Quote:
Originally Posted by PR_Glen
micro payments to what though? I don't know many people who use facebook to shop, but even if they did that is nothing new.
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The easiest way to visualize their future plans involves divorcing your thoughts from Facebook.com itself as a website and thinking along the lines of integrated API's/plugins, identity matrices, social demographics and ubiquitous interface design.
They've already had success as a social and advertising/content platform. (Although it must be said that they still have much room to grow as an advertising/content platform on external sites in regards to seamless and invisible sharing of demographic preferences)
Their next step is to become a financial platform - one where receiving, sending, collecting and dispersing funds online is done from person to person, person to business, business to person, business to business and any combination thereof. Facebook is in a unique position to leverage its financial worth in related sectors against risk and gain the trust of financial institutions fairly rapidly.
Combine their user identification platform with a high level of encryption and we will begin to see persons using their FB logins on devices as a secondary means of ID in certain financial transactions.
Developing nations are responsible for billions of dollars in small monetary transactions each year from nation to nation globally. Western Union, Paypal and others have been picking up the slack in this regard, but when Facebook successfully develops its financial platform and pushes it to these markets through mobile payments and social networking, they effectively can corner these emerging markets.
Then there is China. Trust that Zuckerberg will get into that market even if he has to create a completely separate Facebook with a virtual border that the Chinese government has control of (or he will partner with a Chinese social networking site like Ren Ren just to get FB's developer platform recognized over there).
AR likely is going to play a big role in Facebook's future plans, but the technology hasn't really found its place as yet. If FB takes the reigns on that, it could be yet another big push for the corporation.