Although the popular social networking site Facebook began at Harvard in 2004 and quickly spread to college campuses across America, college students are among the first to abandon or delete their profiles as younger teenagers and older adults join the site.

As a recent New York Times article by Virginia Heffernan suggests, many people are leaving the site due to a perceived invasion of privacy and the ability of anyone to create a profile.

In its earliest days, Facebook was only accessible by college students; now, however, its users include parents, children, businesses, and political groups. It feels less like a club and more like a party that suddenly got awkward because mom showed up. As a result, college students now seem like the demographic least likely to use the site.

Signs of Facebook’s fading luster are already beginning to show. In fact, Scott Infusino ‘12 deleted his Facebook profile this summer after creating it during his junior year in high school.

“I used it to keep in touch with far away friends, but it got boring.” Infusino said. “I just had no motivation to log on and respond.”

Although the majority of students interviewed have continued to keep their Facebook, they tend to use it more sparingly than before.

“I really just use it for five to ten minutes a day,” said Nathan Shane ’13. “I check my messages, but it’s really more of a high school thing.”

Shane is not alone in his attitude towards the social networking site.

“I check if I go online, but I only really spend time on it if people are sending me messages,” said Katya Botwinick ‘13.

Like many Facebook users, Botwinick mostly uses the site to organize events and keep in touch with people she has traveled with.

“It’s really good for sending a message out to a bunch of people,” she added.

In fact, most students at Wesleyan admit that they use Facebook more at home than on campus. Despite the fact that most users do not spend hours updating their profiles and keeping up with their friends, the site continues to assert itself as a dominant presence on the web. For one thing, a profile can never truly be deleted, as Facebook keeps records of every user in their network. In addition, the advertising space sold by the site adapts to the interests of particular users in an attempt to cater to niche markets.

If the Internet were a sci-fi action movie, then Facebook would be one of the faceless mega-corporations vying for control of the galaxy, and just about every product imaginable would be manufactured by one of its subsidiaries. The fact of the matter is, the website is a prominent feature on the online landscape. But its continuous growth, both in the scope of its membership and its development into a business, may be precisely what is pushing away its original group of users.