Ambitious Facebook Aims to Expand its Web Operations

Social network leader Facebook has several ambitious plans to make its users’ experience even more delightful. However, the past year’s privacy concerns have forced it to be careful with its plans to innovate its social network operations.

The company’s latest feature ‘Facebook Connect’ enables users to log onto other sites with their Facebook id and see what their friends are upto on those sites. Moreover, it provides an opportunity to the users to broadcast their actions on those sites to their Facebook friends.

It is said that in the coming few weeks time, several popular sites such as Digg, Geni, Hulu, and those belonging to the San Francisco Chronicle and the Discovery Channel will include this unique service into their Web pages.

Facebook Connect is a creative thought that will abide by the privacy rules. Rather than attempting to amass information about their members, the Web stalwarts have announced plans to share at least some of the data so that users would not require entering the same id information repeatedly on different Web sites.

The major benefit of this idea is that it will give rise to new social Web as conversations among friends will penetrate even those sites which have not seen the social light so far. For instance, a user viewing a video on a particular site can inform his Facebook friends and invite them to watch the video together at that site. This will infuse more networking as all would be able to comment, discuss or share their thoughts regarding the video with each other at the same time.

Though rivals MySpace, Google and Yahoo have announced similar programs this year, Facebook seems to be ahead of them by using its self data-sharing technology. Being ahead at such a crucial period is, in fact, essential for Facebook as competition is intense and it will have to dominate to sustain a major place in the online socializing era.

While all this is fine, it is revenue that makes the engine work for any company, and Facebook will have to swim against the tide to create a stable path for generating revenue from advertising.

The advantage with Facebook is that it has detailed information about its over 120 million users worldwide, including their likes and dislikes and with whom they are connected. If a user permits Facebook to use this data, it could assist other sites to come up with more personalized ads targeted towards the users. Hence, advertisers will have to learn thoroughly as to how the process functions so that they can adopt the pull strategy to lure users to buy.

Now it’s all upto adhering to the privacy rules and Facebook could be able to create an effective streamline of revenues with its Connect program.