The State of Facebook

After its disappointing IPO, Facebook is under pressure from investors and analysts to report increased growth and revenue to Wall Street. Facebook Inc.’s high-profile technology chief, Bret Taylor, is leaving Facebook with plans to assemble a start up. His departure raises industry/investor concerns as to the company’s ability to hold onto entrepreneurial leadership. Yes, Facebook claims 900 million members with 158 million unique visitors in April, according to ComScore. That’s up 5 percent from a year ago. However, that compares with the companies year-over-year growth last year of 89 percent.

Facebook truly was the “what’s next?” story. For the last eight years, the company created and ramped up a technology tool that made 1:1 connections a mass reality. Nevertheless, as momentum stalls, perhaps it is time to ask the question, “What’s next after what’s next?” What if we are shifting from the strategic need based on a technology of “connection” to a strategic need for a technology of “context”?

For consideration: The Internet’s address capabilities recently moved from 4.3 billion unique addresses to 340 undecillion. That is the new market size potential for 1:1 customer communication. That is 340 trillion trillion trillion, or a growth factor of 79 octillion (79 billion billion billion). However you view it, we are talking a lot of data.

There are now a number of niche sites competing with Facebook, including Foursquare, Tumblr, Pinterest and Twitter. And some interesting “new trend” approaches that range from Yovia, a “people engine” that allows users to earn real income from what and who they know, to Badgeville, a gamification company that employs psychologists and social anthropologists to help build contextual software applications from Big Data. Is “context” technology next? Social media is now shifting from technology, seen as connections-driven, to social science, understood as context-driven.  

The market is now creating countless new digital information. Cell phones, smart phones, laptops, iPads, are now generating a new and vastly expanding galaxy of data. And consumers? They are now demanding to know more about what they don’t know and expecting their suppliers to serve up the expected information and insights with their particular needs in mind.  

Big Data mastery is potentially the next important capability after the technology of connection. What’s next appears to be the growing scale, sophistication and ubiquity of Big Data crunching to identify novel patterns of information.

Mining and interpreting social media will allow providers to better serve their customers by using real-time data to describe contemporaneous activities before official data sources are available. It’s all about a time variable. To make money or serve your customers better, and to build new product features or make offers to customers, you have to predict two things: what’s going to happen and what people think is going to happen.

Therefore, Big Data correlations, causality and strategic decision-making, the ability to identify patterns that create answers to questions you did not even know to ask, are the emerging imperatives. The future is not someplace we are going to, but must create!

www.tcs.com