Monica BassoFacebook’s co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced yesterday in an interview on ABC News that Facebook has reached 500 million users. This is a confirmation of what we predicted last year in our report Gartner’s Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users, 2010 and Beyond: A New Balance:
By 2012, Facebook will become the hub for integration of social networks, as well as for social extensions of traditional websites and applications.
Facebook is not simply a social network which grows at rapid pace, particularly on mobile usage, and already outnumbers any other social networks. Facebook is also a platform, which provides a framework for developers to create applications that interact with Facebook features. Through its application programming interface (API), other websites and applications can be made social, for example, by sharing content, invites and events with the Facebook community.
Through these mechanisms, Facebook will support and take a leading role in developing the distributed, interoperable social Web. As Facebook continues to grow and outnumber other social networks, this interoperability will become critical to the success and survival of other social networks, communication channels and media sites. Connection to Facebook are being developed in enterprise products as well – latest announcement coming from Microsoft few days ago about the integration with Facebook of Outlook Social Connector which turns Outlook into a social-enabled application.
Thanks to its already leading role, with a critical mass of both users and platform mechanisms, Facebook will assume an increasingly predominant role for integration among social networks. Other social networks (including Twitter) will continue to develop, seeking further adoption and specializations with communication or content areas, but Facebook will represent a common denominator for all of them.
Sure – privacy will continue to create challenges for Facebook and growing integration with other services and applications make this even worse. Possible competition and resistance to Facebook as a hub might come from other markets, for example, Orkut in India and Brazil, V Kontakte in Russia, Mixi in Japan or QQ in China. Some user groups may begin to defects due to changes to the social network participation (too wide), or other issues originating when a person’s multiple roles collapse into a single Facebook account.
Anyway, Facebook continues marching on its conqueer of the Internet and mobile population and – unless a major unexpected event, a “black swan” appears on its path… it seems to be set to become the mother of all social networks.
Organizations that haven’t done it yet, should begin to think how to target Facebook, the third largest “country” in the World – and take advantage in advertising, communication, demand-generation, marketing and client.
Category: Uncategorized Tags: Facebook, mobile, social networks
