The Future of Facebook - Research Paper Example

?THE FUTURE OF FACEBOOK The Future of Facebook Word Count: 2,014 (8 pages) ?I. Introduction Facebook is an online social networking site which boastsmillions of users and keeps many of these “friends” connected, even though they may be in other towns, cities, states, provinces, and even other countries. Facebook is, therefore, most certainly an online novelty of sorts. The future of Facebook ultimately relies on what has happened in the past, and what is happening now. That is why, here, it will be examined: what has been the track record or history of Facebook; what the current state of Facebook is; and finally, perhaps most importantly to everyone, what is the future of Facebook. II. The History of Facebook According to Carson (2010), Facebook was started in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, who was a student at Harvard (pgh. 1). He first made the social networking site as a sort of on-campus, online student look-book in which some of the students in Harvard’s student body were analyzed. Basically, the site was a success. With some of his associates, Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to develop his site. There was some internal haggling over who had developed what. Initially, some lawsuits were filed on behalf of other Harvard students who claimed that basically the idea for Facebook was theirs. However, such lawsuits were thrown out of court or dismissed. Another problem that Facebook has had in the past is with its privacy settings. There was a big hullaballoo over the fact that peoples’ privacy on Facebook was supposedly breached, and that peoples’ personal information was being sold to companies for money. This infuriated many Facebook users. Not only that, but the giant social network was accused of sharing information with third-party payers—which users deemed unethical. Privacy issues, however, have not been the only negative issues that are endemic of Facebook. Another, increasing, problem—appears to be the advent of cyberbullying. Cyberbullying occurs when people use offensive, bullying, or intimidating behavior via means of social media. The major problem with Facebook is that it does not have a means for people to protest what is posted on the social media site. Therefore, hate speech and bullying behaviors are not regulated much, if at all, on the social networking site. One of the largest problems with Facebook is that it does not have Admins (or administration) who are the regulators of the site. For example, there should be at least one Admin for every 100 people. This way, any behavior that would be considered in poor taste or offensive would be regulated by the Administration, who would approve of posts. This might be considered a Communist tactic, but in reality it would solve a lot of problems of pictures and comments being posted that were inappropriate or unbecoming. This would then put 8 million people to work. They could work online from home, as long as they underwent many of the usual requirements required of job seekers—for example, submitting a resume. Anyone with an Internet connection could be employed. These are merely ideas, but they could fuel a nation struggling from unemployment beyond belief. According to national statistics, 14 million people in the United States are unemployed right now. Creating Admins for Facebook is a genius idea because it would allow people to: a) work from home; and b) transition seamlessly into the work force. Part of looking ahead to the future means looking at the past. Facebook has a long history and is almost going to be going on its eighth birthday in February of 2012. So, it makes much sense that Facebook be seen as a major employer in the United States. The cream of the crop—only the best workers—should be hired for these new jobs. Of course, this has the added danger of making a digital divide between the haves and the have-nots. Much of social networking has reached great heights, but Facebook has been at the helm of the majority of that success. Facebook is going to be a great force to be reckoned with in the future, but only if it can hedge its future success with the good things that it has been doing up till now in terms of organization, organizational culture, and having room for upward mobility in the company itself. III. The Current State of Facebook Facebook is a very large social networking site. In fact, Facebook—according to the online article Facebook by the New York Times (2011)— “is the world's largest social network, with 800 million users worldwide as of September 2011” (pgh. 1). Some users were upset when suddenly, recently—without much warning—Facebook changed not only its privacy settings, but also its ad campaigns and timeline formatting. Privacy settings on Facebook are a particular concern for those who are interested in keeping private matters private. For example, if a person only wants certain people to view their profile’s status update, the person has to specify that when they post their status update. Another problem which Facebook “faces”, so to speak, besides its problematic privacy concerns, is that Facebook ad campaigns are generated to adapt to the particular Facebook user’s profile and interests. Other companies, like Gmail, actively use the information and interests embedded in the Gmail email accounts of users in order to develop a bunch of ads that are suited towards those basic interests and information. Facebook’s new timeline formatting for status updates made a lot of people angry. People who had a certain number of friends would only get to see status updates of certain people in their friend list. This would limit the amount of connectivity to one’s friends since one wouldn’t necessarily see all the posts that every friend were to make on one’s timeline. In essence, Facebook was choosing whose posts one might see at any given moment, based upon former interactions with those people and how many times these interactions occurred. For example, if one hadn’t posted in a long time to a certain friend’s Wall, this friend’s status update would be removed from that person’s timeline. Facebook’s timeline formatting seemed discriminatory, because it was editing out some of the friends’ timelines or posts whom one might have wanted to see. In effect, Facebook is actually choosing for the user what kind of experience the user might have by choosing whose posts or status updates appear on the user’s timeline. The timeline formatting mistake on Facebook is an element that will