In the last couple of weeks I received a lot of friend’s requests on Facebook from people I’d never have thought could have joined Facebook. Schoolmates as well as old friends, many of them finally discovered Facebook and joined it. Moreover, the driver who led them to join was to stay in touch with people, new and old friends, colleagues, classmates, relatives.
This is a clear sign that something huge is happening and that there is no doubt Facebook is more and more going mainstream. That said, I started looking at this phenomena from a different standpoint: is Facebook capable of behaving like an operating system? If you look, for example, at the new Facebook iPhone application, everything you need from an operating system is there: messaging, IM, applications, microblogging, presence, live feed, photos, videos…
In my opinion Facebook could potentially be used for 99% of your time as a central dashboard from which you perform any activity on your computer and your mobile phone, but there are five important features that are currently missing.
1) Address Book – I mean the ability to add people in your “Friend’s List” regardless of whether they are subscribed to Facebook or not.
2) Mail Client - Currently Facebook’s messaging service is rather poor and is not ready to become a fully functional mail client. What if Hotmail would be integrated into Facebook? After Live Search, another move to better integrate Facebook with Microsoft’s services.
3) Documents – If I were Facebook, I would buy a service for online documents management as Google did a couple of years ago with Writely which was the basis for Google Docs. This application, together with the powerful mail client mentioned above, would be a killer feature for me.
4) Web Browser – It would be great if I could open any web page from within Facebook itself, leveraging its powerful sharing capabilities. A wordpress/typepad/… blog editor? A Wordpress.com Facebook application is available already, but a similar app for personal wordpress installations is still missing.
5) Calendar/PIM - 30Boxes is already offering it and it seems users like it (about 24.000 monthly active users) even if it’s still a little percentage of the whole FB population.
What do you think? What should Facebook add to become a real operating system? Can we expect to see a new mobile phone “F1” sometime soon? I look forward to your comments.
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