Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Earlier this month, Canonical, the co-creators of Ubuntu–a distribution of the open-source Linux operating system–announced that they were getting into the smartphone business. They previewed an Ubuntu-based smartphone OS with an aggressively gestural UI design. The phone doesn’t have a home button, a slider-based lock screen, a “settings” tile, or an app switcher toggle. Instead, a user accesses these functions by swiping various edges of the screen.

Gestural interfaces–which eschew visual “chrome”-like buttons and tiles in favor of swiping, pressing, or tapping directly on content areas–are just starting to go mainstream. But the Ubuntu phone is going all-in on these new interactions. They’re as baked-in to Ubuntu’s mobile design language as skeuomorphism is to iOS’s. I got in touch with Canonical’s head of design, Ivo Weevers, and Lead Phone UX Designer Mika Meskanen to ask them about jumping into the deep end of gestural interface design. (They responded jointly via email.)

Co.Design: Why did you choose this approach? Was it simply to distinguish from iOS and Android? Or is an “all-gestural” phone OS the future of phones in general?

Canonical: Traditional Japanese architecture teaches us some important design principles about the balance between space and objects. Things that are not needed are not in the way, to allow complete immersion into an activity. Objects are placed around the periphery of the room and so are easily accessible when needed. By studying design cultures like this and how people use their phones, we could design an experience that takes a leap from where mobile user interfaces were until today.

These principles can be seen in Ubuntu’s gesture-based interface, which gives the content or task at hand undivided attention on the screen. Everything else is peripheral, but is easily evoked from the screen’s edges. It means that it’s really easy to switch between favourite and previous applications, and access controls, notifications and settings without ever interrupting the natural flow of activity. Gestures are also very intuitive and give a natural feeling to engaging with your personal content and applications.

Typical phones insist on navigation via hard or soft buttons to go back to a home screen, and eventually to the desired destination. The edges of the screen give immediate access to the features that a user needs the most frequently on a phone.

Co.Design: Exactly what functions can be invoked by swiping from each screen edge, and why?

Canonical: During research, we found that most people use up to ten apps most frequently, so in Ubuntu a left edge swipe quickly reveals a list of these most used apps without ever leaving the current, open app. Swiping right flips between currently open apps. Most of the time, people want to use two or three apps only, and this swipe makes that very easy.

The top edge gives the user access to peripheral but key system tasks, such as accessing and responding to messages, as well as settings such as connecting to wifi, adjusting screen brightness, time, date, and battery life. For these settings, often users just want to take a quick peek or make a swift alteration without having to leave their application, going to a home screen and scrolling through settings, and therefore losing the ‘flow’ of the activity in hand.

The bottom edge of the Ubuntu screen reveals controls for that app only when they are needed, so users are immersed much more into the things that matter more of the time. Most of the time people want to simply engage with content. For example, it is the photos that matter when looking at photos in a hardbound album, not the scissors and tape used to stick them there. Intrusive control buttons or controls constantly available in the interface take away precious real estate, even though they are used only in a minority of situations.

Co.Design: Gestural interfaces have their advantages, but they’re very new and unfamiliar to most people. How do you make these features intuitive and discoverable to new users, when there’s no obvious visual cues or skeuomorphic affordances?

Canonical: Touch interfaces have had the tendency to become very explicit. By consistently using edges instead of physical or software buttons that people have to poke at or aim for, we can leverage a range of human motor skills previously untapped–like muscle memory and finger dexterity.

User research found that gestural interfaces require a short learning curve. However, once learned they are very easy and become natural interactions quickly. There are already clear examples in existing products how the user can be informed effectively about the interactions, and by doing that the user gets access to a whole new world of interactions.

Co.Design: Aren’t design and open-source fundamentally at odds? How can Ubuntu’s design team ensure the best possible user experience when they can’t control what users will do with the software–including modifying, hacking, and forking it?

