NEW YORK: Over the past decade, Facebook has ceased to be just a “social network”, adding and honing a never-ending array of features to make itself indispensable to users.
In January, the company expanded beyond the social sphere and officially entered the workplace, launching Facebook at Work, a stripped-back version designed for internal staff use.
Its rapidly-growing Groups feature, released as a standalone app last year, continues to encroach on the traditional turf of rivals like eBay or Gumtree, as people look for housemates or buy, swap and sell through their existing social circles, favouring the security of their personal networks.
An electronic payments feature is being rolled out in the United States to users of Facebook’s Messenger app as you read.
And it’s forging ahead with news aggregation in a big way, recently announcing Instant Articles, a feature that will see Facebook host content from other news sites directly on the app.
It is investing in hardware, too, with the acquisition of Oculus, a manufacturer of actual dreams … well, virtual reality.
It’s not that Zuckerberg is bored; there must be more than enough foosball tables at Facebook HQ to keep him busy of an afternoon. And, of course, he has all the friends he could ever wish for.
Since Facebook’s 2012 IPO, it has needed a compelling “story” to tell corporate investors, says IBRS analyst Guy Cranswick.
That means reinvention, experimentation and, inevitably, failure. But with gargantuan revenues and cheap money, markets across the globe are experiencing the lowest interest rates in history failure is a drop in the ocean in pursuit of greatness.
Perhaps the most spectacular of Facebook’s reinventions is its internet.org initiative: an ambitious project which aims to bring a free, limited version of the internet to the whole world within the next decade.
Never mind food or clean drinking water; Facebook’s satellites, drones and lasers will soon be beaming the interwebs to the people of the third world, changing their lives forever.
It’s a genius ploy that builds on Facebook’s incredible social capital, in the most altruistic sense: the benefits of connectivity for economic growth are hard to ignore. But along with connectivity, the project will also be bringing Facebook to the people. It’s a guaranteed way to chase more customers.
Along with internet.org, Zuckerberg has highlighted artificial intelligence and virtual reality as key future themes for the company.
The more corners of our lives Facebook can cement itself in, or the more places it can entrap us to waste our time, the more data it can glean about us, and the more it can profit off us.
Facebook’s targeted ads – worth a tidy $US3.54 billion ($4.7 billion) in revenue in the first quarter of 2015 – now extend beyond Facebook itself, tracking users through to other mobile apps.
Incrementally, this advertising has lost its creepiness and we have come to accept it as a normal part of the user experience, a necessary trade-off for the ever-growing stable of features Facebook offers us.
If telepathy is possible, by the time we get there, that trade-off could mean something very different: a whole new way for advertisers to speak to us.
