Facebook Is More or Less Done

Yes, I’m trying out Google+.

No, I’m not yet convinced that it will kill Facebook. (Is that even possible?)

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook

But the CNN Tech coverage of this week’s big announcement from Facebook gave an interesting air to Mark Zuckerberg’s view of where his pet project is headed.

First: the big announcement. Facebook now has video chat via Skype. While it does seem clear that they’ve been working on this for some time, it’s awfully interesting that the big announcement took place without much drama only 1 week after Google+ announced “Hangouts,” which includes group video chat. (Zuckerberg says group chat isn’t important right now since most Skype users only chat 1 on 1 via video.)

The second big announcement was apparently an afterthought: Zuckerberg confirmed that Facebook now has 750 million users.

But what seems most interesting to me about this coverage was the quote from Zuckerberg about Facebook. The CNN Tech coverage gave the impression that Zuckerberg and his Facebook pals have accomplished their big goals. Third parties will be developing new “features” for Facebook, rather than Facebook itself, Facebook isn’t afraid of Google+, etc.

One quote, in particular, stood out to me. I had to look elsewhere for the entire sentence just to be sure I wasn’t misunderstanding it.

“Social networking is at an inflection point,” he said. “Mostly it was about connecting people and there was still this question about whether social networking was going to be this widespread, ubiquitous service in the world. That chapter is more or less done at this point.”

This is certainly lifted out of context, but really… what does he mean? It certainly left me wondering if Facebook has reached a point where they feel like they can sit back and relax.

If so… all I can say is, “Wow. Great timing.”

Google is coming.

Photo: Guillaume Paumier

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