Next evolution for Facebook

There is often talking of how Facebook has to evolve and what would be the next thing to overtake Facebook, if it doesn’t. Twitter got lots of hype, but as I had suspected, it did not have the fire to become a phenomenon in most countries. There are reports now that Twitter is dying. If it does, it will save celebrities some money for the people who tweet on their behalf. CNN published a report in January this year indicating that twitter growth has flattened which made this gossip even more relevant.

Facebook has become the face of social media although the social media existed much before Facebook gained popularity. Blogs and sharing websites such as Flickr, slideshare and YouTube have always been popular. There were other networking sites such as Ning and myfamily.com which lost relevance because Facebook gave the capabilities of all social networking websites, and even the options of sharing photos, videos and blogs too. But, I believe this open-for-all is its biggest weak point. This is why LinkedIn is still popular for professional contacts because most people do not want to mix up their contacts from different spheres. I believe if Facebook can evolve to the next technology where the contacts are grouped by family, professional, classmates, friends, etc. and the user has an option to chose which group can see his post or photos, I think that will be very liberating for the users. There might be even sub-pages of Facebook profile such as professional, family & friends, networking etc, and only the people who are given access to certain page can see it. There is an option of ‘limited’ profile presently, but it is too vague to be useful. If Facebook can ensure privacy in the social networking, it might take over more social media networks.