A More Elegant Question About Facebook

Facebook wants to connect everybody. 

That was the plan when Mark Zuckerberg moved the online social network out of his college dorm room, and into a business/something more substantive. Whether he knew what Facebook would become is questionable, at best (who could know that Facebook would have the profound effect that it has had on our society?). At the time, Facebook was not a better mousetrap or something original. It was (if we’re going to be honest) just another online social network in a world where MySpace was dominating. History tells the story. Facebook is a dominant force. And here we are, listening to Facebook as they reveal their current and future plans at the F8 Facebook Developer Conference being held this week in San Francisco. 

There were a lot of surprises. 

Varying degrees of surprises were launched. Perhaps the biggest surprise of all happened when Mark Zuckerberg unveiled one, particular, slide that laid out the organization’s roadmap for the next ten years. You can view the slide and read more about in the Business Insider article titled, Facebook just showed us its 10-year road map in one graphic. 

Here’s what we know about Facebook’s next ten years…

• Year 1 – 3.
• Facebook will evolve their “ecosystems.”
• Year 3 – 5.
• Core products will be established. These include:
• Video
• Search
• Groups
• Messenger
• WhatsApp
• Instagram
• Year 5-10.
• New technologies will take hold as Facebook focuses on:
• Connectivity
• Drones
• Satellites
• Lasers
• Terrestrial Solutions
• Telco Infrastructure
• Free Basic.
• Artificial Intelligence
• Vision
• Language
• Reasoning
• Planning
• Virtual Reality – Augmented Reality
• Mobile VR
• Oculus Rift
• Touch
• Social Virtual Reality
• Augmented Reality Technology

A more elegant question: does Facebook want to connect everyone, or does Facebook now want everything connected via Facebook?