F8: Facebook going for the business market

Facebook sees a role for itself in the business market. During its annual developers conference F8 Facebook announced a few new tools to do this with. The most important one is undoubtedly the Messenger Platform with which it is possible to develop apps to reach the 600 million Facebook accounts. Also LiveRail a tool to share videos is expanding, it can now be used to distribute adverts. This makes Facebook a competitor to Google´s DoubleClick and Twitter´s MoPub. How Facebook users react to ads is already known, most don´t like it. But now that apps for Facebook are increasingly popular developers and their customers want to know how to develop and use these. For this purpose Facebook has made available Analystics for Apps, a free tool which allows you to measure the use and functionality of apps. We will have to see if Facebook is able to conquer the professional and business market, especially seeing the competition from Google, LinkedIn and Twitter, and also from Microsoft and Apple/IBM. However, based on the huge amount of users they are very likely to at least get a part of the market, if only because there are so many solopreneurs and small companies already on Facebook.