What's next for facebook?

But Facebook, like Apple and Google, has so far been successful in crafting its image so that even many industry insiders are continually convinced that something borderline revolutionary is in the works behind closed doors. The $15 billion valuation was, essentially, a sign of confidence in the shaky fact that Facebook's current advertising strategy is that it's developing an advertising strategy.

I too think that our beloved facebook is on the verge of something big. The buzz around the microsoft/facebook deal has propagated much anticipation of what facebook is planning; microsoft knows something that the rest of us don't. Some believe that it will be in the realm of advertising. I suppose there's not much else that the site can do to bring in huge revenues. I think that facebook should have used their application venture as a money maker, too bad that ship has sailed. If facebook charged the application writers a nominal fee their profits would increase exponentially. Thus far facebook users have experienced a luxury that myspace users have not- an advertisement free experience. This will soon change, but as I said in my last post, targeting advertising is the wave of the future, and what better place to really see it flourish than in a social networking site. People post such personal information, ads towards their personal interests would be of unmeasurable use to advertisers. That is the problem with most ads, they're not personal enough. Google has a good thing going with their adwords, placing non offensive (not tacky flash banner ads or banner ads in general) ads on the sides of pages that coincide with keywords from the site. If a powerhouse like microsoft can work with the genius of facebook to effectively harness targeted advertising I think it can be good for everyone. On the otherhand, mess it up and facebook will lose a lot of users. If facebook gets to be anything like the over-commercialized myspace, users will go running to other networking sites.