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




The future is coming.


Facebook is clearly solving for the "how will we connect?" in the grand scheme of things. Based on their investors and the money they are currently generating, they are placing big bets on connectivity, artificial intelligence, virtual reality and augmented reality. Big, big steps away from news feeds, status updates, emoticons and a place to share our memes and pictures of food and cats. Is Facebook the future of social networking or the future of the Internet?

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

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