If you have been taking note of the happenings around the web, you would have seen this coming but you know, most people are concern about privacy that they failed to realize that true privacy is only practicable offline. At the last Facebook F8 summit, an annual event where Facebook discusses its future and development platform with developers. This year’s was held on the 21st of this month, and Mark Zuckerberg made the bold statement in a blog post Building the Social Web Together it was indeed an expose on how to build the web together from Facebook’s empire. As the saying goes; He who pays the piper dictates the tune, such is the case of Facebook with over 400million users, it has gone beyond the hands of early adopters to the mainstream who have glued their lives with Facebook, spending billions of minute daily on Facebook.
Facebook stats
- More than 400 million active users
- 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
- Average user has 130 friends
- People spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook
- There are over 160 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups and events)
- Average user is connected to 60 pages, groups and events
- Average user creates 70 pieces of content each month
- More than 25 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month.
The Moves
The major products announced are Social plug-ins which includes; Like Button, Activity feeds and Graph API.
The like button allows you to recommend any content around the web, sharing them on your profile page and automatically keep you update of the changes on the web pertaining to that website. This also gets you connected to the page of the “Liked” site. With this, you also will be able to see which of your friends liked same content, creating a massive network effect. This allows your friends become editor for the contents as such, it limit editorial control of the sites.
Activity feed: it’s part of the social plugin integrated to a site and allows you to see what your friends are reading on the site, automatically creating a most read column on the site that are targeted to your friends interest. With the psychological believe that your friends are the best pattern to know what your interests are.
Graph API is the suite which allows developers access a Facebook user social graph. So largely the permission is tied to your explicit access you grant the application.
The Battle against Google
The new normal is; people are the one giving authority, it’s no more link exchange of the old model of web 1.0 from which Google thrived massively. As Mark said on Social graph pattern of Facebook “…social graph, which is the idea that if you mapped out all the connections between people and the things they care about, it would form a graph that connects everyone together. Facebook has focused mostly on mapping out the part of the graph around people and their relationships.”
Google Adsense is a perfect match for what the web needed in early 2000s but things are changing which Google also can testify to. The web is becoming more social; people are highly engaged on the web these days, sharing likes, posting content and video. Google Orkut which is popular in Brazil and also acquire Youtube back in 2006. Upon the solution brought to the market by Google (contextual search ads, contextual content ads, geotargeting), comes demographic targeting which Facebook now introduce. Google has data people are looking for, but it’s yet to gain has much user data as does Facebook.
While we cannot count Google out yet, because of the fact that the site still have more content than any other search engines and social networking are still growing. Remember also that Google has more than $23billion cash at hand which they can use to buy up any social networking site which could be twitter but twitter is facing a big challenge now with its third party app developers.
A strategic move that will save Microsoft
Not long ago, Microsoft bought 1.5% stake in Facebook which allowed it to expand its ads deals with Facebook and preference on its product integration with Facebook. Though most people saw Microsoft move as overvalued but I saw it more than just an investment but as a strategic move to get hold on the future possibilities which is just unfolding.
Facebook recent launch now integrate Microsoft docs. This allows you to work on your document in collaboration with your friends on Facebook and also allows you to edit on or offline. Microsoft office is the big cash cow in the Microsoft economy, as the cow is getting thinner everyday with the internet disruption; this is a big life support to savage the dying empire. Though a big challenge to Google docs!
Argument still on about whether your friends are truly the ones you want to share your document with, well you will be glad to know that quite a number of employee of some companies are on Facebook. In my formal company (finance industry for that matter) we had more than 50% of our staffs on Facebook. With branches across the country, information within the company flows faster on Facebook than the normal medium. Also, the age groups on Facebook are gen Ys, this group are hyper connected and as they mature and join the workforce, they will bring in their pattern of communication which will disrupt already exist platforms.
Ushering in of web 3.0
I have said a time and again that web 3.0 will be an intelligent web, a web where information about you is known by websites you visit and they are able to give you what you like based on your past actions, friends preference and other geographic and demographic information about you. In web 3.0, the data created in the web 2.0 era will now start making sense and mining and analysis social data would have been solved.
Make the money, do no evil
Google’s mantra, do no evil has helped Google public perception and has been the basis of judging other companies. Facebook has faced public outburst several times and this step will definitely raise some highbrows. Facebook beacon that was introduced in 2007 was something more like too early and drastic for the user but gradually they are moving towards it.
As to making money, Facebook is coming under pressure to deliver on multimillion dollars invested in the company. With the continuous data Facebook is aggregating, they are working extensively to monetize it. They recently took over 100% ad inventory of their site off Microsoft; this points to the fact that they seem to have realized the importance of social driven advertising model they have and are ready to maximizing to the fullest.
To the question whether Facebook is unshakable, I will say time will tell! New things keep coming up, new companies shaking the big ones. Google overtook Yahoo and now Facebook is threatening Google we should not be surprised if another site comes along to threaten Facebook then we will see how they can work it out.
For any local site willing to attain the level of success of Facebook, why not leverage on its platform? Take advantage of the data they have to build something for your startup and move on from there.
What do you think about the raise of Facebook and the new products announced?
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