Canonical: Ubuntu design is led from our exceptional design team based in London, but also through engagement and collaboration at the right levels with other designers and community contributors around the world. There are great examples of co-creation projects that resulted in great products. For example, we have developed our own distinctive Ubuntu font,
which is a great example of a major new design led by our team and developed with the community across the world.

Developers have already shown that the open-source approach can result in great code, so we don’t see why designers can’t achieve the same.

The internet is a big place. Since it’s inception, the world wide web has become literally a world unto it’s own. Today, there are 2.4 billion internet users. That’s double what it was compared to the internet population in 2007. In addition to these users, the content is matched tenfold. It would take 7 million dvds for each hour the internet has existed to capture all of that data. So much information that it is estimated that by 2063 there will 4 times the amount it is today. That’s almost 966 exabytes. psst 1000 gigabytes = 1 terabyte, 1 exabyte = 1,000,000 terabytes! That’s a TON of information. This will take an incredible amount of energy to store and power. In fact, the internet itself uses about 1.5% of global electricity. All that electricity’s got to come from somewhere. This infographic delves into the unintended consequences that comes with all of the Cat memes and tweets that we hold so dear to our digital hearts. We should be informed and aware of how our internet is powered and how that power affects our world, for better and for worse.

Though they look like fabric, the threadlike drawings are printed onto paper.

This drawing, by Eno Henze, is based on the signatures left by subatomic particles in detectors such as the ones used at CERN. According to the authors: “The topic accelerator uses these signatures and strips them of their function as scientific evidence. The impenetrable thicket of signs becomes a symbol of the attempt to explain the world using scientific reason.” Henze approximated the real signatures using his own frame-based algorithm and a drawing machine of his own making.

In Growing Data, Cedric Kiefer explores how real phenomena can be used to communicate data, as opposed to statistical charts and tables. Here, he depicts the air quality of major cities through the growth of virtual plants.

This infographic analyzes the holy scriptures of the world’s five main religions–Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism–shedding light on their differences and similarities. The x-axis includes the 41 figures who appear most often in the texts, with the size of each name and arc corresponding to its number of occurrences in all five scriptures. The bar graphs contain the verbs that most often follow their names. “In addition to the abstract informational level,” the authors write, “the work is intended to make people reflect on their own prejudices and current religious conflicts at an emotional level.”

Various tools were used for the text analysis. The evaluation was performed with vvvv software; the data visualized in Processing.

This wall fixture mirrors the geometrical pattern of its namesake flower.

Made from laser-sintered polyamide, 610 is based on the Fibonacci sequence. (The first two numbers in the numerical series are 0 and 1, and each subsequent number is the sum of the previous two.) The form is inspired by coneflowers.

The Delaunay Raster allows users to customize a scanned image by setting the grid points. The tool is based on the Delaunay triangulation, a system invented in 1934 by the Russian mathematician Boris Delaunay that creates a set of optimal triangles out of a group of points. The Raster converts the triangles into paths in Illustrator.

Commissioned by Print magazine in 2008, this sculpture was generatively grown based on a biochemical reaction. “The contours of a custom font served as the basis for this sculpture and generated its initial crystals,” the authors write. “Over time the simulation decomposed the original structure in an increasingly delicate pattern. Using a process frequently used in MRI scans in medicine, the two-dimensional frames of the different process phases were combined into a detailed 3D model consisting of several million polygons.”

For the Max Plank Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Michael Schmitz devised a trademark that changes according to the principles of evolution. According to the authors: “The quality of the resulting logos is judged by a so-called fitness function, which determined the attributes of individual logos and compares them with the company’s current situation. The best logos mate, and the offspring from this recombination of genetic material replace older individuals.” The system was programmed in Java.

The book is available here for $55.

Remember the old nuclear bomb projections? The Soviet Union nuked the US. The US nuked the Soviet Union. Of course, the Soviet Union saw the US nukes coming their way, so they, for some odd reason, just nuked the whole world. Then the US nuked the world back.

