If Silicon Valley technology companies go through something like the stages of life, then Facebook is in its adolescence — growing quickly, and struggling to find its identity.
That it is rapidly bulking up is no longer in question. The latest figures from comScore show Facebook to be the fourth-largest site in the world, with a 340m unique visitors, trailing only the sites of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. Facebook has added 208m visitors in the past year, a 157 per cent growth rate that has allowed it to surpass MySpace, Amazon and Wikipedia.
That’s an astounding accomplishment for a company that is just 5-years-old. But Facebook’s No. 4 ranking is even more impressive when you consider that all those visitors are coming to just one site — Facebook.com. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo may still be larger, but they are counting visitors to their entire stable of sites.
Yet besides connecting this ever-expanding social graph and helping its users share information with one another, Facebook seems unsure what to do with this audience. Instead, it is leaving that mostly up to the developers on its fast-growing platform.
Since the platform was launched two years ago, games have emerged as the most popular category of applications. But the first e-commerce applications have started to appear, the beginning of a transformation that could turn Facebook into a big destination for online shopping.
As it continues to draw more visitors to its own site, Facebook is also working to embed itself in other sites across the web. To enable this cross-web pollination, Facebook last year launched Connect, which lets users log into other websites with their Facebook credentials. Now Facebook is making it easier for users to share information from other websites back into their news feeds, with an updated version of the Open Stream API.
Facebook has also been trying to mind its manners when it comes to search. In a bid designed to make the site less attractive to casual singles looking for a date, Facebook has removed the ability to search for other users based on their relationship status. Adolescents, it seems, can’t grow up fast enough.
