Facebook Is Trying To Become Your Entire Online World. And Succeeding.

Facebook is working towards an ecosystem that the world will come to rely on.

Facebook started with humble beginnings; it was a social network designed by college students.

With amazing speed, it gained popularity for sharing anything and everything. Today with about 1.59 billion users, it is a global network that is virtually unopposed by any other network of any kind.

“I’m here to build something for the long-term”, Mark Zuckerberg had said a few years ago, about Facebook, and he is indeed doing that.

Already the world’s biggest platform (except maybe Google’s), Facebook is clearly working on integrating all manners of features, functionalities and uses that people are using on other platforms and bringing them under one huge roof.

Having one cool feature under you is never enough. Facebook realised this a while ago and got started on a model of becoming the one-stop-shop for all online and social needs. This is when it started aspiring to move away from being just a social sharing network, to becoming an entire ecosystem.

Over the years, quite like the other two internet giants Google and Microsoft, Facebook has been acquiring companies from all over the globe, and across all forms of industry.
It finds companies that are innovative, are developing new technology and buys them out.

One of the best examples being that of Instagram, acquired by Facebook in 2012.

It was around 2012 that Facebook started seeing a dip in its usage; it was not the cool thing anymore and people were starting to get bored of it.
Add to that, Facebook in terms of a website was great, but in terms of a mobile app, it needed a lot of work, Instagram on the other hand didn’t.

A photo-based social media platform, Instagram was launched in 2010 as a free mobile app. By April 2012, it had about a 100 million users, and was bought out by Facebook.
Instagram now runs as a separate entity while Facebook functions as a parent company, with both making hay out of their individual arenas.

Buying out Instagram bought back to Facebook a lot of the coolness quotient it’d had lost, and Instagram’s acquisition helped in terms of updating Facebook’s app quality.

Later, to increase its outreach, Facebook recently and famously bought out WhatsApp, the world’s foremost Instant Messenger app.
Much like Instagram, WhatsApp also works as a separate entity within the parent company of Facebook. And one can see the autonomy — WhatsApp has only gotten better since the acquisition.

While Whatsapp and Instagram might seem like they don’t really bring a lot to Facebook, they actually did. More than we will ever know, being on the outside, looking in.
What we can say, with surety is that both Instagram and WhatsApp have been immensely profitable to the company in terms of data as well in outreach.

Facebook too, is improving of it’s own accord.

Facebook ads aren’t just the irritating thing on the edge of your screen anymore. Instead, Facebook quick-loads ads as per your search history, enabling marketers to target audiences, making the ad-world on Facebook effective, and thus very efficient.

The faster things load for us, the more we click on them, is universal behaviour and Facebook is cashing-in on that. Smartly too.

Not only is Facebook quick-loading ads, it’s doing that to articles too — it is integrating instant loading of News links and articles into its platform, making Facebook the resource for information.
Integrating links from across the web assures Facebook that you log on when you need to know what’s new. It doesn’t want you going to News sites — it’ll bring news to you!

Facebook however doesn’t stop there. It funnels in updates about what’s trending around you, in a corner on top of the page.
This, in simple words, keeps you on Facebook longer and away from the external websites you might have explored for reading up on them.

Facebook is also giving shopping websites a run for their money, by integrating shopping features right into their social media portal. They’ve made it a seamless experience by allowing business, entrepreneurs, and anyone else, to create a standalone-entity page for themselves, put up buying options, so customers and followers can access dedicated shopping feeds and satisfy all her cravings right from her Facebook profile!

There’s more.

Two recent additions to Facebook are ‘M’, Facebook’s AI based assistant and Pay-via-Messenger that allows you to transact directly via Facebook Messenger.

M, Facebook’s version of a personal assistant, is clearly in competition with Microsoft’s Cortana, Apple’s Siri and Google’s Now, and the Pay-via-Messenger option. While this text-based virtual assistant is only in its infancy and is still under testing with a select few users, their feedback suggests that M is more powerful than anticipated and extremely capable already; however is not as integrated into the device apps like the other. Yet.

Pay-via-Messenger is another feature Facebook has added recently, which allows the users to use their debit cards to transfer money to another Facebook user while on chat on Messenger.
Using only debit cards right now allows Facebook to not charge service fee for the transactions and maintain security for its users.

Thats not all. Facebook is never going to become a dodgy old fuddy-duddy and it takes it’s role of entertainment quite seriously. To make social media fun, Facebook continues to brings in features like Doodles, Picture-in-Video, On-This-Day, Live-Streaming-Video, GIF Messages and a lot more.

Their Messenger is one of the best out there, bested ironically by WhatsApp, if any one.

Okay, now that I’ve told you how aggressively Facebook has been bringing new things under it’s roof, let us now focus on the “how”.

While some is innovation, some of it has been good business deals. Facebook has been involved in some of the biggest and the best acquisition deals in the last few years.

One example of this would be the “Like” button on Facebook, which was famously borrowed from Friendfeed after Facebook took it over. The cool thing that Facebook does when it recognises all your friends in pictures comes from technology from Face.com, while Facebook’s gifting features come from Karma.

So, a lot of Facebook’s cool features come from companies it bought out over the years. Along with cool features, Facebook also likes to have cool people working for it, and it doesn’t shy away from buying things out for that. Nextstop, Drop.io, and Hot Potato would make it to the top of the list of companies that Facebook acquired for its personnel, though Friendfeed also brought Facebook some good ex-Google employees.

There’s no end in sight, so I may as well stop, at some point.

While Facebook is buying some and innovating some, it is indeed, and quite certainly, modelling itself towards becoming the one-stop-shop for its users. A company of its humble beginnings, has made a huge, indelible mark on the world, and it is heartening to see it still chipping aay at opportunities to improve.

It is working towards making and becoming a network that is all encompassing, an ecosystem that the world will come to rely on.

Next stop, education, Facebook?

Originally published at Chip-Monks.