Facebook’s F8 conference shows us the future of how we will use the social network

SOON you will be doing everything through Facebook. Everything from booking a cab, a table at a restaurant and send your friend some money.

Facebook wants to own the internet

EARLIER today at Facebook’s F8 conference, the company unveiled a series of big new changes to everything that is Facebook. Messenger is becoming a platform on its own, Facebook Video is looking to take on YouTube and developers are finally being looked after.

One thing that is clear, is that very soon you won’t be able to do much on the internet without using something to do with Facebook.

Take communicating your friends for example. As consumers move further away from traditional messaging services like SMS and to the likes of Kik and Line, Facebook sees a market it wants to own.

Whether it be messaging your friends or businesses, Facebook is setting up the perfect platform for you to do so through both Messenger and WhatsApp. When Facebook bought WhatsApp last year for $21bn, people thought they were crazy, but now their plans for the service are becoming clearer.

Messenger is turning not just into your main messaging service but a platform on its own. Through Messenger you will pay your friends, create GIFs to send, reserve a table at a restaurant and order yourself a cab. All without leaving the app.

Messenger will now have its own app store.

That’s just right now. Facebook has completely opened up the service for developers to add whatever they want to the platform, who knows what we will be able to do in 12 months time.

Within Facebook itself, the company is looking to turn itself both into your go-to source for news and entertainment.

Think video. As it stands, content creators upload their videos onto YouTube where they hope users will discover and share their video for others to see. The key word there is share.

Why would creators rely on that model when they can just drop their video into social media where the eyeballs already are? Right now, Facebook’s algorithms prioritise videos in your newsfeed over text and picture posts, so users are more likely to like, comment and share videos for more people to watch.

Similarly with news. Over 40 per cent of news read on the internet comes from people finding it on Facebook. That’s a big chunk. The New York Times is even reporting that Facebook is in talks to signing up news publishers to have their content directly hosted on the social network, meaning users wouldn’t even have to open a link to read the news.

Outside of its core services, Facebook owns the future of how we will play video games and watch movies with Oculus, it owns all our pictures with Instagram and even supplies the third-world with internet.

Facebook wants to be where you do everything on the internet. And scarily, it’s on the right tracks.