Started a mere six years ago; Facebook is now the most visited website on the Internet, with over 570 billion page clicks per month according to an article in Australian IT of 30 May 2010. After a huge surge in growth over the last year, they have already passed 400 million of the 1.7 billion Internet users worldwide. And so far there are no signs this will come to an abrupt stop. So where is Facebook going, where will they be in lets say two years time?
In a very nice article in the Guardian online of 14 of March 2010 John Naughton concludes the following: “if Facebook is to continue to grow, then it needs something more than social networking to sustain it” “but it won’t make it too big to fail”.
Listening to their own ambitions it might be a long way from where they are now. In an article on Forbes.com by Reihan Salam dated 26th of April 2010 it states; “Facebook has settled on a truly grand ambition: to serve as the infrastructure that knits together the world's information”. In the same article we can read that Facebook CEO is working on what he calls: “a new open graph initiative, which will make the web more user friendly”. According to the Facebook developers the Open Graph protocol can be described as: “The Open Graph protocol enables you to integrate your web pages into the social graph. Once your pages become objects in the graph, users can establish connections to your pages as they do with Facebook Pages”.
This all sounds great, but as said before Facebook is not too big to fail. Facebook will not be the first company, as Jeremiah Owjang so eloquently said in his article in Web design; “that is a technology supernova, it will grow explosive, then fail to innovate from political tape and sheer size and will fade away". Right now Facebook is renowned for trying all kinds of innovations at the same time. Some will work and some will not. However, there are some voices that say that because Facebook tries to be everything at the same time, it will end up being nothing at all.
What will be important is what direction will it choose. What will be their main focus; a mobile OS like Android; the Open Graph protocol annexing all your favorite websites within your FB profile? Will it remain independent? Can it create a business model that will generate enough cash to develop the new technologies? Will they go public soon, or will they be bought by Microsoft as is suggested as a real possibility in the article by Mark Cuban in SAI on the 23 April 2010.
A lot remains unsure, therefore it is hard to determine with any form of real certainty what will happen to Facebook in the next two years. In my opinion one thing will be sure, it’s going to be a fast evolving story in an ever faster changing world.
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Very interesting post. The connectivity of Facebook with other websites is one of the most interesting functionalities Facebook offers in my opinion. I think is a trend that will continue and make Facebook more interactive. With this connections Facebook will also be able to get some information about users (interest, habits,..) and use it for customized advertisement (and increase their revenues…).
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