Future of Facebook Having Begun

Future of Facebook

Having begun as a collegiate network for classmates first at Harvard and later across Ivy League universities, Facebook quickly grew to over 500 million users globally, as the website states as of October, 2010. The development plans at Facebook are now more focused on transforming the Web-based application into an advertising, e-commerce, entertainment and collaboration platform (Zeisser, 2010). Facebook has grown so quickly that it can challenge Google as a platform for enterprise applications as well (Zeisser, 2010). The intent of this analysis is to evaluate the future of Facebook across these global dimensions.

From Application to Platform

The advertising model Google ingeniously created with their AdWords application has created an entirely new approach to advertising online, generating nearly 30% of sales in the early financial periods of the company's history (Bernoff, Li, 2008). Facebook's exceptionally profitable growth is also attributed to their use of advertising model where ads are placed alongside individual profile pages and the sales of optimization technologies for advertiser's fan pages. Advertising could propel Facebook beyond Google in revenues within ten years (Zeisser, 2010).

The second area of growth for Facebook that the integration of the massive amounts of data they produce daily from interactions between members themselves and between members and companies who have fan pages, applications and in the case of Delta Airlines, an application to buy airline tickets directly online. All of these factors point to Facebook being ideal as the foundation for a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and its related strategies (Hennig-Thurau, Malthouse, Friege, Gensler, Lobschat, Rangaswamy, and Skiera 2010). This is one area where the sales of the data Facebook has been collecting for years could revolutionize the entire area of CRM strategies and platforms. Companies including Salesforce.com are very interested in partnering with Facebook to gain access to these data sets to further strengthen their applications as well.