Luis García de la Fuente.com

Artículo reciente en Wired y comentarios/pensamientos míos (en rojo) intercalados…

FACEBOOK’S
4-Step Plan
for Online Domination

Mark Zuckerberg has never thought of his company as a mere social network. He and his team are in the middle of a multiyear campaign to change how the Web is organized—with Facebook at the center. Here’s how they hope to pull it off.

1. Build critical mass.
In the eight months ending in April, Facebook has doubled in size to 200 million members, who contribute 4 billion pieces of info, 850 million photos, and 8 million videos every month. The result: a second Internet, one that includes users’ most personal data and resides entirely on Facebook’s servers.

There seems to be no problem with the numbers so far: 200m members is a great achivement for a few years of facebook. The ’second Internet’ seems a too ambicious dream though. I have a clear idea about what is people looking for in the Internet, i don´t see it that clear what is people looking for inside Facebook, and its still very difficult to separate the hype from the real added value for new users.

2. Redefine search.
Facebook thinks its members will turn to their friends—rather than Google’s algorithms—to navigate the Web. It already drives an eyebrow-raising amount of traffic to outside sites, and that will only increase once Facebook Search allows users to easily explore one another’s feeds.

3. Colonize the Web.
Thanks to a pair of new initiatives—dubbed Facebook Connect and Open Stream—users don’t have to log in to Facebook to communicate with their friends. Now they can access their network from any of 10,000 partner sites or apps, contributing even more valuable data to Facebook’s servers every time they do it.

4. Sell targeted ads, everywhere.
Facebook hopes to one day sell advertising across all of its partner sites and apps, not just on its own site. The company will be able to draw on the immense volume of personal data it owns to create extremely targeted messages. The challenge: not freaking out its users in the process.

Once again trying to sell ads in social networks, and falling into the ‘database of personal data fallacy’. No way this will work in my opinion.

This is not a plan, but a collection of several extremely-difficult-to-achieve-and-simultaneous objectives. What abut focusing Facebook in just one of them, just as Google did with search advertising? I´m afraid ‘world domination’ is too ambicious even for Facebook, why not trying to dominate just one business model to start with!?