Omnipresent F

Everyone is there, your friends, colleagues, parents and even grandparents... everyone is on Facebook, even your aunt who likes to gossip with the whole family about pictures or new relationships she has seen in her news feed. This huge book now has faces of millions of users all around the world, allowing you to connect with anybody on the planet within few clicks, knowing just their last name, kinder garden they attended or their 4th cousin from mother’s side... golden grail for all the stalker. In its beginnings the website was dedicated to keep you in touch with your fraternity bros/sisters, professors and alumni. Now, it has great range of features far more complex than young Mark could have thought about in his early years.

*not actual Mark

Facebook is developing at great pace and thanks to its large user base has huge potential to catch up on other services. In order to increase its share on streaming video market, where YouTube has the leading position, Facebook eased the way of managing video content and allowed embedding videos on other websites. For users on mobile platforms, external links now open within app using Facebook’s own browser… watch-out Chrome and Mozilla. With content generated on demand, you won’t use other app but Facebook… and Messenger of course. Messenger is now separated app dedicated to only to messaging. With it’s recently launched own website and released API for third party developers, the app boosted its attractiveness for many new users. Releasing API for developers will help Facebook attract more users from countries where messaging market is more diversified, mainly in Asia. When launched, Messenger was the number one app on the store, with just 1 star rating. This has changed just within a year and Messenger is on the way to become the universal communication tool, say goodbye to SMS and cellular calls, good job! Another feature coming soon is money-transfer feature. User will be able to transfer money to anyone on his friend list, directly competing with PayPal. Micro-transactions and money services represents very lucrative and perspective business for Facebook. The wide range and increasing quality of services Facebook provides is not the only factor behind the growth of this social-network giant.

Successful acquisitions greatly helped in expansion of services, user database and know-how. In 2012 Facebook purchased Instagram for 1 billion dollars. Some say the purchase was due the fact that Facebook’s mobile app was pretty awful, while on the other hand Instagram’s app was not. (I personally agree with this opinion.) More importantly, Instagram has currently about 300 million monthly active users, not bad. The largest acquisition by Facebook yet was Whatsup. The 19 billion dollar purchase in 2014 opened the gates to servers of 700 million monthly active users and significantly increased the share on messaging app market. In addition there are 500 million monthly active users on Messenger, and Facebook alone registers 1.35 billion monthly active users, out of which 1.12 billion are mobile users. Data generated by the user base is the gold of every social network. All our “Likes”, “Check-ins” and posts are collected and analysed, creating our own social pattern. Facebook knows everything; what you eat* (thanks Instagram), where you eat* and with whom you eat* (*use any verb, Facebook still knows it). All this enables Facebook to generate content made-to-measure based on user's behaviour, making the social-experience “more unique”.

When there is limited market, you obviously need to expand it to grow. In Facebook’s case, the growth is limited by uneven global Internet coverage. This issue is addressed by project called Connectivity Lab. Main idea of this project is to cover remote areas with Internet connection using drones. Well, more Internet users equals more Facebook users, it is simple math. The acquisition of Oculus Rift early this year confirms that Facebook wants to be even more present in our daily life. Virtual Reality is still young concept but I believe there are great opportunities with this technology for every-day use in the near future.

We may expect that at some point in the future everyone on the planet will have an account on some universal platform where all financial, medical and personal data will be stored. This platform will be our virtual “black box” uniting all services and networks one needs for life. This box although won’t be in our living rooms or bedrooms, it will be omnipresent on any device you take in hand, just simply type your username, password or let the device read your fingerprint. There will be no need for wallet with your ID, medical insurance or credit card in it, just your one account.