As much as I hate to admit it, teenagers drive markets. When they do something, other people do it, too. They are good at measuring what “cool” is because they make the cool things cool. Gag. I feel like I’m 15 or something.

But the fact is that teenagers really do drive the market. Advertisers, marketers and technology geeks watch what the teens do with apps, because we know whatever starts trending in that market first will start trending among other generations as well. And guess what? Teens, like always, are bored of something.

They’re bored of Facebook.

“Whoa, whoa, slow down, woman,” you might be saying right now (hopefully not out loud, because that’s creepy on at least two levels). “Facebook is not boring. I find all of my leads on there, and I talk to my friends in Florida, and I can even pop bubbles and earn points to raise my animal sims!”

Yeah… the teens may be going toward the right ideas, here.

This data comes from the launch of some dumb social photo album app called Albumatic. Before the app was launched, it was introduced through a focus group to a bunch of kids under the age of 25. And you know what they said? They didn’t like how much the app relied on Facebook because, “They weren’t on it as much as they used to be.” AKA, “We’re damn bored with that social media crap.”

Instagram and Snapchat seem to be trending, but Facebook has kind of faded from vogue as of late. Teens avoid the platform because, like MySpace, they friend every damn person who asks to friend them, and then those people try to talk to them, (big surprise) and they don’t want to talk to those FRIENDS of theirs, and things just get dramatic from there.

But don’t think Facebook is behind on this. Here’s some info from its annual 10-K:

“We believe that some of our users, particularly our younger users, are aware of and actively engaging with other products and services similar to, or as a substitute for, Facebook. For example, we believe that some of our users have reduced their engagement with Facebook in favor of increased engagement with other products and services such as Instagram. In the event that our users increasingly engage with other products and services, we may experience a decline in user engagement and our business could be harmed.”

Oh, snap.

But… wait. Doesn’t… Facebook own Instagram? Yes, yes it does. But the chief financial officer, David Ebersman, still called Instagram a “formidable competitor,” and thinks that it may take over Facebook in the next few years when it comes to photo shares.

Let’s all be honest here for a second. Teenagers – unlike adults, of course – are constantly looking for the new big thing. It used to be awesome to share sweet photos with those other folks with whom you chat to on Facebook and show off your car or stack of drug money or pregnancy test or whatever. But now people want to get away from the massive amount of users those Web sites and retreat to smaller, more intimate groups of people. In other words, teenagers are all freaking hipsters, and they did Facebook before it was cool.

And they made it cool, and now it’s not cool anymore.

Don’t ask, I don’t really understand teenagers any better than you do.

But teens aren’t deleting their profiles. They’re just talking on other platforms, too, and they don’t visit the Web site as much. But because Facebook owns Instagram, and there’s still thousands of fangirls and fanboys ooo’ing and aahhh’ing over filters you can put on crappy pictures, it’s all good for Mark Zuckerberg. We’ll see what Facebook has to morph into to stay en vogue soon enough, I am sure.