The Next Facebook

In light of the first question on the final; I asked myself: what will the next Facebook be? When Google+ first came out, there was a lot of speculation regarding will it take over or not. I am sure most people didn't think it will, and it was just a matter of time till this became clear. I personally do not know all the reasons why Google+ didn't really take over, but what I do know is that for me, it wasn't different enough! Yes, different. I do not believe that next Facebook will be something that is very similar to how things are now but with minor tweaks, rather, I believe it will be drastically different which won't make the transition so obvious. I was reading an article in the Washington Post titled Where will the next Facebook come from? by Dominic Basulto where he discusses that “the next Facebook” has not been created yet. He goes through where he thinks it will come from. He focuses on the younger generation and mainly college campuses. Dominic explains "Consider for a moment that when Google was planning to go public in early 2004, Mark Zuckerberg was still a sophomore at Harvard, working on a little project called The Facebook. Concepts such as the “Social Graph” and the “status update” were not yet part of our everyday lexicon? Facebook, like IPO predecessors Google and Netscape, is the type of zeitgeist-defining company that has changed the way all of us think about the Internet. With that in mind, perhaps the single, best way to predict the Next Big Thing would be to spend a few days hanging out on college campuses in Palo Alto or Cambridge or New Haven, observing how the youth of today are using technology to socialize with one another ." I am not sure if Dominic is right, but regardless of where this new idea will come from, I think it will be very different and it will bridge the gap between out online social life and our physical one. I also believe that the new platform will break many more privacy barriers that years ago we couldn't have envisioned to happen, but Facebook will have been the tool the paved the way for the next 'big thing'.

Article:www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/post/where-will-the-next-facebook-come-from/2010/12/20/gIQAEizaGO_blog.html