Will Facebook Exist in 2020?

Will Facebook Exist in 2020?

Posted by Jon Thomas, 18 Sep 2012

I have a bet with a friend who works in finance. He believes that Facebook will not exist in seven years. I, a marketer, couldn’t disagree more. It reminded me of when, in 1995, astronomer Clifford Stoll claimed that the Internet was “grossly overpromoted" and would ultimately be looked on as a fad. (He has since acknowledged his mistake.) More from Clifford later.

It’s difficult to define what “existence” even means in today’s digital age, when social technologies are imagined, developed, funded, adopted and acquired by a media conglomerate (often Facebook) in a matter of months, not years. Myspace is technically still in existence (I had to test it in my browser as I wrote this, just to be sure), but it’s far from relevant anymore in the social sphere. If Facebook goes the same route, I’ll concede defeat. 

But I don’t expect to be in that situation come 2020. Though Wall Street is panicking about the stock price, which has shrunk by nearly half, Facebook is a game-changing technology, and technologies like that don’t just fade away in less than a decade. As we do the automobile, we can’t image what we ever did or would do without it. It’s a technology that we seemingly never saw coming (as opposed to a smartphone or tablet, which were arguably natural evolutions in product innovation), and technologies like that are special. 

So if I’m so confident about the future of Facebook, where do I think it’s going? What do I think it will look like in seven to 10 years? As technology is moving so quickly, it would be futile for me to speculate on exactly what Facebook may be at that time, but here are four that opportunities could help sustain the platform.

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Is Foursquare Becoming the Perfect Local Ad Platform?

Posted by Luke Dringoli, 25 Jul 2012

Local merchants that’ve ignored location-based check-in platform foursquare have just been handed a serious reason to get on board: Local Updates, the first-ever way for merchants large and small (all one million of them, currently) to communicate directly with their customers on the platform, has arrived. As of today, they’ve even begun testing the waters with Promoted Updates, a way for a business to attract new customers through paid placement (the difference: spots, matched relative to interests and activity, are only seen when you’re actively searching on the Explore tab). This, coming a month into foursquare’s strategic shift in approach—including a rebuilt mobile app (try it out if you’ve written FS off)—means that the newfound focus for the platform as a social-exploration tool is as much about enabling richer user-to-user interactions as about enabling richer business-to-customer and customer-to-business interactions.

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Online Recommendations: The Expert Stranger vs. The Friend

Posted by Katie Edmondson, 22 Jun 2011
Bing’s advertising campaign centers on the idea that friends know best: “You’ve always trusted your friends. Now, when you search on Bing, your friends on Facebook help you decide.” But do friends really give the best advice when it comes to searching on the Web for information and reviews? A new study yielded surprising results...
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Google Rewards Real Storytellers

Posted by Luke Dringoli, 28 Mar 2011

This post originally appeared in our March issue of “Live Report from the Future of Marketing,” our monthly Post-Advertising newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

Google has finally rewarded those steadfast providers of valuable, high-quality content over purveyors of drek. In the main objective of their recent search algorithm revamp codenamed Farmer, Google has yanked republishers, editorial mills, aggregators, and other wholesale sources of otherwise weak, unorganized content (such as Associated Content and Mahalo, to name two of the most egregious offenders) off their high-ranking perches and slashed their search results by adhering to a new system that attempts to account for actual editorial quality. Adhering to a standard of perceived quality means that news outlets, brands and other publishers of notably engaging stories are finally gaining the additional recognition they deserve. But what of the grey area—the in-between web listings that don’t deserve to be demoted? Will those harmless do-gooders potentially be misplaced, orphaned by Google’s iron hammer? One thing’s for sure: Great content wins—especially when a system exists to recognize it as such.

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The Race to Decode Jigga Man

Posted by Patrick Gannon, 22 Oct 2010
The night before last, Jay-Z unveiled his latest joint in front of a large crowd in South Beach. And to the surprise of the celebrities, media, and fans in attendance, his latest release isn't his usual street poetry. It's prose. The Mariano of the Marriott has written a book. As exciting as it is that Hov is coming out with a memoir, what's really big pimpin' about this project is the marketing campaign that accompanies it. Designed by Droga5, it spans multiple continents and channels. You crazy for this one, Jay.
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