Over on Building 43, Robert Scoble recently sat down with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to talk about the future of that social network. That future is, necessarily, rooted in the history and basic philosophy behind Facebook: the interconnectedness of the whole world.
It’s those connections – both the personal, friend-of-a-friend connections, and the you-like-what-I-like connections based on interests – that make networks like Facebook possible in the first place.
Zuckerberg says in this interview that these connections really drive Facebook’s movement towards a decentralized network – one that behaves less like a website and more like a platform.
Facebook’s great opportunity lies in the vastness of information that people are putting out there – “Through tools like Facebook,” Zuckerberg says, “you can control that.” Facebook’s future is about privacy and having a say in what information people can see about you. He also notes that he believes that “the real thing that makes up a person’s identity is the set of people they’re connected with.”
Using tools like Facebook Connect, people can offer up selected information about themselves – and businesses can begin to tailor their products and services for the people who are coming to them, based on the information they’re recieving about the interests and identities of the people who are coming to them. The interconnectedness that this creates allows for real bonds of trust to be created between people, and softens the cold anonymity of a Web 1.0 world.
Facebook’s goals for the future have a lot to do with the concept of a “social graph” that illustrates the whole interconnectedness that Zuckerberg has been interested in. “Being able to map out all those things in one graph is going to be really valuable for understanding what all those people and things are, and what they’re doing.”
Zuckerberg says that Facebook is moving away from the old school model of value being centralized on one site, based on their experience with the application ecosystem – all of that value lies in the long tail – many applications, with small audiences, bring in far more value than one widespread application.
Having Facebook’s capability for helping users build their identities spread out over many sites will help them capitalize on the long tail of the internet. What’s fascinating about this is that Zuckerberg seems to have learned the lessons of Friendster and MySpace: rather than allow a closed ecosystem like this to suffocate and wilt over time, Facebook is looking out toward the long tail.
By making sure that the system’s vitality is not linked to one site – which may well come in and out of fashion faster than Beanie Babies – Facebook is turning its vitality into longevity. And while collecting this kind of information seems, at first glance, a little Orwellian, Zuckerberg places just such a dystopian future on the opposite end of the spectrum from Facebook.
He believes that by allowing people a say in which information they make public, we can avert the loss of control over our own identities. Facebook really just wants to make it easy for people to integrate their internet lives, thereby making themselves a truly powerful platform for brand and personal identity management. But all of that is in the longer-term future, even if the groundwork is currently being rolled out.
The immediate future, of course, is rooted in smartphones. More people are opting to pick up phones like the Palm Pre or the iPhone that function as tiny computers, and smarter, more powerful applications for those platforms will be the immediate future of social networking.
It should be noted here that Zuckerberg stops well short of calling Facebook’s future a utopia. He has a charmingly grounded sense of Facebook’s place in society – when Scoble says offhand that everyone is on Facebook, Zuckerberg corrects him. “Well, 200,000,000 of them anyway,” he says, as if to say ‘well, it’s only something like 3% of the world’s population on Facebook. We’re not that big a deal.’
