Hisham Sarwar
Just 7 months ago, Google Map introduced a feature that took on Facebook pages with the follow feature for tracking businesses. In one of the biggest announcement made by Facebook at the F8 developer conference, it was revealed that the company is redesigning the social media portal around the group and the events. It was also revealed in the conference that a new feature calling ‘Facebook Dating‘ will be introduced in more countries. It will help you hook up with your crush secretly.
Every year Facebook comes up with new surprises by rolling out new features. It started as a simple social media connectivity website. Today, from acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp to introducing amazing new features like a marketplace for buying and selling, Facebook Live, promoting videos and encouraging more videos by allowing the publishers to make money from advertisements tells a lot about company’s future plans.
It seems like Facebook wants to be a one-stop shop for everything. It tells you about your current local weather early in the morning, shows the posts from your close friends you engage the most and a lot more. Recently, Facebook has introduced a device called ‘Portal‘. It is a device that costs around $199. It is a smart way to make a video call and has an amazing AI featured called ‘Alexa‘.
The portal connects with Facebook Messenger, sends out the notifications, shares the content and also has a smart camera for a video call which adjusts to your movement in the room through a smart built-in AI.
The voice recognition game is taking over the gadgets in order to support and facilitate human beings. Google has a voice assistant, iPhone has a voice assistant, modern day cars are equipped with a voice assistant and here comes Facebook, it also has its own voice/video portal now.
In an attempt to facilitate users, Facebook is rolling out all features which one needs in order to carry out day to day operations. In the future, we should not be surprised if we are presented with new amazing features such as Facebook payment systems, Facebook watch, not the watch party but a watch for your wrist and most importantly Facebook’s own search engine.
We know, data is the new oil. Every key player in the game wants to get a competitive advantage over data. Perhaps the 10-year photo challenge was also a stepping stone to enter the data game in the long run.
Despite all the problems the company has been facing in the last two years, the Cambridge data leak or unsecured passwords left on the public servers by the third party applications raise a lot of questions about out facebook security. It also raises an eyebrow about Facebook exercising efforts to grab every bit of information about people who use its services.
Facebook is gathering so much information about us and our surroundings, about our best friends, about how are we feeling in a day, about what we are up to and our future plans, the data is already not private anymore.
Is Google in trouble?
Google is the world’s biggest search engine. It is big because it has huge information backed by Artificial Intelligence and bots that assist users in search results.
Google’s Supremacy is not guaranteed. After all, it was just over a decade ago Yahoo was the search engine king but Google smartly outsmarted Yahoo with its better artificial Intelligence and loads of information.
Facebook is on its way of gathering information smartly and the new features rolling out frequently indicate the company’s direction for the future.
The eye is on the data, we the humans. In woe to make our life better, closely connected, the dependency on the portal is also increasing in the future. One can see the signs right now. Facebook has a number of users higher than the number of cars on the road and planes in the sky all over the world.
Future seems to be Facebook. Question is, are we ready for it?
FB’s product ‘Portal’ is the 1st step here. It is video call right now using artificial intelligence but the next step could well be ‘Questions’ and instead of fetching the answers from the internet credible resources, Facebook may be collecting and giving information from its own portal.
