Random Prediction On Facebook’s Future

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about online identity & facebook. I’ve seen a lot of people complain about facebook changes over the past few months. There’s issues with privacy. There’s the flaws in usability. Lastly, there’s the ever increasing flood of crap that facebook continues to force into the user experience. If facebook continues to overwhelm the user, and under deliver on the necessities such as usability and privacy- what will be their enduring value proposition?

As facebook becomes more and more common on a myriad of sites, I think facebook (along with google) is vying for what will be the next major advancement in social media- Identity. Currently on the web you need little more than a fake name and picture cut from a magazine to register an account as someone entirely different from yourself. While the loose structure of current online identity begets many of the things techies adore about the internet, it also creates serious cases of virtual identity theft.

In past years, defense of one’s personal identity had to be carried out on a case by case, site by site basis. This has created back breaking work for the user and made it nearly impossible to verify identity across sites. Then came open authentication and suddenly a login to facebook/twitter/google could be used to register on various other social sites. Thus the identity is verified across sites under a single username. This make protection and isolation of identity a single step rather then several.

My prediction is that facebook’s oauth capabilities are the beginning of their attempts to carve out a identity niche. Sure, I bet they have plans to stay a top ranked social site, but just in case they’re making sure they survive by initiating the process to create cross site identification. While facebook’s friend connect isn’t anything new, the developing concept of verified virtual identity is. With google also on the oauth train it will be interesting to see who develops a full virtual identity management system first.

As social media continues to cater to the niche, whoever presents a way to verify a virtual identity across site is set to score and score big.