Facebook’s Future Is Contextual

Bildschirmfoto 2013-01-20 um 12.54.03Robert Scoble went to Facebook’s headquarter and interviewed various teams about where the future of Facebook lies. Before using this for his book “The age of Context”, he summed up some of his interviews in a four point thesis:

1. Everything you do on Facebook will affect what comes in your view in the future. If you like crappy things that you don’t care about, you’ll see more crappy brands that you don’t care about in the future and it might even affect your experiences when you walk into bars, churches, schools, shopping malls, etc. Using Highlight, for instance, I can see what kinds of things you like and I’ll treat you a lot differently based on what you’ve liked.

2. Facebook is teachable. If you hide items, you’ll see fewer of those kinds of items in the future. Like more items and you’ll see more of those in the future.

3. Facebook is looking to help you distribute content to who you want to distribute to. Facebook gets a lot better if you put each of your friends into either your “close friend” or “acquaintance” list. Put family members on your family list, and you’ll be able to send photos just to your family members very easily. Spending some time tuning your friends lists dramatically increases the quality of your feeds and also lets you see items from your friends and family so you don’t miss them.

4. Facebook’s new gift feature will be able to build new kinds of stores in the future. If I buy a gift, like I did for Sam Levin, who got engaged last night, Facebook can learn about what kinds of things I like to buy for people, but it also lets Sam switch his gift without letting me know, so now Facebook knows more about the kinds of things Sam likes to receive.

After all, this sounds promising and makes Facebook look exciting again. Next to some insights, he collected some photos from the campus.
Read the interview here. Follow Robert on Twitter: @Scobleizer

 

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