Millennials used to be best friends with Facebook. We’d tell it what we were doing that day, show it all of the pictures from the party we went to and play games with it for hours. But then Facebook became best friends with our parents and grandparents.

“That’s weird,” we thought, “Facebook hangs out with my mom as much as it hangs out with me.” So we became friends with some cooler social networks like Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and Vine.  “Sorry Facebook, I can’t hang out today I, uh, have a lot of homework,” we said, after receiving another Candy Crush request.

Facebook noticed our distance. So it made some changes and tried buying back our friendship.

Facebook’s recent $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp is the latest in its ploys to win back millennials. The messaging service syncs with your contacts, allowing users to send messages to one person or a group and shares locations with contacts who have the app. The messaging service is free the first year, and $0.99 every subsequent year.

With 450 million users, WhatsApp makes a marginal profit. But with a price tag of $19 billion, Facebook clearly didn’t buy it for the money. They say you can’t buy your friends, but it’s an unspoken truth that you can buy cool things to make friends.

So how will WhatsApp bring back Gen Y users? According to a Feb. 21 article in the New York Times, millions of smartphone users are heading for more private messaging services that use their contacts, rather than sharing on a public platform. It makes sense, after all we don’t want our parents or future employers seeing all the inappropriate memes we share or the drunk pictures from last night.

Facebook knew our generation liked to communicate secretly. In 2011, the website introduced the stand-alone Facebook messaging app, allowing for easier mobile messaging and group messages. Then Snapchat hit the app store and Facebook realized that’s where the millennials — not necessarily the money — was. Facebook unsuccessfully tried to buy Snapchat last November for a reported $4 billion. It then created Poke in 2012, a more aesthetically pleasing version of Snapchat that absolutely no one used. Instagram, which Facebook also bought in 2012, introduced direct messaging a month after the Snapchat-purchase attempt, hoping to hop on the bandwagon.

Facebook realized messaging services are the projected future of social media, but the company is still missing the magic key to our generation — which it hopes WhatsApp is.

How exactly Facebook will use WhatsApp is still unanswered. Will it be used independently like Instagram? Or will it be brought into our Facebook friend circle and sync with all the Facebook contacts we don’t really care about? Regardless of Facebook’s decision, only time will tell if buying WhatsApp will bring back Gen Y users.

Oh look, a friend request from my former best friend, Facebook. I’ll wait and see what Facebook does with WhatsApp before I accept it.

Kate Beckman is a freshman magazine journalism major. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at kebeckma@syr.edu and followed on Twitter at @Kate_Beckman.

Published on February 24, 2014 at 9:54 pm