The next frontier for Facebook
Saturday, 26 July 2008
“Hey, guys.”
These were the words that began Facebook’s developer conference as the social networking website’s casually dressed founder, Mark Zuckerberg, stepped onto the stage - as reported by MercuryNews.com.
The conference was to discuss Facebook’s future regarding its business potential for the many web developers that depend on the social networking site. It included Zuckerberg describing two new facets of Facebook that will shape the website’s future.
The first, Facebook Connect, allows the expansion of the Facebook platform onto the external web. The service makes profiles portable so that users can bring their Facebook information with them as they visit third party websites, while still maintaining user privacy.
This means that a Facebook user’s actions on third party partner sites will be shared through their friends feed back on the main Facebook site, allowing users to stay updated with the various exploits of their friends.
Zuckerberg also announced that, following the recent redesign of the site, Facebook plans to impose some new rules regarding Facebook applications - many of which have been blasted by users as low-standard, spammy and occasionally including viral links. These low-grade apps spoil the new, uncluttered look of Facebook - and therefore applications will now have to undergo the new ‘Facebook Verification Programme’ before being approved or discarded.
Software applications seen as valuable to the Facebook system will then be rewarded by Facebook with good ratings, and the ones deemed as nasty - many of which breach standard user privacy rules - will get kicked out of Facebook town. Since it opened its doors to independent applications, Facebook has already chucked 1,000 that they considered unacceptable.
So that’s all the good news - but what could be a spanner in the works for the future of Facebook? Well, WebProNews spotted that the numbers of Facebook’s original target audience, college-age students, have been dwindling… then realised that it only seemed that way due to an extra 66 million users being on the site since last year.
No, it seems quite certain that Facebook will only continue to grow from strength to strength in the foreseeable future. It’s already slated to overtake MySpace in member numbers this year - and with constant expansion over the web, who knows where Facebook could continue to?
It’s certainly not bad for a scheme hatched by a 20-year-old in his college dorm room.
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