Facebook on its way to being social superpower Facebook

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg poses at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., Feb. 5, 2007. In an about-face following a torrent of online protests, Facebook is backing off a change in its user policies while it figures how best to resolve questions like who controls the information shared on the social networking site. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma) less Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg poses at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., Feb. 5, 2007. In an about-face following a torrent of online protests, Facebook is backing off a change in its user ... more Photo: Paul Sakuma, AP Photo: Paul Sakuma, AP Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Facebook on its way to being social superpower 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

Facebook was born in 2004 as a way for college students to connect with friends. But what does the Palo Alto social media giant want to be when it grows up?

Similar to how Microsoft, Google and Apple have inserted themselves into users' everyday lives, Facebook also seeks that type of influence by providing a social layer to every online activity.

"They want to be a communications platform," said Jeremiah Owyang, social media analyst for Forrester Research. "This is what they've been trying to indicate to the market all along."

Put another way, Owyang said Facebook is moving toward becoming like a computer operating system for communications.

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Evidence of that evolution came last week when Facebook unwrapped an upgraded search function that gives its members instant access to the news links, hot topics and other status updates posted not just by friends but also across its growing network of 250 million registered users.

That new search capability went live hours after Facebook announced a deal, reportedly worth nearly $50 million, to acquire FriendFeed, a company that allows users to combine content from their favorite sites, blogs and social media networks, including rival Twitter.

The combination of these events gives Facebook the potential to deliver much more relevant information its users seek as well as real-time marketing data to companies hoping to sell products and services to a rapidly growing audience.

Membership growing

Privately held Facebook started as a network of Harvard students and eventually expanded to other universities like Stanford. But today, it's open to anyone older than 13, and various studies show it's attracting members from all age levels and demographics.

The status updates and other posts created by Facebook members have created a collective stream of consciousness that has marketers salivating.

According to its own numbers, Facebook says 120 million of its registered members log on at least once daily. And they share 1 billion photos and 10 million videos each month, and post 1 billion pieces of content - news stories, Web links and blog items - each week.

And its reach goes beyond just Facebook. Through Facebook Connect, members can log on to outside sites and distribute information with their Facebook friends.

Boston University Professor N. Venkat Venkatraman notes that Internet powerhouses like Amazon.com built their audiences around an e-commerce platform, and Google became successful by collecting and delivering information from around the Web.

Data gold mine

But in creating a "de facto social platform," Venkatraman said Facebook is tapping into the next level of the Web's development, a gold mine of data about what people are talking about, what they like and dislike, and how they are influencing the opinions of others.

"We're more likely to be influenced by what our friends are doing," said Venkatraman, chair of the university's School of Management Information Systems Department. And with social media networks, "our friends need not be just friends in a physical world, but people who are like us who share our interest," he said.

For example, he said, newspaper critic reviews and advertising used to be primary motivations for someone to go see a new movie.

But now, reviews by several friends on a network of movie fans can be more influential because the film "has been ratified and amplified by my social network rather than just endorsed by The San Francisco Chronicle," Venkatraman said.

And with the acquisition of FriendFeed, a 2-year-old Mountain View company headed by former Google executives, Venkatraman said Facebook now has access to a staff that can develop techniques to do data mining on what "social people are doing."

Then again, there are no guarantees that Facebook will succeed. Ray Valdes, an analyst with Gartner Research, said many tech companies have had a vision for "world domination," from "Microsoft to Amazon to Google to others that enjoyed a moment in the sun, such as Netscape."

Lags behind Google

Forrester's Jeremiah Owyang said Facebook is still far behind Google as the Web's dominant entity, although that could change if it crosses the 500 million member mark.

And he noted that social media users have tended to migrate quickly from once-hot networks like Friendster and MySpace.

"I don't expect there will be a king of the hill for a long period of time," he said.