Is Facebook heading for world dominance?

I was just reading an article on the BBC website this morning that focussed on Facebook and how it has now grown to having a global audience of 300 million active users each month.

The Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg stated that they had not expected to make a profit until 2010 but were way ahead of schedule with this.

The site is gathering about 5 million new users each week and this equates to 50 million in the last 75 days.  It is not hard to see therefore that this social networking site is definitely at the cutting edge of all others.  The site’s popularity was evident to me recently when I was on holiday in Europe.  The resort we stayed in hosted a bank of PCs, I think there were about 8 in total and they always had some young person sat in front of them.  I found it really interesting that every time I passed, each and every one of them were on their Facebook page.  I also noticed some older people also using Facebook and this is because it is an excellent way of building networks in the business world also.

Facebook is primarily funded through advertising and what I noticed and don’t think it’s a coincidence is that when I open up my Facebook home page, there are age appropriate adverts on there.  I’m not going to say what they are, but one could take offence with some of them if one didn’t feel as old as they were!

Companies who are not using Facebook to promote their products through direct advertising are missing a huge opportunity to get in the face of 300 million people each month.

Facebook Lite (no, not for those looking to save calories while using Facebook)

The recent launch of Facebook Lite has not gone unnoticed either and is probably partly attributable for the recent rapid growth in users.  Facebook Lite will be faster and simpler than the main site because it offers fewer services.  Initially it is designed to support users in developing countries where bandwidth constraints make the current version too slow to use.  At the moment it is only available in India and the US.  Many industry watchers said they believed that even users with good internet connections might well flock to Facebook Lite because of its new look and ease of use.

Twitter seems to be at the forefront of any discussion regarding social networking but I’m not convinced that it can ever match up to the popularity and profitability of Facebook.  If Facebook continues to expand its platform and incorporate some of the Twitter features, this could spell trouble for the Twitter industry.