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What’s in store for Facebook in 2008?

Posted in Digital, Mel Varley, Latest reporters' blogs January 11th, 2008 by Melinda Varley

There’s no denying that last year was the year of social networks and Facebook definitely took the most column inches in spite of its older rivals MySpace and Bebo. But what must the site do to keep on top of its game?

As the saying goes, when you come in at the top of your game there’s nowhere left to go but down. And Facebook definitely sky rocketed to popularity last year, boasting more than 50 million users worldwide less than 12 months after its global launch.

Internet speculation in the past few days has been suggesting that Facebook fix its privacy issues after a host of stories last year speculated that personal information was being misused.

After the launch of its ad platform Beacon, even more users complained as they were having their online purchases shared as well as other internet activity.

Facebook’s advantage is that since its launch it has managed to introduce a host of new applications to interested users. This is what has got users asking what next and when will the social networking site run out of ideas?

To be honest, if it wasn’t for Christmas and New Year I wouldn’t have logged on to Facebook over the past two months, and there’s only so many holidays in one year.

I think we are getting over Facebook, I know I am, and they’ve got to think of something truly wonderful and entertaining in order to keep us visiting. But what could they offer that we can’t find somewhere else?

Some have predicted that Facebook will become our homepage, the place  we login every morning and we will navigate our way around the internet from our profile page. We’ll quickly check our ‘mini feed’, then check our bank balance, order our groceries, catch up on the latest news headlines and figure out what movie we’ll watch on TV tonight.

There is no end to the possibilities of Facebook – but how quickly can it come up with them in order to keep us interested? Perhaps it needs to take a step back from becoming the Holy Grail of advertising and focus on its users.