Facebook passed three quarters of a BILLION users recently and didn’t bother to announce it because, it’s a metric they believe is no longer ‘relevant’ – WOW – they must have bigger fish to fry…
They announced that bigger fish on Wednesday afternoon. Hello to Facebook’s version of video chat! What does this mean for you? What does this mean for the way we do business? That remains to be seen, it might not seem like a big deal, but either did ‘The Facebook’ all those years ago. The largest social network consisting of 1/7 of the world’s population has paired with Skype (users are averaging 300 million minutes per month of video calling). What could go wrong? A long awaited group chat and more user friendly chat features are also being rolled out.
A beautiful combination: until it kills Skype
Zuckerberg spoke of his vision for social networking in the next 5 years, claiming the next growth surge will come in the development of social apps ontop of the social network infrastructure that already exists. We were glad to hear it, turns out we’re on the same page!
He also wisely talked about leaving this app building to ‘the experts’, and that Facebook is creating the space for smaller app developers to do what they do best. He reminded the audience that a business that specializes in one thing will always be better than a larger business trying to do a million things. This was the first announcement of what he is calling the ‘launching season of 2011’. Makes you wonder what else he’s got cooking.
All of this on the heels of the elusive Google Plus invites that are floating around…BTW – who’s got one they’d like to share?? This is Google’s chance to catch up, but it seems to be losing steam already.