Even though the Facebook's deal with Skype is a mundane development, it could be the beginning of an "awesome" era for the social network.

Yesterday Facebook underwhelmed the 60,000 or so people who watched the live stream of what was dubbed the event, based on comments CEO Mark Zuckerberg made last week. With all the rumors going around about a Facebook and , a revamped chat interface with Skype video calls was decidedly not-awesome.

Zuckerberg, not really known for stellar public speaking in the first place, didn't help himself by going into full-on geek mode early on, inflicting on the audience chart after chart about Facebook growth and nerdy anecdotes on Moore's Law and folding a piece of paper(!) fifty times. However, reading between the dork lines, Zuckerberg revealed a lot about his thinking—and thus Facebook's thinking—about the state of social networks today, and his in particular.

One of the most telling moments was when Zuckerberg casually confirmed that Facebook had reached more than . Almost as soon as he said so, he pretty much dismissed the statistic, saying, "We don't think it's the metric to watch right now." Reaching this kind of milestone is nothing short of amazing—very few pieces of software, or even products in general, can boast this scale of user base. Why would Facebook start to de-emphasize its size just when it's getting epic?

The No-Numbers Game

For a couple of reasons. One, as incredible as Facebook's growth has been, . Once Facebook reaches about half the population in a country, as it has in many developed countries, the number of users tends to stay flat. In some markets, the number of active users may be going down. If Facebook makes a big deal out of the numbers game, it invites discussion about other numbers that don't look so good.

But the greater reason is that Zuckerberg's right—size no longer matters, at least not that much. Facebook's a juggernaut, everyone's on it, and it makes little difference if "everyone" constitutes 750 million or 1 billion netizens (a mark Facebook is sure to hit eventually). Now that Facebook has evolved and grown to a colossal size, it can turn more of its attention inward, and focus on , specifically apps.

"They're on the march to ubiquity," says Lou Kerner, a social media analyst with Wedbush Securities, a Los Angeles-based investment bank. "They want everybody to be on their platform. Now it's not just getting everybody on the network, but getting everybody as deeply engaged as possible on the network."

Moving Back to Apps

I found it peculiar that Zuckerberg saw app development as a becoming a big deal in the next five years. After all, Facebook apps used to be the primary focus of the network, with whole swaths of its user base coming to the site just to play online versions of Scrabble or Boggle. Facebook profiles used to be all about arranging your various app "boxes" for all to see. The network wisely moved away from that model in favor of the social trifecta of sharing, commenting, and Liking.

Concurrent with that strategy, Facebook set out to conquer parts of the Web that it didn't specifically control, encouraging other sites to connect their content to the network via Like buttons, software that lets users log into third-party sites with their Facebook accounts, and full-on integration of Facebook comments on other websites. Apps were always there (and they've been very lucrative for developers like Zynga), but they haven't been the way Facebook has gotten to that 750 million mark.

Those projects have been successful if Facebook's meteoric growth, and its user interest, which is up about 40 percent over the last three months, are any indication. But if Facebook wants to keep that engagement up, it needs to conquer new frontiers, particularly mobile. How does the Skype partnership do that? It doesn't (at least not yet), but a five-year plan focusing on apps does.

"They're very focused on mobile," says Kerner. "They see that mobile is the future. And I think they're putting everything through that prism."

Somewhat ironically, the emphasis on apps has experienced opposite trajectories on Facebook and smartphones. Just as Facebook was redesigning itself to put greater emphasis in its news feed and sharing, mobile app stores were taking off in a big way. Of course, Facebook itself has an app, but it doesn't bring with it those nifty apps from the desktop version.

Moving Toward Mobile

Now the tides are shifting again, and Facebook's wisely shifting with them. Where Zuckerberg once said the iPad "wasn't mobile," now Facebook boasts a tablet app for the HP TouchPad, and an iPad app is rumored to be in the works. The is a fully integrated Facebook phone, and you can bet more are in the works. Finally there's the so-called Project Spartan, which could be Facebook's master plan to bring its big quiver of apps to smartphones and tablets. Little is known about that project, but it's said to be coming later in the summer.

It's informative to compare Facebook's apparent strategy with Google's rollout of Google+. Certainly, much of Zuckerberg's commentary yesterday was an attempt to into social networks. After all, Facebook's "awesome" news today was totally one-upped a week earlier by Google Hangouts, a Google+ feature that doesn't just let users video chat, but lets them do it with up to 10 people simultaneously (Facebook's Skype integration is just one-on-one).

Does Facebook care? Considering Google+ is only available to a select few people right now, and Facebook's video chat ability is getting rolled out to the millions of Facebook users today, I'd guess Zuckerberg isn't losing sleep over Hangouts. Or Google+ for that matter.

More to the point, Facebook is already a fully formed social network. Where Google+ is concerned with ironing out bugs and attracting new members, Facebook is shifting the emphasis on engaging its users more often on more devices with more features. Now it just needs to bring the awesome.