Facebook | The Winner of Social Networks

FACEBOOK is a social networking website founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college friends in February 2004. The real customers of Facebook are enterprises who advertise on Facebook. Thus the more users there are (currently Facebook has about 500million and an estimate of 630million users by 2011), the more amount of traffic and useful information the site generate, and the more valuable will Facebook be.

Here we will be analyzing two key subjects related to Facebook and how they would possibly evolve in the near future.

TOP ON THE LIST – PRIVACY & SECURITY

Since launched, Facebook has been subjected to mostly privacy and security issues until this very day with the most recent case related to the launch of “Instant Personalization”.

More importantly, in trying to achieve their business model, Facebook tries to “open up” so as to attract more companies into the Facebook advertising world. On the other side, Facebook users are complaining about the issue of privacy. The outcome of dissatisfied users might lead to the following outcomes; (1) Reduction in the sharing of data and interaction (2) Falsification of data (3) Reduction in the clicking of Ads (4) ABANDON FACEBOOK

Hopefully Zuckerberg is not really in a denial as mentioned by him in a recent press. Facebook should really look into this privacy issue, maybe making it easy for people to opt out of unwanted applications, before more Google employees deactivating their Facebook accounts.

SECOND ON THE LIST – SOCIAL NETWORKING PLATFORM TO CONQUERING THE WEB?

Facebook is definitely the most successful and popular social networks in this era. The introduction of “Open Graph” which consists of the following three products, social plugins, open graph protocol and open graph API, allowed us not just to connect to friends on Facebook, but to numerous things all over the web.

Zuckerberg explained on the Facebook Blog: “we are making it so all websites can work together to build a more comprehensive map of connections and create better, more social experiences for everyone. We have redesigned Facebook Platform to offer a simple set of tools that sites around the web can use to personalize experiences and build out the graph of connections people are making.”

It is evident that Facebook is moving towards web domination and these new features had already created privacy concerns from the public. From my opinion, it is a huge gamble; a make it or break it situation. Zuckerberg is definitely pushing the traditional social network to new heights but whether it will be successful really depends on the receptiveness of the consumers. On the other hand, Facebook should also look into its potential competitor, Google perhaps, and consider possible actions and reactions when expanding its boundaries.

CONCLUSION

We would be seeing more bold initiatives coming in the near future if the current introduction of “Open Graph” turns out to receptive from the users. If all is smooth for the next 2 years, Facebook should be capable of creating a semantic web in a longer run.