February 8, 2009 by Matt Thomas
The next step for Facebook was to let people with email addresses from corporations as well as universities join, this was when the site started getting more flashy. The poke feature had been a staple of the site since its inception though more and more new features kept getting added and Facebook became something more like what we know and love today.
The accessibility also improved vastly with the abandonment of the institution specific friend policy – you were originally only able to be friends with people from the same institution as you.
This paved the way for the logical extension of the whole thing in 2006, when Facebook finally let anyone join. Since then the whole thing has completely exploded in terms of users as well as in terms of functionality. Facebook has opened up the site to developers who provide a seemingly unlimited array of applications, the site is barely recognisable from what it was even two years ago.
So what does the future hold for Facebook and its 150 million members? Well, in terms of the site itself, Facebook Connect is the big news, the application will allow users to transpose their Facebook profiles, friends etc. into other social networking platforms. However, on the business side, there’s also the very real prospect that they will either be bought by one of the big guns in the same way that YouTube was or that they will start gobbling up smaller social networking sites themselves – they attempted to acquire twitter last year.
Basically the possibilities are limitless. Aaron Sorkin is even planning a film about their success. Not bad for a five-year-old, eh?
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