Those were always unsettling, but at least they were theoretical. This Mapping Arms Data visualization, created by Google using information from the UN Statistics Division’s Commodity Trade Statistics Database (CoMtraDe), is entirely real. It depicts the personal arms (from pistols to machine guns) that every country in the world has imported and exported over nearly the last 20 years. And the US looks to lead the pack, with nearly $1 billion in imports and $600 million in exports snaking their glowing, pulsating tendrils into every spot on the globe.

The effect is only exacerbated by the fully explorable, 3-D interface. China is a global export hub–sending $50 million in weaponry around the globe, but they don’t hold a candle to Italy, which exported more than six times that amount in 2010. Indeed, however small a country may be on the globe, their large, laser-like arcs of light expelled by weaponry balance out any possible misconceptions. The glowing visual may be eye-burning overkill, but it’s also darned effective at calling out small land masses that would sneak by if all we did was paint them in a different color.

Of course, there are huge shortcomings with the reporting. The project admits that some military trades will circumvent gun checkpoints, some countries don’t account for all weapons coming over their borders and, in the cases of China, Iran and North Korea, especially, the reporting is far short of reliable (PFD). You could buy a midrange car for more than North Korea said they imported in weapons last year. Then again, the country is known for throwing bad military photoshops and parades full of fake missile launchers–and also doing plenty of covert trade in weapons and luxury items for the ruling regime.

But before the mass amounts we spend on personal weaponry get you too upset, do try to put it all into perspective. The US imported a billion dollars in guns in 2010, sure, but that’s less than the price of half a dozen F-22 jets.

Wait a second…actually have no idea if that makes me feel better or worse.

Virgin Galactic has announced plans to enter the commercial space payload delivery business, with Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson making the announcement at the Farnborough International Airshow in England. Virgin Galactic will use the same aircraft designed to launch passengers aboard SpaceShipTwo on sub-orbital space tourism rides, to carry a small, two-stage rocket capable of delivering satellites into low earth orbit.

The announcement isn’t a huge surprise, as it’s long been assumed the WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft would serve as a launch platform for other space-bound vehicles beyond SpaceShipTwo. Keeping the naming of its space vehicles relatively simple, LauncherOne is capable of carrying up to 500 pounds (225 kilograms) to low earth orbit for less than $10 million.

“Virgin Galactic’s goal is to revolutionize the way we get to space,” Branson said at Farnborough. “Now, LauncherOne is bringing the price of satellite launch into the realm of affordability for innovators everywhere, from start-ups and schools to established companies and national space agencies. It will be a critical new tool for the global research community, enabling us all to learn about our home planet more quickly and affordably.”

Artist rendition of LauncherOne’s second stage separation.

Branson added that Virgin Galactic has already received deposits from four private companies intent on using the LauncherOne for “several dozen launches.” One of the companies, Skybox Imaging, is planning to deploy a constellation of high resolution imaging satellites. Another of the new customers is the recently announced Planetary Resources, the asteroid mining company.

The small satellite industry is growing as engineers are able to cram more and more capability into smaller packages. Virgin Galactic’s LauncherOne is competing with existing air launch provider Orbital Sciences, as well as small, ground-based rocket launch services. But air launch ideas aren’t limited to the small satellite industry. Scaled Composites – the company that designed and is flight testing WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo – is also working with Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen to develop the largest airplane in the world, which will air launch a SpaceX Falcon 9-based rocket capable of carrying heavier payloads to orbit.

Both Virgin Galactic’s LauncherOne and Orbital Sciences’ Pegasus rocket feature small wings to aid stability during the drop from the carrier aircraft and turn the rockets make to their upward trajectory to orbit. By using a carrier aircraft, rockets can be launched from 50,000 feet, independent of weather conditions on the ground. And unlike ground-based rockets that are limited to a handful of launch sites around the world, air launched rockets can be carried almost anywhere to optimize the entry to the desired orbit.

