THE FUTURE OF FACEBOOK

Facebook is a social media platform that has the most monthly users at 2 billion every month. (via techcrunch.com) As the biggest social platform, Facebook has done many things to ensure its position at the top. From the very beginning of Facebook where only basic chatting was included, it slowly improved in every aspect such as creating options to make groups and start an event. As it continues to grow, many people take advantage of its large user base to promote their products. So, ads are included on the side to maintain its "free to use" status. For now, Facebook also introduced live video and Facebook story to allow users to communicate more easily with their audience. Somewhere in the middle they also launched free WiFi in rural areas and introduced Facebook lite to make it easier to have access to Facebook. That is it for now, but what can Facebook offer in the future to maintain the top spot?

VR world

Before this, Facebook launched their first attempt to bring VR into common use by introducing Spaces. It is an application that allows users to create avatars and use them to communicate with others while wearing an Oculus VR headset. This is the most foreseeable improvement that may be done by Facebook in the near future.

Merging Messenger and Whatsapp

Facebook bought Whatsapp at the price of $19 billion in the year 2014. Since then, Whatsapp has changed minorly and still manage to be the most used messaging platform. Messenger, on the other hand, is also growing steadily but still trailing from Whatsapp. Many users now have two applications side by side on their smartphones because not all people have Whatsapp and vice versa. Although Mark Zuckerberg did promise to let the two apps co-exist, it is still not a bad idea to have both of it merged, what do you think?

Make Facebook an all-around social media platform

For now, Facebook actually owns Instagram, Whatsapp and 61 other companies. Users like us now have many social media apps on our smartphones. I think that the ultimate goal of Facebook is to be a universal platform that does everything in one application, making life simpler.You may argue that users only used it for a certain function that an application provides, but the change is quite predictable. Facebook has added many features that also existed in other social media applications, such as the story function that once only existed on Instagram.

Closing Words

I am very eager to see how the social media giant will make its next move. A wrong move in this fast paced world can make even the biggest competitor fall in a second. This has been proven by the once best mobile phone company-- Nokia. However, this also gives users like us an advantage because the social media giants will continue to make improvements for us to stay in the spotlight. As for now, good night.

Reference links: https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/facebook-2-billion-users/
                           http://time.com/4881487/facebook-vr-spaces-preview/
                           http://www.knowyourmobile.com/mobile-phones/whatsapp/21430/whatsapp-vs-facebook-messenger-features-differences-compared-which-is-best