Facebook: What’s Next?

Google, the Mecca of top minds in computing, the dream workplace of fresh-grad software engineers, is shaken by a tremor of brain drain. Or rather, a brain haemorrhage. And it is Facebook who struck the blow. It started with Sheryl Sandberg, once Google’s Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations, now Facebook’s first Chief Operating Officer. Then Erik Tseng, a high level product manager of Google’s Android hopped on to Facebook to lead its mobile strategy. Trailing along was Google’s ‘rockstar’ developer and head of the Chrome OS project, Matthew Papakipos. He went to Facebook right before the completion of Chrome OS.

Today, more than 100 Googlers have defected to Facebook amidst extraordinary counteroffers on behalf of Facebook. Tech Crunch joked that Googlers should consider an offer from Facebook just for the sake of getting Google to drastically increase their salary.

The mass migration of Googlers to Facebook indicates one thing: Facebook might just be the next big thing.

And it may even be bigger than Google. Still a privately held company, analysts are predicting that Facebook’s IPO would be larger than Google’s when Google went public in 2004, reports The Financial Times. Part of the reason why those brilliant Silicon Valley luminaries at Google are flocking to the whelp of a company that is Facebook, is to own a small chunk of a company that might, as the whispers go, be valuated at $100 billion not too far in the future, reports Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch.

Analysts are predicting that Facebook’s IPO would be larger than Google’s

The social network company is going to get bigger than the Facebook as we know it today, because it is just the beginning of something truly revolutionary. Not satisfied with permeating the fabric of our online social life, Facebook aims to extend its tentacles to the mobile platform (now it makes sense to steal Google’s Tseng and Papakipos). Joe Hewitt, one of Firefox’s founders, developed the immensely popular Facebook iPhone app. The new Places feature brings real-world interaction with Facebook to another level, by feeding your current location to Facebook via your mobile. Tech Crunch reports rumours that both Hewitt and Papakipos are in charge of a ‘top secret’ Facebook initiative, to create a Facebook phone to counter the competition from Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android phones.

Hitting the mobile market is the next sensible step, as there is only so much you can do with a website alone, unless you lug a laptop around with you everywhere you go. As Arrington points out, there is only so much Facebook could reach with an app on those platforms, unless it creates its own tight integration with a mobile operating system.

Then there is Facebook Connect, which enables you to log onto websites outside Facebook, using your Facebook account, and the new Facebook Credits which critics think might be able to usurp PayPal in the future. Both Facebook Connect and Credits could lay the groundwork to transform the Facebook platform into a global village that transcends borders, with its own passport (your Facebook account) and currency (Facebook Credits).

Facebook has the potential to be bigger than Microsoft. Bill Gates created the most popular platform for personal computing, but Zuckerberg created a platform that embeds itself into a more fundamental aspect of human life: our social networks. In The Facebook Effect, Zuckerberg likens social networking to Moore’s law – that processor capability grows exponentially over the years. The quantity of information exchanged over social networks should increase exponentially over subsequent years. Zuckerberg thinks that we are inevitably heading towards a more transparent world, a zeitgeist some find discomforting. Regardless, he sees Facebook as a tool to help people adopt openness. For Zuckerberg, an open world is a more responsible world.