ShareThisFacebook was born in 2004 as a way for college students to connect with friends. But what does the social media giant want to be when it grows up?
Similar to how Microsoft, Google and Apple have inserted themselves into users' everyday lives, Facebook also seeks that type of influence by providing a social layer to every online activity.
"They want to be a communications platform," said Jeremiah Owyang, social media analyst for Forrester Research. "This is what they've been trying to indicate to the market all along."
Put another way, Owyang said Facebook is moving toward becoming like a computer operating system for communications.
Evidence of that evolution came with Facebook's new upgraded search function that gives its members instant access to the news links, hot topics and other status updates posted not just by friends but also across its growing network of 250 million registered users.
That new search capability went live hours after Facebook announced a deal, reportedly worth nearly $50 million, to acquire FriendFeed, a company that allows users to combine content from their favorite sites, blogs and social media networks, including rival Twitter.
The combination of these events gives Facebook the potential to deliver much more relevant information its users want, as well as real-time marketing data to companies hoping to sell products and services to a rapidly growing audience.
Privately held Facebook started as a network of Harvard students and eventually expanded to other universities. But today, it's open to anyone older than 13, and various studies show it's attracting members from all age levels and demographics.
The status updates and other posts created by Facebook members have created a collective stream of consciousness that has marketers salivating.
According to its own numbers, Facebook reports that 120 million of its registered members log on at least once daily. And they share 1 billion photos and 10 million videos each month, and post 1 billion pieces of content -- news stories, Web links and blog items -- each week.
And its reach goes beyond just Facebook. Through Facebook Connect, members can log on to outside sites and distribute information with their Facebook friends.
Boston University professor N. Venkat Venkatraman notes that Internet powerhouses like Amazon.com built their audiences around an e-commerce platform, and Google became successful by collecting and delivering information from around the Web.
But in creating a "de facto social platform," Venkatraman said Facebook is tapping into the next level of the Web's development, a gold mine of data about what people are talking about, what they like and dislike and how they are influencing the opinions of others.
"We're more likely to be influenced by what our friends are doing," said Venkatraman, chair of Boston University's School of Management Information Systems Department. And with social media networks, "our friends need not be just friends in a physical world, but people who are like us who share our interest," he said.
With the acquisition of FriendFeed -- a 2-year-old company headed by former Google executives -- Venkatraman said Facebook now has access to a staff that can develop techniques to do data mining on what "social people are doing."
Then again, there are no guarantees that Facebook will succeed. Ray Valdes, an analyst with Gartner Research, said many tech companies have had a vision for "world domination," from "Microsoft to Amazon to Google to others that enjoyed a moment in the sun, such as Netscape."
Forrester's Owyang said Facebook is still far behind Google as the Web's dominant entity, although that could change if it crosses the 500 million-member mark.
And he noted that social media users have tended to migrate quickly from once-hot networks like Friendster and MySpace.
"I don't expect there will be a king of the hill for a long period of time," he said.
(Contact Benny Evangelista at bevangelista(at)sfchronicle.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Must credit the San Francisco Chronicle
