYONE whose wall you wrote on, what you liked, who just accepted your friend request, what you posted to your wall, and the last time you took a shit! Isn’t that super cool?!?! Also, your parents are on facebook and they want to be your friend. You can’t reject them because it’ll look super shady. Also, your grandmother. Better untag yourself from that girl-on-girl pic. …no, the other one.

Fast-forward a couple years to the present. facebook sporadically makes minor tweaks here and there. About once a year, they update their privacy policy to let you know what percentage of your life they own, and some douchebag lawyer/World Of Warcraft Mage goes on CNN bitching about it and pretending like he read it. At some point they split the news feed into two separate views: “top stories” (updates facebook thinks are more relevant to you) and “most recent”. Last week, they decided to put both views in the same window *gasp* and place a separate live feed that updates in real-time in the right hand corner. You know, where the ads for gay underwear and pictures of people you don’t know used to be. People find it confusing and/or ugly. Of all the changes to facebook ever, this was the one that did it. People were ranting about it on their facebook updates, twatting about it on twitter, and even yelling about it on cable news. facebook is going down, girlfriend.

But slow down, take your pointer off the “delete account” button, and put the chihuahua down. facebook isn’t the new MySpace. google+ isn’t the new facebook. Why? Because if google+ was going to happen, it would have happened already. google isn’t a social networking pioneer, they just know how to make very profitable business tools. Face it: google isn’t cool and never will be. They’re good at what they do, but google for social networking reeks of nerd. They’re never going to get the attention of Gen Y, which was that catalyst that sparked facebook’s success. Also, facebook isn’t really that bad. Considering I’ve had facebook for the past 7 years, a lot has changed but at the same time nothing has changed. I still don’t get spam or random friend requests from pedophiles like on MySpace, I don’t have to wait for 100 images of Justin Timberlake to load on your page, and it’s still relatively easy to use. Plus, all my friends already have it (since facebook decided to be a whore) and adding them all again on another site sounds incredibly time consuming.

I’m fine with facebook, and if you’re not, then that’s fine. Maybe you can try google+. I hear they opened it up to everyone that wants it. All 4,367 of them.