Oh, sorry, I meant Facebook.

http://www.businessinsider.com/teens-using-messaging-apps-in-threat-to-facebook-2013-4

My anecdotal observations within the extended family confirm this.  Mom and grandmom, however, are eyeball-deep in FB every day.

In Japan the FB crowd tends to be college age and up. It's a growing segment, especially with the oldies.
My personal observations of the teen/tween crowd showed almost no FB usage. They're all on LINE and Twitter.

I've not used Kik by I am a Whatsapp user. 

Whilst on the face of it, its an alternative to SMS, I can see that its a bit more than that.

You have something similar to Google Circles - but with all parties actively engaged - rather than selected and passively fed into your stream.

Sorry, Adam. Maybe get ready to bend over and get the big G brand...

http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/google-acquiring-whatsapp/

The good thing about FB is that all the cute cat pics, jokes and memes that used to come to my email inbox now come via fB where they are quicker to flick past.

I still like Twitter better even if I'm mostly posting to robots, spammers and hookers.   

Wait!! The intertubes have hookers?

I am shocked.

Yeah next there will be free prawn.

Great article. Be very interesting to see if Google do buy WhatsApp. Still can't believe Facebook are so average/poor on mobile. Asking for trouble.

As the article says, it seems a no brainer for Google.  Would imagine it would be fairly easy to plug this into G+.

I'm seeing this story spun & respun in the press now.  There are different "catastrophes" being hyped but the universal comment is that teens don't want to hang out with grandma.  Put another way, teens are reacting to personal privacy issues. ...maybe recording every keystroke spawned by your not-fully-developed-frontal-lobes wasn't such a hot idea.

I'm not familiar with Whatsapp (which has denied being acquired by G, btw) but unless it just generates near-anonymous pageviews without recording them to some sort of archive then I don't see how the privacy issue is going away for any social network.

more numbers. looks like peak oil facebook.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/facebook-losing-millions-users-us-110108858.html

Teens using, but not liking FB:
http://mobile.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/05/22/teenagers_hate_facebook_a_pew_study_says_that_94_percent_of_teens_use_facebook.html

QuoteFacebook remains the leading social network among American teenagers. It's also the most reviled. While some teenagers interviewed by Pew claimed they "enjoyed using it," the majority complained of "an increasing adult presence, high-pressure or otherwise negative social interactions ('drama'), or feeling overwhelmed by others who share too much."