Facebook has become a lot more than a social networking site.With 200 million visitors, 850 million photos, 8 million videos, and one fifth of all internet users with a Facebook account, Facebook is changing the future of the internet and how it will be defined.

The Facebook vision is centred around the “Social Graph”. This is the place where people meet, use their real names, addresses, share friends, likes and dislikes. It is also the place where we store our online diary which contains our most personal data. Facebook stores all our news, birthday wishes, and trashy bits of data on roughly 40,000 servers. This data is protected from the Google Crawlers. With Facebook Connect we can access our data, network and upload information from over 10,000 different sites and applications.

As a search engine Facebook could  pose a formidable foe to Google. Imagine searching friends feeds for opinions on  purchasing a new car model. Word of Mouth has always been the strongest form of advertising there is and one could argue a more powerful influencer in a purchase decision than  the Google algorithum.

Facebook Connect and Creative APIs available through Open Stream allow us to read our friends news feeds outside of Facebook. However, everytime we use these features more data is collected on us. This begs the question on where the company is going in terms of adhering to permission-based principles and our privacy. Users have already rebelled twice when Facebook attempted non-permission based personalized advertising that was creepy. Behavorial targeting that results in the delivery of relevant ad copy is fine as long as it relies on aggregage data or anonymous search activity.

The Facebook team has been anxious to sink its teeth into a serious revenue model but the fact is that models are elusive in the Social Media space. You have to keep experimenting until you get it right. They may have a winner with the Live Stream Box, a feature that any website owner can enable to allow Facebook users to connect, share and post updates in real-time as they witness an event online. There are a whole lot of advertisers who would be interested in targeted ads on aggregator sites showing live events. As long as Facebook has the permission of its users to aggregate the content partnership with other media could be very fruitful. Digg had an idea to partner with news sites in providing a widget that enabled  access to their vast vault of user generated content.

Very soon the models will be in place and people will be participating in social sites to enact community based commerce.