Facebook's Future Looks Good

This week at f8, Facebook’s developer conference, the company announced several new features including its realtime sharing functionality, subscriptions, deeper integration with content, and its brand new profile design which includes the new Timeline.  It’s clear that these changes represent the future of not only the social network, but social in general.  It is also clear that people are now sharing more than ever before.

The new profile design (screenshot below), which is nice, encourages more sharing and deeper Facebook integration into your life.  While the changes are far from subtle and will most likely cause an uproar from the 750+ million active users that are using Facebook, these changes are probably for the best.  Something I believe the masses on Facebook will discover once they end up using the new Facebook for a while.

The changes Facebook is making show me that the company has plans to stick around for a very long time.  How do they plan to do it?  By becoming an integral and vital part of our lives.  A glue, if you will, that keeps pieces of our life together with the ability to easily explore it and “relive” certain parts of it (if we so choose).  And it’s not going to be just your life which you will be able to explore, it’ll be your friends as well.  Which I believe is where some people are showing concern about privacy.

Nonetheless, it also presents a new way for parents to document their children’s lives as they grow up.  Forget digital photo albums, scrapbooks, etc.  Just document it on Facebook.  Then when your child is old enough to use Facebook, hand over the account.  By integrating Facebook into everyone’s life, it almost assures the company’s success into the future.  This is all of course assuming everything goes according to plan.

We are at the point now, if you are not on Facebook you are missing out.  Facebook is the real deal.  I think it’s here to stay.