Facebook’s plan to find its next billion users: convince them the internet and Facebook are the same

This is the story of Facebook’s rapidly unfolding plan to take over the world, or at least the world wide web.

It’s a tale that’s been hiding in plain sight for years, and it begins with an explanation of how Facebook has reached almost a billion users. It continues with a roadmap for how the seeds of Facebook’s future growth – to two billion and beyond – have already been planted. In both cases, what matters is emerging markets in Asia, Africa, and Latin America: the striving, proto-middle class “next billion” whose first impression of the internet is often that it seems to consist entirely of a site called Facebook. By the end of this year, there will be more mobile phones on earth than people, and 73% of those phones will be something other than smartphones. Most of these phones have no data plan associated with them, and if they are capable of browsing the web at all, it’s through a protocol all but abandoned years ago in developed countries, known as WAP, which can only access websites specially tailored to it. By 2008, Facebook executives realized that one way to maintain its meteoric growth was to make it easy and free to access Facebook on devices like these, devices that in no way resembled the desktop computer for which it had originally been developed. And that’s where our story begins.