Facebook in 2014: Fighting for Social Supremacy
by Kurt Wagner
Put on your party hats and string up the banners: Facebook celebrates its 10th birthday in 2014.
You’d be hard pressed to find a more popular, yet polarizing, service than Facebook over the last decade. In less than 10 years, Facebook has collected a billion-plus users, hosted a presidential Town Hall, been the topic of a major motion film, and connected people from every corner of the planet. Its global brand recognition may be the best in the tech world, rivaling only Google and Apple, both of which had a substantial head start.
And while 2014 is, in all reality, just another year for the social media giant to collect users, data, and revenues, it’s also a reminder of how far Facebook has come — and how quickly the tech world evolves.
As Facebook approaches the ripe, old age of 10 (that’s 70 in tech years, right?), the company will continue to face questions about its functionality in the social media industry it created. We’re not talking about Facebook disappearing — in fact, all indications point to another year of increased user metrics and revenue, in keeping with its years of steady growth. Instead we’re talking about Facebook’s identity, which could be lost amid the new features and ad rollouts that have defined the company’s most recent growth years.
In a nutshell: What is Facebook now? And where does it fit into the social media landscape it helped define?
Building Better Algorithms
The good and bad of Facebook is that it has everything
The good and bad of Facebook is that it has everything. It’s a search engine, a dating profile, a family photo album, an address book, and a newspaper, all rolled into one. For many longtime users, it’s also a never ending class reunion, featuring a stream of life updates and photos from long-forgotten high school or college acquaintances.
The problem staring Facebook in the face, is that there is so much information and connectivity on the platform that it’s becoming hard to keep any of it straight. Other social networks, like Twitter, Snapchat, or WhatsApp are filling the niche use cases like photo sharing or status updates that used to be Facebook’s domain.
Facebook tweaked its News Feed algorithm multiple times in 2013, twice with an attempt to bring more “high quality” content to users’ News Feeds. It has spent years identifying which friends users want to hear from — now it’s time for the company to identify users’ interests and the news items they want to see as well.
The platform encourages users to engage with the ads they come across, in an effort to better identify which ads work and what people want to see. It’s a lofty challenge with more than one billion users and one million advertisers, but its also a challenge Facebook will likely come closer to solving in 2014 as its efforts continue.
Facebook announced plans in early December to further grow and develop its artificial intelligence research team, a major sign that the company plans to continue perfecting the algorithms used to surface and share content on the platform.
“[Facebook] is sitting on possibly the greatest cache of user data ever compiled,” says Nate Elliott, a principal analyst at Forrester Research. “Certainly they know more about users’ affinities — their tastes and preferences — than anyone ever has. If they stopped dancing around [the data] and started using it, it would be incredibly powerful.
A big part of using this data and information revolves around Graph Search, the platform’s Google-like internal search engine that allows users to seek out more specific data from their network of friends. A Google search will return a list of nearby restaurants. In a perfect Facebook world, you would get a similar list, with the added caveat that these recommendations are coming from your friends, the people you trust and, in theory, with whom you share common interests.
Graph Search is still in its early stages — the company announced the feature last January but only made it available to all U.S. users in August. Expect Facebook to bring the service to mobile in 2014, a move that will test its functionality as people use it on the go the way Yelp or Google are used now.
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