WhiteKnightTwo has recently been busy with resumption of flight testing for SpaceShipTwo. The flight test team at Scaled Composites made eight flights with WK2 last month, the last two included releasing SS2 for glide flights.

Images: Virgin Galactic

The 2012 Olympics in London are being touted by some as the world’s “first social Games.” While some question just how social they’ll actually be, there’s no doubt that networks such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube will play an unprecedented role in how information is disseminated from London, and how the global sports conversation is driven during July and August.

Why the big shift? It’s simple: Four years is an eternity in Internet time and since the last Summer Olympics in 2008, social media has exploded.

Web use in general has grown rapidly, too. In 2008, there were about 1.5 billion Internet users globally, according to the International Telecommunications Union, making up about 23% of the world’s total population. By this summer’s games, that number will have swelled to about 2.3 billion users making up about a third of the world’s total population.

Summer Olympics feature some of the most popular international sports — including soccer, basketball, swimming, and track and field — so that’s sure to fuel the global buzz as well. For more context on just how and why social media will reshape this year’s Olympics in relation to 2008, we thought it’d be interesting to take a quick look at a few of the world’s most popular networks and how they compare then and now.

Facebook

2008: A tweet in August of 2008 from then-Facebook executive and eventual Path co-founder Dave Morin gleefully celebrated Facebook breaking the 100 million-user threshold. 2008 was also marked by reports around the web of Facebook — gasp! — passing MySpace in popularity. The social network debuted its now omnipresent chat feature that year as well.

Today: Facebook claims more than 900 million users, is fast becoming a portal to the web at large for many and is a publicly traded company. Its founder Mark Zuckerberg is a global celebrity.

Twitter

2008: 2008 saw explosive growth for Twitter, and it still finished the year with about 6 million registered users who sent about 300,000 tweets per day. The social network and its users were still very much finding their way, as evidenced by this official blog post explaining @replies. In 2009, Minnesota Timberwolves forward Kevin Love would tweet that the team’s coach had been let go, breaking the story and causing some in the sports world to speculate that maybe, just maybe, the service could change how news was delivered and consumed.

Today: Twitter currently claims more than 500 million users who collectively send some 400 million tweets each and every day. Sports news regularly breaks on the network, it’s become a prime marketing channel for athletes and much of the London 2012 conversation among media and fans is sure to take place there.

YouTube

2008: By fall of 2008, YouTube users were uploading 10 hours of video to the site per minute. The site had emerged as the go-to destination for web video and had been acquired by Google two years prior. It also launched its mobile site, pre-roll ads and 720p HD option in 2008. But that success was nothing compared to what the site would look like four years later.

Today: Iconic Olympic moments are sure to go viral and become immortalized on YouTube seemingly as they happen this summer, and it’s easy to see why. The company says it receives over 800 million unique visits per month. Those visitors watch more than 3 billion hours of video per month and upload 72 hours of new video content per minute. Five hundred years’ worth of YouTube video are watched on Facebook every day and more than 700 YouTube videos get shared on Twitter each minute.

What It All Means

Just looking at the the three most ubiquitous social networks reveals a sporting scene and world at large that have been transformed by social media since the last Summer Olympics. And that doesn’t take into account services like Pinterest, Foursquare and Google+ — none of which even existed in 2008. This summer, expect news to break, social sharing records to fall and moments to live on as never possible before thanks to social media. And to think — this will all pale in comparison to what 2016 has in store.

How will you use social media during the 2012 Olympics? Share with us in the comments.

Thumbnail image via iStockphoto, cmannphoto

How L’Oreal uses games to find and hire the kind of smart leaders that rarely show up in resumes.

Every talent-recruitment executive knows how hard it is to make a good new hire. But L’Oreal, the French cosmetics giant, is making hundreds of successful hires each year from a pool of thousands of highly qualified young prospects who connect with L’Oréal through business games.

