You know technology is up for discussion when the long term horizon is two years. In thinking about Facebook's future for weeks now, I continue to remind myself that Marc's vision is evolving and much simpler than many imagine.
To begin on the subject I have to mention that I went to school with one of the founders. In fact he was one reason I avoided signing up for years. I just was not a fan, he was not so nice. I am happy I got over it. He actually left the company at the end of '08 to start his own project. An interesting fact is that many departures occurred around that time, for reasons unknown, I imagine growing pains.
Facebook is a company run by young folks who are trying to figure it out, they simply do not have all the answers, if any answers at all. There are no collaborations with the CIA or bundled data being sent off to nefarious corporate teams looking to snare consumers. Well at least not yet. Maybe when the founder turns 31 his motives will change, activist Jack Weinberg's quote in San Francisco's Chronicle in '64 never dies. People have a tendency to give the founders of Facebook enormous amounts of credit presupposing they have a master plan of world domination. While I agree that the team of 1600 has altered the way in which we communicate, to which we owe some praise, we need to remember they are human and fallible.
Facebook will continue doing what it has been doing only the rate of users will grow proportionally more than in the last 6 years combined. I forecast membership will more than double in two years. This may sound like an astronomical figure, but if 400 million users have any pull and every user encourages just 1 person to join, 1B does not seem too far off. Once Facebook reaches this volume it will be interesting to see how they will keep users updating their profiles and status.
One trend I see among Facebook users, especially within the older demographic (Aunts and Uncles are my source) is that once they join Facebook, quite often their account remains inactive. An inactive account is one that is not updated in a month. I wonder how many of the 400M current users are inactive. Like anything else, Facebook is simply a tool, you have to work to stay in touch with your friends, post pictures, content and update your profile. The people who were not big on communicating in the past realize after a time that Facebook does not mean they will be great communicators. Facebook is only as effective as its user and perhaps that is one of the company's greatest strengths. Users have to explore on their own to figure out the site and its potential. Even deleting your account is not obvious, you must dig to delete your profile. Facebook gives its users autonomy and leaves their profile content up to the imagination. As much as Facebook's future appears bright, many many users may become inactive over the years for various reasons. How will Facebook keep its user hungry to share and engage?
A partial answer to my question may lie with the 1M developers on FB who work to give users what they want in addition to the 1000 engineers. Follow the users and they will take you where you need to go. The CEO is all about customer satisfaction, if the users are not happy than we need to go back to the users...'takin it back to the roots'. This attitude will keep Facebook on top. The social plugin's and Open Graph make it tough for any internet user to ignore the site, regardless of interest or expertise.
Facebook's current platform rests on four pillars, .com (personal profiles, business pages, and group events), mobile (2x's more active than the website), www (social plugins and Open Graph) and devices. The company has been profitable in the last 8 quarters netting profits largely from advertising, which represents a very small share of potential revenues. Will they try to grow the rev slice of the pie? If so how? Through Games, apps, devices, business engagement. I am not well versed enough to comment on this, if they continue to exploit the advertising in the next two years the company will do just fine. Beyond that time frame changes may be necessary to keep ROE high.
As a Facebook employee stated, Marc's focus is speed of the site, scalability and uniqueness (not comparing himself to competitors or others). Marc's open and honest policy along with humility, unless it's all a front, will keep Facebook on its trajectory.
A final topic both confusing and intriguing mentioned by a fellow colleague is Facebook becoming a social search engine. Google recently bought Aardvark for $50M in February, a Facebook application...is this disruptive to Facebook and Microsoft's relationship? How will Google integrate this application into its cloud? Is Google aiming to further develop the app for Facebook to fully integrate? Will Google be the fact search and Facebook be the social search? Or will this seemingly friendly purchase and collab end bitterly with Aardvark being shutdown like Dodgeball or Facebook losing its app and Google's cloud growing ever more ominous. I would like to see Google and Facebook be like Sonny and Cher...I Got You Babe!!!
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