I like nothing better than kicking back on the lounge with a good game on TV ordering in my favourite pizza. After all, I've earned my slice of convenience and not having to leave home if I really don't want to. For the future, home for many people will be more than their current abode and will include sites on the web where they will live their lives and interact with the rest of their community from local to global. For many that home will be called Facebook.
A chat with friends about their kid's perceptions on technology came up with some interesting peeks into the future. When asked what the web was, the general reply was Facebook. For an eight year old without access to a computer, this is an interesting reply. Everyone they know from Mum and Dad to their older siblings and Aunty May are on Facebook daily, so to them it's an easy jump to assume Facebook is the web.
No doubt parents agonise over when they should give their kids access to the net and a lot are trying to figure out how to manage those first tentative net surfing steps their child might take into the rest of the world. When they finally get to surf the web, their first port of call for those kids is likely to be Facebook. In fact there is a thinking around that surfing may end up like ashtrays, only for the addicted, and we will have a small finite number of sites we visit, like Facebook, and all the other interests, product sellers and information providers we would normally search for will find us through sites like Facebook. Just like the pizza man finding me on a Friday night.
There will come a time where, if a business is not finding us, we probably won't care about it. Your preferences, your likes, your friends and all of your favourite net interactions will be housed in the bubble of your personality profile on Facebook. With consumer sites like Copious ( see previous blog ) only working with your Facebook profile likely to increase, the need to surf will become superfluous as B2C sites find you because they have something they know you already like, have shown interest in previously and maybe have purchased something similar before.
Why would companies pay for all the SEO overheads when a Facebook could exposed them to more relevant customers, on a global scale on a 24/7 basis? Why leave the comfy confines of Facebook if all you ever searched for on the web came to you? Online buying communities would spring up where you could buy direct while you have conversations with the seller and the broader community.
Without realising it, we are already programming our needs and wants via our searches, likes and favourites to one day end up at our most popular home site and from there we'll order our pizzas, our entertainment, our groceries and no doubt anything else available, all via the comfy surrounds of Facebook people we know and suppliers we trust.
Facebook, don't leave home without it. Karl Malden would be turning in his grave.
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