The Future Of Facebook

Wayne Radinsky2011-06-25

Surpassed

Classmates.com, SixDegrees, Tickle, Club Nexus, Ryze, Friendster, Collegester, Myspace, Tribe, ConnectU, Orkut, Hi5, and

others!

Size

Facebook: 640 million Qzone (mainland China): 480 million Habbo: 200 million Twitter: 175 million Windows Live Spaces: 120 million Bebo: 117 million Vkontakte (Russia): 110 million

Growth

PC's expected to grow from 1 billion to 2 billion between 2008 and 2015

2 billion people currently have internet access, either by PC or mobile phone

12% of population has smartphones, but growth is 14%/year. Everyone in the developed world, and ½ the world's population will have internet access by 2020.

Facebook vs Google

Early internet had a “portal” model Google broke the “portal” model by making an

exponentially better search Facebook may try to return to the “portal”

model, keeping people on Facebook Google's “social graph” is PageRank, but

Facebooks's profiles & social graph may prove superior for determining content quality

Advertising

$450 billion/year global market Online advertising is $34.5 billion Google makes $10.5 billion, or 30.4% of the

online advertising market. Facebook currently makes $1.19 billion, or

3.5%.

Google's fear of Facebook

Google in Feb. 2010 launched Buzz, as an aggressive opt-out add-on to Gmail. A broad privacy backlash resulted, and Buzz today has only a few million users.

Google's Facebook clone, called either Google Me or Google +1, has experienced a lot of internal conflict, due to Buzz's failure, and huge cost and time overruns

Google vs Facebook

Google still has many valuable “social” technologies: Android, Google Docs, Youtube, etc

Might acquire Twitter – Google Tweets? Groupon rejected a $6 billion offer from Google Facebook has responded with Facebook Deals

Facebook Photos

50 billion photos, more than any other site Facebook's face recognition system received a

lot of backlash Facebook's photo system is lacking most of the

tools of competitors like Flickr and Picasa

Facebook Places

Ability to find friends nearby, with their permission. Facebook's service hasn't caught up with competitors like Foursquare.

Facebook Lists

Not very easy to use. Should algorithmically figure out whether a new

friend is a “Friend”, “Acquaintance”, or “Professional relationship” based on others they are connected to, and default to the proper list.

Keep lists isolated for privacy – separate news feeds, etc

Facebook Neighbors?

Facebook Neighbors – find people in your neighborhood by entering your street address. Facebook could become a competitor for Meetup.com and dating websites.

Facebook Local Friends/Local Parents, etc Facebook Shareables Facebook Dating Etc

Facebook Family?

FrameChannel is a hosted service that allows every family member to email pictures, from their phones or PCs, to a website that will automatically update internet or wi-fi equipped electronic picture frames from various companies.

Facebook could incorporate the same functionality into Facebook

Facebook Virtual Events?

Teleconferencing system, with a permanent space for saving photos, videos, maps, profiles pages, and other data, for holidays, birthdays, or other social events

Facebook Genealogies?

Link together data of parents, grandparents, great-grandparents

Could incorporate data from DNA testing, such as from 23AndMe

Facebook Ratings?

Facebook could partner with, or acquire, Netflix, Yelp, TripAdvisor, or Amazon.com.

Facebook could become the market-leading ratings site for all products and services

Facebook 140 Character Messages?

Ideal for mobile users Should have a “public” option that makes

messages viewable by the whole world (not just friends or friends-of-friends)

Public messages should have no limit to the number of subscribers (like Facebook Pages today)

Facebook Club Card?

A replacement for every supermarket club card In the world

Facebook will be able to match up grocery store purchasing behavior with online behavior and get more accurate profiles of people for advertising

Facebook Data Lockers?

A place to keep your medical data, with privacy controls

Health care data must eventually go online Facebook could get immense brand loyalty if

they do this first and do the privacy controls well.

Potential disruptor: Mobile

Facebook is not integrated with in-car navigation systems

With voice recognition, you could say “Directions to Pete's house”, and Facebook could find him on your friend list, find his address, and provide to to your car's GPS system to give you driving directions.

Potential disruptor: Teleconferencing

Realtime video is becoming affordable throughout the developed world

“Always On” video connections could create an “office-like” environment for people working from home.

Explosion of virtual meetings and travel could displace expensive and slow physical travel

An alternate platform could threaten Facebook

Potential disruptor: internet TV

1 Mbps broadband is ubiquitous in Scandinavia today and it is estimated that 100 Mbps will be ubiquitous in Scandinavia by 2015.

Scandinavia will probably lead the world in internet TV

Facebook would be the ideal platform for TV recommendations and ratings, but...

Facebook does not own Youtube or have strong links with any traditional TV producers

Potential disruptor: Symbiont Networks

The growth of mobile networks will allow the rise of highly connected, highly productive groups of people, or “symbionts”, who will outcompete isolated, disconnected individuals, in schools, in jobs, and in life.

Always-on wearable video and audio devices will create extremely intimate connections between people in a “symbiont” group.

Potential disruptor: the conversational interface

The “conversational interface” is when computers can understand spoken language and respond to the meaning of commands rather than literal words

IBM's “Watson” is a preview John Smart expects the conversational

interface won't arrive until about 2019.

Potential disruptor: Cybertwin

A cybertwin is a digital agent that knows exactly what you're interested in and scours the internet looking for things that fit your interests, preferences, and values.

Facebook is the leading collector of personal interests, but if another company jumps ahead with AI technology, they could create cybertwins and take the lead

Merging with the “real world”

Facebook will become a “wearable” social network.

Facebook will become society's law enforcement system, or “immune” system, as crimes will be hard to commit by highly connected individuals with high levels of transparency.

Facebook microcurrency

Facebook Credits could evolve into a micropayment system that complements the main currencies such as the US dollar and Euro.

Facebook Credits is currently used in Facebook games, e.g. Farmville.

Facebook transparency

Facebook Connect/Facebook Single Sign On extends Facebook's non-anonymous “real name” system to the rest of the internet.

Facebook Groups non-anonymously identifies members of political groups

Facebook's push for transparency and lack of anonymity can both threaten and empower political activist groups

Closing thoughts

OkCupid has a very clever system where anyone can create and answer questions about themselves, and see other people's answers. Facebook could incorporate a similar system. This would help people understand each other.

Facebook could provide ways for professional therapists to work with juvenile offenders, mentally ill, addicts, isolated elderly, or others seeking emotional support or behavior change.

Closing thoughts (cont'd)

The average US internet user spends 14 minutes/day on Facebook, more than Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Youtube, Wikipedia, and Amazon combined.

40% of youth age 8-18 are on Facebook