The Future of Facebook Open Forciete Project collected web interviews with 30 of the world's leading tech thinkers across categories spanning society, technology, economics, environment, and politics. These are seven core visions that emerged during the process. Facebook will become a more pervasive part of the network fabric. Network fabric of our lives from being a provider of voice and video services to being the place that we share our memory's thoughts and dreams to be the venue for interactions with government citizens and businesses. It will be something that follows us in a lot of different places where a like becomes something that's nearly as valuable as a hyperlink in less current trans-reverse. By 2015, I think the Facebook experiences a series of tabs for everything in your life. You can search there, you can find there, you can buy there, you can sell there, you can communicate there, you can find online dating there, you can manage your relationships there. I think that's really the dashboard for life. I think they'll get there. So I think increasingly, you know, Facebook will take on that role of the most public persona that you have, the one that's the most bland and palatable. One that's unlikely to draw any ill will from any quarter. The most public and bland personality a person could put forward, like putting it on like a business suit. And the other aspects of the person's interests and character and some that might be, or a parochial like a particular political party or something that might be questionable or not perceived as professional, would be unlikely to be done in Facebook. Divided up in a dozen of other apps. And the young people will be defecting so this person will be 45 or 50. The average person will be in 18 year olds. I see Facebook peeking and wintering. It'll either die of it on the court because people get bored or tired or they start to feel it's more of an exhausting thing than it is an energizing thing. And once people start to experience Facebook as the man, or once we have an American society that rather than its youth culture trying desperately to get on American Idol, the youth culture is going to be more about getting beyond American Idol. You'll see people leaving a service that's about sales. They won't see them all as the coolest place to be. And that's just a matter of time. That's just a cycle. It's ultimately going to peek in terms of its online capacity and terms of how many users it can draw in. It's going to probably peek in terms of how complex and contextual its online communication sort of value is going to be. So as fast as it can extend itself into the offline world in terms of physical commerce, location, technology, doing something with mobile more than just having it as a miniature of the online Facebook and giving it to completely different lines of business and sort of facets of consumer lifestyle are going to be critical to its survival. Otherwise, it will just end up being another AOL peeking at several hundred million users and ultimately being replaced by the next big thing. I think that the future lies in the creation of thriving small businesses and Facebook doesn't really offer a lot of opportunities to do that. If I'm running Facebook, I would find a way to imbue it with a sense of entrepreneurialism and create mixed media, mixed reality events that tie the physical world back to the platform in some way that enables them to generate revenue from their advertisers and from the way people use the platform. The ability for humans to join groups and understand and think as groups is one of the greatest forces that shapes us historically and Facebook could enable that. A Facebook could connect us to other people, could reduce the barriers between our minds and actually help us function more collectively in groups, maybe even something towards what I like to think of as group minds, collective consciousness or what people may call the global brain. To the extent that it connects us and helps us see and understand and empathize with what other people are experiencing, it will actually bring us closer together and start to create a kind of smarter human super organism, which could be a good thing for the world. Since this project began, Facebook has continued its rapid global expansion. Structurally shifted to timeline, fought off the rise of Google Plus, brought into its experimentation with credits, been sued for allegedly grabbing mobile users' address book data, has been increasingly utilized by governments for surveillance, and is now preparing for a $100 billion IPO. As Facebook approaches 1 billion users, its socioeconomic influence is clearly on the rise, and understanding the nature of the world's most significant social network is more important now than ever. So we urge you, the public, to continue asking questions and looking for answers about the intentions and impact of Facebook and other emergent social structures. The open-forced-ite methodology we view to lies during this process is open source and can be applied to any future topic. Let's get smarter at building visions of our increasingly complex world together. The world's most important and most significant social network is the world's most significant social network. The world's most important and most significant social network is the world's most significant social network. The world's most important and most significant social network is the world's most significant social network. The world's most important and most significant social network is the world's most significant social network. The world's most important and most significant social network is the world's most significant social network.