Facebook Celebrates 10th Birthday

“We’re really at this point where we can take a step back and think about the next big things that we want to do.” - Mark Zuckerberg, on his decade-old company

Mark Zuckerberg’s little company designed to keep Harvard graduates in touch has changed the world and now the little site that could is one of the most important and frequently visited sites on the planet. Boasting more than 1.2 billion users, $135 billion in worth, and literally millions of pictures people wish they could take down, Facebook is now entering the next major part of its existence: puberty.

I wish I could say I came up with that puberty line, but it’s on the front of the latest Newsweek, along with a picture of Zuckerberg having a laugh.

The interview shows plenty of reasons why Zuckerberg can sit there, with his arms comfortably crossed, and reflect with a smile. Nearly half of the internet-using global population has a page and it is only matched by Google in terms of growth. And, while the company has its public failures and ethical conundrums, no one can deny its power, influence, and success.

As for what’s next, Zuckerberg is only too happy to share. After buying Instagram, Facebook is looking to diversify and is starting with a series of stand-alone apps called Facebook Creative Labs. The in-house developed apps are looking to move Facebook off of Facebook or, in the words of Zuckerberg himself, “We just think that there are all these different ways that people want to share, and that compressing them all into a single blue app is not the right format of the future.”

Monetization of the free service, especially as subscribers move to other platforms, has been one of Facebook’s biggest obstacles. They have saturated the market and are competing with places like Twitter and Snapchat, the latter of which refused a $3 billion offer by Facebook last year.

Facebook’s future, then, may just be in spreading outside itself and keeping people engaged and sharing in ways they like. Rather than adding features that largely get unused on the site itself, the company is looking to branch out.

At ten years old, Facebook has done a lot of growing in the public eye and may not even exist in the way we know ten years from now. But as for Zuckerberg, he seems quite content to smile.