Will Facebook be the Center of Social?

Earlier this week, Ted Leonsis posted about the future strategy of Facebook. He hits on how Facebook needs to figure out what they want to become and whether or not they "want to be needed or loved as a brand and as a service." It's the utility versus entertainment question and ultimately I think Facebook has already stated that they want to become the most effective social utility. There only point of failure in my own opinion is that they haven't yet manifested their ultimate goal which is being the center location of social knowledge. What is social knowledge? Earlier today I touched on the difference between social and search and how social could ultimately become the future of search. First they will need to have the largest aggregate of users' social data and then be able to decide what individuals' expertises are. Facebook is best positioned to become the center of social on the web. They are rapidly becoming the largest social site on the web and is most effectively aggregating data about relationships and the conversations between them. As Ted says in his post, Facebook "will also have to innovate and redefine utility-like services such as email, messaging, search, chat, storage and self-expression." I've argued this before. Facebook has the potential to redefine how we handle email overload by creating filtering systems which are based on our social graph. Rather then going into details on the subject again, I'd rather simply say that Facebook is in the position to become the social search engine and the social homepage of the net. Since much of our information will be socially filtered, we need a system which most effectively maps the graph and tracks the influence of people. There are an endless number of ways that Facebook could improve their system to become the center of social on the web. The only problem that they face is they become increasingly cluttered as the community grows. If they can provide more systems to reduce the clutter and reduce the novelty of their site, I think Facebook could become the center of social on the web. What do you think? Will Facebook be our central location for tracking all that's social?

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Will Facebook be the Center of Social?

Nick O'Neill

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Nick O'Neill