After attending last week’s Social Business 2010 conference in Petaluma, CA, I am more convinced that Facebook will become the center of the web in a few short years. First, the statistics. With over 400 million users, FB has the 5th largest population on earth. Second, Facebook eclipsed Google in March 2010 for number of daily visits. Users are spending an average of 1hour per day on FB.

Now, the qualitative points. More companies who advertise on TV are concluding their commercials with their Facebook page - NOT their company URL (website address). Of all the Social Media Marketing channels or “touchpoints” that a business could include in their social marketing, Facebook is a must. Companies are realizing that they must “Go where the audience already is, and get them to do what they are already doing”.

Facebook recently had their F8 Developer’s Conference and released new products. They have completely revamped the FB platform improving the ease by which developers can create applications for FB by an order of magnitude - or more. This will accelerate the proliferation of apps. FB’s Open Graph vision will increase the connectedness between different networks such as Yelp, Pandora, CNN, Facebook. The result is more personalization no matter where you go on the internet. 75 major brands have already embraced this and that will accelerate too. The “Like” Button is going rogue, too. It’s going to become ubiquitous across the web. Ultimately, users will help FB index the web for what’s important and popular and that data will automatically feed back to FB’s massive database. Google has to spend $billions to index the web itself. Finally, as Facebook’s reach across the web grows so will it’s advertising revenue, and that means less ad revenue for Google Adwords.