Big new Facebook features coming soon?

Facebook’s f8 developers conference takes place today and there are plenty of rumours flying around about what the social network has up its sleeve.

In just over a year, Facebook has gone from 350 million users to more than 750 million, so, although to most of us, a developers conference is about as interesting as watching paint dry, F8 is important because of the impact it may have on our businesses and our customers.

Here are three of the key things that, if the rumours are to be believed, will be high on the agenda:

1. Music

One of the biggest rumours of the past few weeks has been that Facebook will be announcing a music partnership with Spotify soon. As the first panel of the conference is The Future of Digital Music with speakers including Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify and Bob Pittman, chairman of Clear Channel Media and Entertainment, this seems likely.

2. Video and Film

Similarly, there have been suggestions that users will also be able to do something similar with video content as well as big movies. Facebook certainly has the power to make inroads into the movie industry giants as it has such a massive user base.

3. Redesign

Facebook insiders are speculating about a BIG redesign which will really shake up our personal profiles, including an integrated media platform, to tie in well with the rumoured music, video and film partnerships.

All of this makes sense according to David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect(source CNBC) who thinks that Facebook has 3 primary goals that will be exemplified in the announcements they make on Thursday.

  1. They want to increase their revenues through something they call Facebook Credits. They want to give you more stuff you can buy inside the Facebook ecosystem. So, obviously, music is part of that, and video is probably going to be part of that as well.
  2. They also want to increase usage of Facebook, so that if they can make you feel that Facebook is more central to your life because you’re listening to more music and listening to more video inside Facebook in addition to all the other things you do there, that’s a plus as well.
  3. They also really want to reinforce Facebook’s use as a mobile device. One of the things that I really also suspect is going to come out of Thursday’s announcement is some significant new structural changes in the way Facebook works on mobile….Facebook is effectively moving off the desktop, off the laptop, off everything except for on mobile devices, which includes phones and tablets.

We’ll know more by the end of the day…so watch this space!

 

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