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As part of the Future of Facebook Project and Open Foresight process, we’re asking the crowd for their opinions and forecasts on the same 15 questions we’ve asked our interviewees. Questions are posted on Quora, but can also be answered here on the blog or on our Facebook Page.
Here are some interesting and thought-provoking answers we’ve seen so far. We’ll be integrating our favorites into the final video series, so add your thoughts and join us as producers of the future!
1. Social Graph & Sentiment Data Usage
I believe the biggest issue facing Facebook is how it chooses to use the massive amounts of data it collects on everyone of us. Facebook is a unique window into our minds and has the potential to know what we want even before we do. How it chooses to capitalize on this fact and the tools it builds could propel commerce, content and communication for the next 5 to 10 years.
2. Partnerships with Brands
Let’s face it – brands are the ones who are bringing the revenue. But as of today, Facebook has a very closed-in environment with very limited support for brands and limited consideration for brands’ needs. They have also been missing some key things brands are looking for (like capability to easily segment audience within one fan page for the brand to avoid defragmented fans base/presence across Facebook, etc).
3. Higher Education
The London School of Business is already offering an International MBA delivered via a Facebook App…. The quality of Facebook Higher Education delivery will be no better or worse than current online and blended online and face-to-face courses already being offered by universities. The difference is that instead of using walled off course management tools offered by universities and publishers, Facebook will deliver an open and transparent education that allows more real time interaction and collaboration with experts in the outside world. Students will not be limited by location and will shift to educational brands that deliver quality social experiences online forcing many local and regional Higher Education institutions out of business in the next five years. The world will truly be the classroom.
4. Signal to Noise Ratio
I think a major issue going forward for Facebook, and other social sites, will be finding a better way to sift out relevant posts from noise. We’re all guilty of following / friending more people than we actually care about. Social graphs contain invaluable personal data; being able to analyze that data and make content more meaningful, contextual and separate value from the noise will be critical as social networks continue to explode .
5. How We See Ourselves and the World
…my focus tends to be on the utility of FB and its popularity as a vehicle for emergent properties… it will be interesting to not only see how social media continues to play a part in physical protests against oppressive governments worldwide, but how that same spirit of revolution loops back into the virtual world and online psyche – a place where we are only beginning to understand the implications of global connectivity (i.e. virtual cities of thought/memes that supercede physical city, national, corporate and cultural boundaries; open source educational models and the reframing of “learning”; speculative gaming as a means for simulation/big picture solutions; etc.).
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Add your views to the Future of Facebook Project topic on Quora!
Check out our kickstarter video here
Thanks to Producers Sean Park, Dr. William Ward, and Debra Farber, and to all supporters of the Future of Facebook Project!
emergent by design 
My top 5 are:
Cool factor – think friendster, bebo, myspace they can all change with the wind
Tech lead – again myspace and friendster lost it with downtime and bad recode efforts, I think FB is above this level of incompetence though look at the hiphop recode of PHP, nifty.
Privacy and Ownership – why use FB when you can own all your data on Diaspora?
err… can’t be bothered to think of 4 or 5, it’ll hinge on those first three.
Myles –
Your comment on privacy and ownership is an extremely important one and one that CLOUD believes goes beyond FB and Diaspora. In our opinion, your information should remain yours no matter what website you are on.
CLOUD, the Consortium for Local Ownership and Use of Data, believes that the Internet should start with us, not webpages. Our connections are bigger than the edges of a website, deeper than an individual social networking page and broader than any one of us can imagine.
The open source standard we are writing, CTML, will move the Internet to a world of ME 1.0, rather than just Web 2.0. These two items from the CLOUD website speak directly to the issue of Facebook and our web-based view of social networks:
CLOUD and ME 1.0
Is Privacy a Uniquely Facebook Issue?
http://cloudinc.org/?/ecosystems/article/is-privacy-a-uniquely-facebook-issue
First off, it’s awesome to see such insightful comments assembled together. I love the Quora component of this project.
Second, in reply to John Hazard who wrote, “I believe the biggest issue facing Facebook is how it chooses to use the massive amounts of data it collects on everyone of us. Facebook is a unique window into our minds and has the potential to know what we want even before we do. How it chooses to capitalize on this fact and the tools it builds could propel commerce, content and communication for the next 5 to 10 years.”
The Social Graph that FB commands is indeed incredibly valuable. It will only increase in value as emerging technologies and behaviors permit us to unlock more and more of its value to generate actionable knowledge. Facebook is aware of this and therefore seems to have adopted a let’s stay squeaky clean / Teflon approach to its PR. I believe this is likely to continue until the company is forced (by environment, user base, etc) to make choices that force it to take a particular stance on the usage/application of this data. That time will come, but when?
I think the big question now is, “Will Facebook Innovate or Stagnate?”
They already have 600m users or whatever the current number is so growth has to reaching a plateau. If exponential user growth stops then Facebook has to find a way to get more revenue for each user. I can imagine two approaches to this:
1. More page views per user – they could stick to essentially the same advertising model and try to generate more page views and therefore more impressions. This sort of approach would probably involve lots of gimmicks and relatively little value, adding addictive stuff that keeps you clicking despite your better judgement.
2. Big Innovation – alternatively they need to find additional revenue models. Facebook credits has this sort of potential but it is simply a payment system (not a currency) if it requires buy in with $, and particularly if it remains restricted to the FB platform.
It would be really interesting if they started leveraging the social graph to offer a premium subscription service. Imagine a set of tools built on top of Facebook that allowed easy data mining and visualization of the social graph. This might involve showing you how you are connected to people who are several steps away or allowing you to search for people who match some set of criteria (demographics, interests, career, social graph proximity, etc). Essentially this would mean opening up the advertising targeting tools to the average user.
I don’t have any reason to expect this will happen though ;(
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