definitely ruin the user interface communicableness of the social networking site. Choosing for users whom they will see and whom they will not see is a form of regulation and suppression of the 1st Amendment, it could be argued. So, why has Facebook taken away the ability of users to see all the posted status updates and then choose which ones they would like to comment upon, like, share, and so forth? In one view, this is a major problem, because it assumes that only certain people will like certain other peoples’ status updates. The formatting timeline problem is not going away, but Facebook is probably not going to make a change to the new timeline system unless a lot of people complain—like users of one big corporation found out recently. For example, the company Netflix recently made a new company called Qwikster to sell its DVD’s. However, customers got mad because they didn’t want to sign up with another new account to be able to rent DVD’s, so Netflix changed their policy yet again, after having made a couple of big mistakes in pricing hikes for their DVD’s which were exorbitant. They made, in total, about three different mistakes in the space of a few weeks, indelibly damaging the reputation of the company. This not only resulted in a dissatisfied clientele, but the movie company lost 400,000 users, which was a large blow to a large company. The company’s stock dropped tremendously as well. Thus, Facebook should take care not to anger users, or it could backfire badly. IV. The Future of Facebook Facebook is going to be the next biggest success story, the likes of which Google or Apple could only imagine. Facebook has the potential to proverbially blow its competition out of the water. So many people are ready to shell out money for Facebook because the company has people under their thumb. For example, according to Facebook Charges (2011), a false Internet rumor spread which has mentioned that Facebook would charge $3.99 per month for the bronze user status, $6.99 per month for the silver user’s status, and $9.99 per month for a full-service user who has gold member status (pgh. 1.). So, as it turns out, this rumor was indeed false. Howevr, it is believed that the day is coming in which the people will have to pay for the social networking site’s services. The thing is—people will pay if a fee is administered. People are so connected to their Facebook pages, it is almost certain that even the most basic user will want to pay a paltry fee—in order to stay a customer with the service. It is most likely that Facebook is something that people will pay for because they don’t want to lose contact with their friends and associates, for example. Without a doubt, Facebook is not just going to be a service that people pay for—but it will be a product that people will ensure it is a service for which they make money in their budgets. This would be akin to paying one’s mortgage, keeping the car’s tank filled with gas, or keeping food on the table and a shelter over one’s head. Facebook will soon be making other people rich besides its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. According to Reuters (2011), in 2012, Facebook will make an initial public offering (IPO) and investors might become rich overnight, owning many shares in the company (pgh. 2). Ideally what could happen is that investors, should they decide to take stock in Facebook, might be faced with the possibility of becoming very wealthy very suddenly—just because initial public offerings tend to make people rich if the company offering the IPO’s is a very good company, because its stock is worth more. For example, since Steve Jobs held much of the stock involved with Apple, when the company gave an initial public offering, he automatically was catapulted to billionaire status. So, in that regard, Facebook could make some people very, very wealthy—who might have otherwise not had that opportunity. When Facebook releases an IPO, likely at the end of 2012, Zuckerberg was knowingly (or unknowingly) giving people an option: they can save their money now and buy shares of Facebook later—thus giving people a goal for which they can save up money. So, if shares of Facebook are offered at a relatively affordable rate—it is pretty sure that Facebook prices are bound to go up, thus making people profits that they might not otherwise see in their entire lives. It’s very important that Facebook keep its good relations with the public at large, and not to introduce any more measures that might be considered unstable or unpredictable. People like predictable products. Obviously, many people were not impressed when the new timelines were introduced without warning. Therefore, Facebook should stick to doing what it has been doing and not change the format too much. It was obvious that when the formatting of Facebook changed, people were not very pleased. This is antithetical to business practices, where the customers should be first in the mind of Zuckerberg and the upper echelons of Facebook’s leadership. ?V. Summary and Conclusions Facebook was a wonderful idea, but by that same token, Facebook should take care not to change too much about its formatting—while it is recommended that the company strongly rethink issues about stronger privacy and cyberbullying rules and regulations. Here it has been attempted to address—at length—the following issues: the history of Facebook; the current state of Facebook; and of course, not to be left out, Facebook’s imminent future. The future looks bright for Facebook. The company shouldn’t have problems down the road, as long as it remembers its key customers—the 800 million users of Facebook. BIBLIOGRAPHY Albrechtslund, Anders. (2008). Online social networking as participatory surveillance. US: First Monday, 13 (3). Andrejevic, Mark. (2005). “The work of watching one another: lateral surveillance, risk and governance.” Surveillance & Society, 2 (4), 479-497. Back, M. D., Stopfer, J. M., Vazire, S., Gaddis, S., Schmukle, S. C., Egloff, B., and Gosling, S. D. (2010). “Facebook profiles reflect actual personality, not self-idealization.” Psychological Science, 21, 372-374. Baker, James R., and Moore, Susan M.. (2008). “Distress, coping, and blogging.” CyberPsychology & Behavior, 11 (1), 81-85. Barker, Valerie. (2009). “Older adolescents’ use for social network site use. CyberPsychology and Behavior, 1-5. Barnes, Susan. (2006). “A privacy paradox: Social networking in the United States.” First Monday, 11 (9). Barnett, E. (2010). 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