The eyes of the world rest upon Facebook. The site’s user base has grown to over 550 million. Mark Zuckerberg is Time’s Person of the Year. The site went down on Thursday afternoon for a period of approximately 30 minutes, and people noticed. And with the company’s notoriety for being so tight-lipped in its PR practices, the slightest steering of the good ship in a certain direction turns every head paying attention.

      Which is why my head turned rather sharply when I heard Facebook Manager of Corporate Development Michael Brown  suggest the company’s 2011 strategy: multiple talent acquisitions, an emphasis on social commerce, and a continued push into mobile.

      “Maybe 15 acquisitions,” Brown said on Friday afternoon in a startup seminar held in San Francisco. “They will be a mix of talent acquisitions where we’re looking for people to run important parts of product, who have really strong vision.”

      Facebook hasn’t been shy about acquiring talent in its past. Facebook bought check-in site Hot Potato over the summer for somewhere in the neighborhood of $10-15 million. After shutting the site down, former Hot Potato CEO Justin Shaffer was placed at the helm of Facebook’s Groups product. In 2009, Facebook acquired FriendFeed for close to a reported $50 million, making FriendFeed co-founder and Google alumnus Bret Taylor Facebook’s CTO.

      “If you can see kind of where we’re innovating as a company, those are probably the areas in which we’re likely to acquire, because we’re hungry for new ideas and leadership,” Brown said.

      Brown’s comments, first reported by peHub, went even further into product categories the company may be focusing on in 2011: “Maybe it’s social commerce. Maybe it’s HTML5 stuff that we’re interested in for mobile. Maybe its around local.”

      But those ‘maybes’ seem more liked certainties to me. Look at Facebook’s history with social commerce, for instance; the company began testing its virtual currency system, Facebook Credits, in 2009.  Credits Manager of Marketing Deb Liu expanded upon the potential of Credits at the f8 developers conference in April, explaining how the use of a universal virtual currency system like Facebook Credits would make it “easier for people to buy things across apps,” VentureBeat reported. “Rather than being locked into one app that has their credit card, they can buy in any app.”

      At the Virtual Goods Summit in October, Liu returned with news that Facebook Credits had opened its doors to more Facebook app developer partnerships, meaning further expansion of Credits usage in the myriad applications that are accessed via the Facebook Platform. In May, Zynga – by and large the most successful Facebook app provider existing today, with over 215 million monthly active users - signed a five-year agreement with Facebook to use Facebook Credits as the exclusive form of virtual currency for all Zynga games. For each credit spent, Facebook gets a non-negotiable 30% cut.

      In an interview with Facebook CTO Bret Taylor earlier this week, my colleague Quentin Hardy reported that the Credits system has “scaled up nicely,” with most of the near-term work needing done being inside the game companies, “optimizing it, improving the conversion rates, and the mechanics of doing a transaction,” said Taylor.

      Bottom line; Facebook Credits looks like a strong revenue stream, especially in light of Bloomberg’s recent report saying Facebook’s 2010 revenues are likely to reach $2 billion, over double that of 2009’s reported $700-800 million in revenues.

      As far as mobile devices are concerned, Brown’s comment on the mobile focus makes sense, especially given Facebook’s recent history. From small product tweaks like the dashboard introduction made this week, to major mobile app updates like the Android and iPhone update launched with the announcement of Facebook’s location-based Deals program, Facebook is certainly pushing aggressively into mobile.

      Taylor emphasized as much in conversation with Quentin, making an interesting point about an emphasis on HTML5 coding for mobile devices: “Every product release has to be updated to the Web, for touch devices like the iPad, for feature phones, and for native apps on Blackberry, iPhone, Blackberry, and others,” Taylor said. “We’re putting a lot of effort into HTML5 — that will get all those versions down to two or three.”

And Quentin alludes to another interesting move:

      “The Facebook exec made another interesting point about HTML5 though; mobile developers, he said, are far more familiar with the standard, since many aspects of it are in their most popular development environment; that could give them an advantage over traditional PC application developers, when Google’s Android mobile operating system starts appearing in tablet-type devices.”

      The emphasis on HTML5 widens the recruiting talent pool for potential Facebook developers, while consolidating their efforts into fewer versions spread across multiple operating systems.

Brown’s final comments on 2011, seen in a YouTube video below, read more like a rallying cry than anything else; the new geek-thos espoused by the young and successful of Silicon Valley:

      “We’re looking for hackers. We’re looking for men and women who want to drink Red Bull or Mountain Dew and stay up all night, and turn an idea into an ugly-looking prototype that they can buy some Google search traffic on and test, and see what people think of it. We’re looking for people who are impatient. Who like to write code. Who want to crank stuff out, and think social is going to change the world. So hackers, welcome.”

      It’s a vision ripped right from The Social Network – the hackathon scene, sans booze. Will it be a reality for the company in the new year?

We’ll all have to wait and see.

Source from Forbes

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