i think one of the next things Facebook could do is offer services to companies who have lots of users already in Facebook.
it’s funny because Google is racing to create an offering of online office/email/calendar/whatever and trying to sell this to small/medium/large businesses.
what advantage does Facebook have ? credentials. take Siemens for example, they have 6,000 employees already ON Facebook. these are 6,000 verified and authenticated users. Siemens
doesn’t need to do anything to verify them (as long as they trust Facebook’s email verification).
so wouldn’t it be ingenious if Facebook licensed or bought some online office suite, some online file management tool and a wiki, and offered these as Value-Added-Services to the companies who already have tons of users ON Facebook. These services would live in an isolated environment accessible only to that companie’s users (easy, according to email address).
instead of Siemens having to buy, deploy, host and maintain some corporate Wiki/file-sharing/whatever, just license it from Facebook, since it’s as if everything is already well
integrated there.
the next thing will be some work from the Facebook side to try and synchronize the Facebook
user repository with a company’s outlook address-book or whatever it is they use there.
this could mean some real $ for Facebook.
i think this is one of the biggest opportunities for FB right now, but since – as u mentioned – google are on the same race, let’s see which of the following will happen -
1. microsoft buying FB and putting their web office on individual networks
2. google buying FB and putting their web applications on networks
3. no one buying facebook, FB itself developing corporate applications (UNLIKELY)
4. 3rd party company delivers a killer app for this
i still think google will buy FB, but as time goes by i guess the price goes high.
Gil
i get the feeling that facebook are on the IPO road.
i think they’ll acquire or license an online office suite and offer these in some facebook-for-your-business package.