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Comment by iooi | Hacker News Reader

Your parents were on ICQ? And AIM? They set up a Myspace account?

Facebook is easy to use and accessible everywhere. This is coming from someone that hasn't had a Facebook account since 2009. GP makes great points and the title to this submission is pure clickbait.

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When ICQ, AIM, MySpace etc were popular, the babyboomer generation was not really widely adapted to computers like they are today. I don't think Facebook has been the reason they eventually did, either -- my grandmother, for example, doesn't have Facebook, but e-mails and texts.

My whole family was on ICQ when I was a kid. This may not actually be true but my understanding back then was that ICQ was pretty popular internationally (most of my family lives outside of the US).

Yes, ICQ was popular just before the internet went full on mainstream, MSN and Yahoo messenger followed it up, followed by a brief Google chat and Skype stint and then a void filled up by the social networks and eventually the mobile messengers like WhatsApp.

MSN being killed is still so weird to me, I get that The Netherlands is a small country, but they had full 100% market dominance, after MSN got killed I bet some researcher could have seen people in The Netherlands just had a communication dip for a year or two.

My parents let me log into their AIM accounts, before I was old enough to get my own, and then we kept in touch. We moved to Yahoo messenger, and my Dad still keeps in touch with me via Hangouts. We migrate; instant messaging is an easy tech, and there's always something available to use, so we just grab whatever's convenient and go.

At MySpace's height, it was starting to penetrate the Baby Boomer market. It was heading the same direction that Facebook as able to achieve.

My parents being on Facebook is a con not a pro.

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