Facebook- On a conquest for the web
Started at harvard six years ago by Mark Zuckerberg and his team Facebook has come to quite a long distance to be what it is now. Its been nearly a month since the first time Facebook surpassed Google with the most number of US visits. There’s already statistics that Facebook has almost 40% of the entire social media traffic. To add to that Facebook boasts a humongous 400 million plus user base and its still increasing at a rapid rate and its just 2010. Facebook now stands at a very crucial stage and my god they do have ambitious plans. Facebook has enough user base that it can start crawling the web, page by page using its users as crawlers like how Google crawls the web using a googlebot. Thats how i perceive the new Like feature (or social plugins) they launched at the Facebook F8 Summit. Its difficult to imagine the web with Facebook written all over it. May be down the lane Facebook alone will be the gateway to the web, in the sense u look at sites which facebook suggests, you buy stuff using Facebook account, you go places in real world which Facebook suggests.Almost all your decisions would influenced by Facebook. There would be literally no anonymity on the web, all your activities would be tracked down to your Facebook profile. Facebook’s ambitions are really big and fragile. Scoble has a detailed post (must read post) about the media reactions and how the changes would influence the web. Google already felt the threat from Facebook and did launch buzz in spree and made a mess of it. Guess Google needs to try harder. The kind of volume which Facebook is growing into is too big and critical. Facebook already has enough data about us that influence our daily life considerably. I just wish and hope they don’t misuse the freedom and power and lose our trust. I wonder if Facebook become’s the next Google in terms of the traffic stats and revenues they would generate, then what kind of company would emerge to challenge Facebook. What kind of interaction would mankind look forward from the web. What could be the Next Big thing on the WEB. Do you have any clue?