That's a pretty short view on Facebook's role in users' lives. Facebook definitely has some challenges ahead, but advances in NLP and sentiment analysis could b

That's a pretty short view on Facebook's role in users' lives. Facebook definitely has some challenges ahead, but advances in NLP and sentiment analysis could be a boon for them. What happens when Facebook is able to use their data set to extract implicit information about search subjects. For example, I recently engaged in a discussion on Facebook with a friend who is considering a career change. He had some questions about Linux system administration career choices. Right now, that conversation is opaque to the systems at Facebook. It has no meaning beyond the strings that are stored on disk somewhere. What happens as NLP and sentiment analysis advance to the point that they're able to extract real ideas from conversational threads? Multiply that by 845 million active users. In that scenario, Facebook is sitting on a gold mine of monumental proportions. It's almost unimagineable the amount of data Facebook has. What questions could be answered using that data? I can think of more than a few inventive purposes for this data. The fly in the ointment may end up being consumer privacy concerns. If the government passes the right/wrong (depending on your view) legislation, it could destroy Facebook or Google. Google didn't roll Google+ to have their own social network, they rolled it for similar reasons as they did Google Voice. They want the data. I know it's common echo chamber fodder, but big data is the future.