Hiring at most corporations begins with a job posting. Each posting draws a seemingly infinite number of applicants responding through websites, social media, email and (sometimes) even snail mail. To process the onslaught, technology is used to screen the sea of applicants.

But the typical Applicant Tracking System filters for keywords tied to relatively worthless data such as schools attended, previous work experience and personal affiliations. Any manager who trains new hires will tell you that one’s alma mater and previous work references are poor predictors of job performance.

What qualities do you really want in your next new hire? How about smarts? Not just academic knowledge, but the ability to think, solve problems, and be creative. But how can a corporation wade through an endless stream of applicants to identify that kind of much more complex criteria?

L’Oréal does it by inviting the world’s most promising students to play games. For 20 years, L’Oréal has been using business games to identify potential employees, and many students hired through L’Oréal’s recruiting games have now risen to management level positions.

L’Oreal launched Brandstorm in 1993. In Brandstorm, international undergraduate marketing students are challenged to function as brand managers in re-imagining one of the company’s well-known global brands. Last year, Brandstorm attracted more than 7,000 participants.

Now in its 20th year, Brandstorm is such a remarkable success that in 2010, L’Oréal introduced its second recruiting game, Reveal. In Reveal, players work through a simulated product launch. The game moves through three phases–development, production, and launch–and players solve a challenge at the end of each of 12 scenes.

L’Oreal spokesperson Laurence Balmayer says Reveal is “the first ever multi-disciplinary digital platform which allows players to undergo a professional career discovery experience within the context of an international business like L’Oréal.”

Brandstorm and Reveal have done a phenomenal job of elevating the L’Oréal name among the next generation of business leaders. More than 50,000 students from 43 countries have participated in Brandstorm, and in just two years, Reveal has attracted more than 100,000 students from 165 countries.

“These business games have successfully attracted a diverse pool of young talents and have opened up all these participants to the universe of L’Oréal,” Balmayer said. L’Oréal is consistently ranked among the most desirable companies to work for in the world.

The games have become the fast track for employment at L’Oréal. “Each year, there are about 150 Brandstorm players and around 100 Reveal participants that are recruited by L’Oréal,” Balmayer said.

Not only are hundreds of promising employees being hired each year, but some are now advancing to management positions, Balmayer said. “The best Brandstorm players who have been initially recruited by L’Oréal as trainees have accelerated into becoming marketing and commercial directors in the countries or regions in just a matter of six or seven years.”

L’Oreal’s recruiting games are excellent example of using recruiting methods that predict performance. Participants are challenged to demonstrate in the games the very qualities and capabilities that L’Oréal wants in its work force. So, it’s obvious that the real winner of these recruiting games is L’Oreal itself.

Image: Flickr user Ben Bunch

They’re hot now but do mash-up apps have a future? We talk with Brandon Leonardo, cofounder of the Pinterest/ Instagram combo Pinstagram, to find out. We also pitch him a few of our ideas, including “Shazump,” “Spotifurious,” and “Angry Fruit Ninjas.” Let the investment cash flow!

Brandon Leonardo is one of the cocreators of Pinstagram, a “mash-up app” that combines features of… you guessed it. In essence, it takes the functionality of Instagram and splashes it in the elegant waterfall layout familiar to Pinterest fans. Pinstagram recently debuted its iPad app (and rose to be the No. 1 new and notable app in the Photo and Video category this week). Fast Company caught up with Leonardo to talk about the future of the mash-up app, and to pitch him a few ideas of our own.

FAST COMPANY: Tell me the origin story of Pinstagram.

BRANDON LEONARDO: Pek Pongpaet, his cofounder and I were having lunch on a Friday, joking around: “Pinterest is a huge company, and so is Instagram. What would happen if we just smashed them together?” We were just laughing about it. But then you could see the wheels starting to turn in Pek’s head. He brought it up a couple more times: “I think Pinstagram would be really cool,” and I kind of chuckled. The next morning at noon Pek called me and said, “You’re never gonna believe what I built. Look at your Dropbox.” By that time he had pretty much gotten the entire site designed. We went into hackathon mode, and by Sunday we were basically done with the initial version we launched with.

