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.

Share
Social Media Overpowers NBC

Social Media Overpowers NBC: A Vision

Posted by Kirk Cheyfitz, 12 Oct 2009
RFPs may suck, as Tom Searcy's new book proclaims, but Story Worldwide was recently asked in an RFP to write down Story's "vision for the future of social media" and I thought it was a really good question. Where exactly is all this going? What does it mean? Here's our take: Story’s vision is that “social media” soon will be called just plain “media” and the world will accept that the power to publish or broadcast to large audiences has passed irrevocably from a select few to virtually everyone. It is common wisdom these days that marketers no longer own their brands; the audience does. It’s critical to understand that this is true because marketers are no longer the masters of communicating about their brands; social networks have given that power to everyone. This profoundly game-changing democratization of mass communications is going to accelerate. One day soon, social media will trump the power of traditional media, meaning that national newspapers, network TV and brand advertisers will become, in effect, just another voice in the crowd. On that day, brands without a credible presence on social networks will cease to be competitive.
Share