Back on Track: Facebook 2012 — What the Future Holds

I feel like I got a little off track this week with the birth of my niece in my . So, let's get back on track and talk about my favorite subject: Facebook.

What do you do after your site grows to 800 million users and 1 trillion page views per month? Ding ding ding ding ... you got it! You sell part of your company to the public. Facebook is planning a $100 billion IPO (an Initial Public Offering is the company's first sale of stock to the public). MAN, I wish I would have thought of this Facebook thing!

Going public is clearly the biggest thing on tap for Facebook in 2012. It's safe to say that Facebook's long-rumored IPO will be the biggest public offering of 2012 and perhaps the biggest of the current decade. Facebook will continue to fight some of the social media giants in 2012, including Apple, Amazon, Ebay and Google with new products expected consistently throughout the year. I am guessing, that most of us with a "common" understanding of Facebook and social media in general, cannot even fathom the depth of the opportunities that lie ahead for Facebook. This is huge, folks. 

However, I am much more interested in what the world's most populated social network is going to have in store for me and the other 800 million users in 2012. So, what is coming up in the next year? Is Facebook going to stall as MySpace did and fall off the radar? Don't count on it. Why? Two words .... Mark Zuckerberg. 

Facebook's founder Zuckerberg "gets" social media in a way no other business has. Shortly after Apple's co-founder Steve Jobs died in October, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on his profile, "Steve, thank you for being a mentor and a friend. Thanks for showing that what you build can change the world. I will miss you." 

Facebook has indeed changed the world. It's hard not to draw comparisons between Jobs and Zuckerberg, both of whom dropped out of college and founded their companies in their early 20s. Zuckerberg, who could be the next larger-than-life figure to drive innovation in the viral world, seems to hold the key now. He understands his consumers in ways that competitors have yet to grasp, and that edge has helped him to win the war in social media networking so far.

What Facebook incorporated in 2011 has helped to launch past almost every company in social networking. Two new additions, the "Timeline" and the "Subscribe" features have been huge stepping stones for the social networking giant.  

Timeline turns your Facebook account into an online scrapbook where you can highlight important moments in your life and resurface past activity. For example, when my niece was born this week, I entered her birth as an event in my life (a life event). Facebook highlights the events with a larger-than-life picture for you to share with your friends. "Timeline is the story of your life ... it's a new way to express who you are," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said. Timeline organizes your life in reverse chronological order based on the content you've shared on your Facebook profile.  If you've entered when you graduated high school or college, when you got married, when your first child was born or when you started a new job, all that data will show up in your Timeline. You can also go back and add photos and captions to important past events if you want to, or remove particularly embarrassing photos or other content from your new profile page. It allows us all to essentially scrapbook our life. If you haven't activated it yet, I suggest you try it. I will definitely revisit Timeline again soon and give you more information on how it works. 

Second, the new Subscribe feature Facebook launched recently, allows us as users to let us follow public updates by essentially anyone who is on Facebook. You've always been subscribed to friends, now you can hear from journalists, celebrities, political figures and more. Want to find out what Nickelback is doing today but they won't approve you as a friend? Problem solved, Subscribe allows you to follow them without a friend approval AND it allows you to get public updates in your news feed.  Lastly,  the subscribe feature allows you to choose what you see from friends and others in your news feed. For example, for each person, you could hide all game stories, see just photos, limit updates to life events and more. 

Is your head spinning yet? I know ... it's a lot to take in if you haven't followed it closely. Suffice it to say, Facebook will not be the next MySpace and go away quietly. Like it or not, it is not going away. Facebook's goal is to make the world "more open and connected," and I would say that with 1 trillion page views per month, it is succeeding. 

Tammy