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Facebook evolves to stay on top of social web Benny Evangelista, Chronicle Staff Writer San Francisco Chronicle October 24, 2010 04:00 AM Copyright San Francisco Chronicle. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Sunday, October 24, 2010 (page 1 of 2)
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More TechnologyStar power assists online drive to help gay and lesbian teens 10.24.10The Week in Bay Area Business 10.24.10Facebook evolves to stay on top of social web 10.24.10China's Web map service challenges Google, Sohu 10.23.10In the past six months, Facebook Inc. has rolled out about 20 new features, services or partnerships covering a diverse spectrum of technologies, from photos to search to commerce.
But what they all share in common is the Palo Alto company's grand ambition: to make itself the foundation of the next online wave - the social web.
In that vision, everything we currently do online - communicate, search for information, make purchases - would be shaped by our social networks.
That is why Facebook is moving quickly to take advantage of how it has already "become ingrained in our everyday lives," said analyst Atul Bagga of the investment research firm Think Equity LLC.
Bagga cited one personal example - he now receives more birthday greetings on his Facebook wall than he used to get by e-mail, phone or greeting cards.
"Communications are moving more and more from e-mail to Facebook," Bagga said. "They want to be the plumbing of the Internet."
In just six years, Facebook has propelled social networking from being an online network of U.S. college students into an everyday habit for 500 million people of all generations around the world. The company says members spend 700 billion minutes each month on the site and that more than 1 million external websites are tied into its platform.
In one measure of how the company is intertwined with pop culture, the top box office draw this month was a movie about its origins.
Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg last week outlined a vision for how Facebook can benefit from a new generation of companies that make social networking part of their DNA.
Speaking at the introduction of a $250 million investment fund for social media entrepreneurs, Zuckerberg said his company wasn't going to get into the business of making video games, music or movies. Instead, he wants outside companies such as San Francisco's Zynga Game Network Inc. to prosper by plugging into the social network.
In areas like e-commerce, "we're not going to build warehouses, but I think we could deliver an exciting social e-commerce product," Zuckerberg said. "Our fundamental view is there are going to be social versions of apps that get built out over the next five years or so that are probably going to be disruptive to a lot of industries."
Zynga Chief Executive Officer Mark Pincus compared Facebook's role in the social web to the way telephone companies provide the underlying network for voice calls.
"I think of Facebook as the social dial tone beneath all of it," Pincus said.
Keep moving forwardSo while Facebook is already hundreds of millions of members ahead of its direct competition, the company isn't content with sitting still.
Since April, Facebook has consistently grabbed headlines with its numerous announcements, which is notable since the company is still relatively small compared other Silicon Valley giants. Facebook has about 1,700 employees, compared with Hewlett-Packard's workforce of 300,000.
Some of the announcements have been minor tweaks requested by customers, such as making photos easier to view.
Others are major products, such as Places, a feature that encourages members to not only share their thoughts, but where they are located. Another new feature, Groups, gives members a way to narrow their overall circle of friends into smaller circles by interest.
Groups was born out of a recent 60-day "lockdown," sessions in which Facebook's 500 software engineers work long hours and weekends while focused on a new feature. In response to heavy privacy criticism, the company had a two-week lockdown that yielded new and simpler privacy settings in May.
But Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, the firm's director of engineering, said Facebook's furious pace of innovation isn't driven by the need to just produce more features at a faster rate.
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Subscribe to the San Francisco Chronicle and get a gift:Sunday + a $15 gift cardFri-Sun + a $15 gift cardMon-Sun + a $25 gift card Related Topics: Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Chief executive officer, Internet, Social network, Hewlett-Packard, Mark Pincus, Video game, Social media
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