The Future of Facebook

A group of us were talking about Facebook today, and we kicked around a bit the idea of what Facebook could become. This is something I've been thinking about a lot, and I have a theory that could be significant for news organizations.

It goes like this: Facebook, which already functions as the default home page for a lot of people, could morph into something really powerful: a sort of highly personalized personal portal/home page, bringing together the utility of My Yahoo with the intimate personal power of Facebook's social networking roots.

Imagine being able to alight on Facebook and find out not only what your friends are up to, but what's going on in the world, in sports, in your neighborhood, with your investments, even the local weather. That means adding to Facebook's existing friend-based "news feed" the ability to include broader feeds, perhaps even from traditional news providers. Voila: The public and personal Daily Me, all on the same page.

It would require some rethinking on the part of Facebook's leadership, but that's long overdue anyway: As Facebook's audience has grown from its college-student base to a much broader, more mature group, the platform has really failed to evolve substantially. It still very much reflects its college-age roots, and its much-touted apps and widgets oddly are more visible to other people than they are to the people who add them to their pages. If I add a news widget to my page, it's great that you can see it—but I'd sure like to be able to see it too, on my main news feed page. At the moment, Facebook doesn't always work that way.

Media companies already are circling around Facebook and its 60 million-plus members, trying to figure out how to reach them with their content. So far, that's mostly consisted of fairly feeble attempts at news quizzes or other widgets. But the ability to add local or national or topical feeds to member pages would be powerful stuff (and have some significant advertising potential as well). It will be interesting to see if Facebook can evolve this way.

And by the way, if you're not already on Facebook, get on it and use it. It's not enough to just look around and think you've figured it out. Facebook's power and magic is only apparent if you start using it as intended, to link to friends and keep up with what they're doing on the service (and off it). It's a profound new way of exchanging information, and every journalist or person in the media business should be deeply familiar with it.

Comments

[Dave Lee]

Couldn't agree more. In a way we already digest news on Facebook; but it's about our family and friends. If local and national news can embed itself within that model then we may find good journalism becomes more popular than ever. Great post.

[Amy Potts]

I discovered the power of facebook last night and it's ability to pass news along a lot faster than our local news station.

After a deadly car crash last night involving teens in the town I live in, my daughter was on face book feeding me information to give to other parents looking for information on the accident. Within 2.5 hours of the accident we knew what happened, who passed, who lived, etc. I was amazed! Our local news station didn't even have anything on the story until over 4 hours later.

What a cool tool - guess I need to get a facebook account.

Thanks Mark

[albert]

I disagree with you on this one. Facebook's greatest flaw in my opinion is that it is essentially a closed system. Oh sure, they have an API and you can develop applications for it and all, and that's great, but the data and information on it can't leave the site. Brining news feeds to Facebook wouldn't make it any more than a glorified feed reader, and not everyone will want to use it.

The real power of the user base Facebook has built up will come when they figure out a why to let people access that social graph from outside of the site. Let me put my news feeds wherever I want them, on whatever platform.

The idea of creating one unified home page to access everything from has been tried already, and it didn't work.