Once anyone has started a social life on Facebook, it’s very difficult to quit again. „Quitting Facebook is like throwing away your own diary”, internet expert Danny Mekic’ says. „You build up something personal that you won’t want to lose any more.”

For that reason, many hundreds of millions of users can’t go a day without this social network, whose tenth anniversary is today. „In the past, you’d send invitations to a birthday party by mail. Nowadays, you indicate which friends you want to be there on Facebook.”

This is just one of countless examples that go to show the unparallelled impact this social network has had on our society during the past decade. Without Facebook, you’re out of the picture. „That’s why quitting is such a gigantic hurdle for many people. You’d lose everything all at once: your photos, all replies and an overview of all the important moments in your life.”

It’s part of Facebook’s grand plan to become and remain the central hub of everyone’s social life. Mekic’: „To Facebook it’s not about the number of members any more. Its ultimate goal is now to get every user to spend as much time as possible on the network. Because the more time they spend there, the more advertisements they’ll see and the more money will be made off them.”

Exactly those advertisements are a thorn in the side of many users. Ask those internet users who were brave enough to turn their backs on Facebook for their reasons, and nine times out of ten, they’ll mention the large amounts of advertisements.

The big question that the ones in charge of Facebook will be asking themselves today is: how will we be doing ten years from now? Will we still exist? Mekić: ,,People have always felt a need to roam and migrate. They want to discover new places. It’s no different on the internet.”

It’s not just direct competitors like Twitter and Google+ that are hot on Facebook’s heels. Hardware manufacturers like Apple pose a major threat as well. They change the market by making users spend their time not on internet sites but on mobile apps that rely on internet traffic.

Mekic’ expects that Facebook in its current form will probably no longer exist ten years from now. ,,There’s always the danger that your users grow tired of you.”