Are you in dialogue with Instagram or Pinterest? Aren’t you running afoul of laws here?

Pinterest’s waterfall layout was not invented by Pinterest. It’s a jQuery plug-in someone created a couple years ago and released it open-source. Pinterest gets credit for making it famous, but it’s not necessarily copyrightable. On the Instagram side, we’re using their public API. And it’s kind of a win-win: we’re sending them lots of likes, comments, and actions.

It seems like the sort of thing where either you get a cease-and-desist letter, or you get acquired.

No one has sent us a cease-and-desist letter. In fact we got coffee with a Pinterest engineer last week. The founder of Pinterest has actually used Pinstagram. On the Instagram side, no one’s contacted us.

You built an iPad app before an iPhone app. Why?

Instagram’s already on the iPhone. We’ll never be a better Instagram than Instagram. What we can do is build the best iPad viewer.

Let’s talk more about this idea of the app mash-up. How exactly do you splice the genes, and is there an island where you put your failed experiments?

You take the best pieces of each. The benefit to having a hackathon, is you have a severe focus on only what’s necessary. This is Pek’s and my third project together. The other ones are running, but this is the one that took off like crazy. But having an island sounds like a great idea. The island where source code goes is GitHub.

Do you think there will be more app mash-ups, more “Grey Albums” of the app world?

I think building products, period, is good. Any time you’re creating something and putting it out in to the world, you get a little bit closer to perfect. Nothing anyone has ever built has been perfect. But you keep improving on little things, and you get closer and closer. If you want to do a mash-up, you should do it.

Good. Because I want to pitch some mash-up apps to you.

Okay.

“DoodleJitter.” It’s a mash-up of Doodle Jump and Twitter. You can only play the game for 140 seconds or less.

That’s about how long I play DoodleJump right now.

How about a mixture of Shazam and Bump called “Shazump”? You use it to quickly exchange songs.

Do you want me to rate these?

Yeah, if you were a VC, how much money would you give me?

The music business is the worst business to be in, so I’d say no. Spotify is the only one I’ve really seen be successful.

OK, how about a mash-up of Spotify and Epicurious, called “Spotifurious.” You use it to stream unlimited food.

Could you use that in other parts of the world? I don’t think the U.S. needs more food.

“Angry Fruit Ninjas.” It’s just a much more violent version of Angry Birds.

Oh yeah… Absolutely. That sounds like a winner. That one I would give you the most money for. Throw some zombies in there, and in three years, you’ll be acquiring Zynga.

The World at Work is powered by GE. This new series highlights the people, projects and startups that are driving innovation and making the world a better place.

Name: WILL Interactive

Big Idea: WILL Interactive develops Virtual Experience Immersive Learning Simulations (VEILS), which are interactive movies that force users to make serious decisions as a learning experience.

Why It’s Working: With more than 70 games on topics including the military, financial decision-making and youth education, WILL Interactive has developed a new form of educational and therapeutic media.

Walk in the shoes of a soldier on the battlefield or learn how to avoid foreclosure in a precarious housing market — if you make a mistake, simply start the game over.

WILL Interactive has found a way to encourage game players to solve real-world problems using interactive role-playing games.

WILL has created more than 70 “serious games.” That term, the site explains, “means games that are designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment. Higher end serious games are designed to inherently engage their target audience through the use of interactive gaming attributes, which, in turn, ultimately educates them on how to solve a specific problem, task or objective.”

The company patented its signature medium, Virtual Experience Immersive Learning Simulation (VEILS), in 1998. VEILS enables players to take on the identities of characters in a movie, and each of the characters’ actions result in a different reaction and outcome for the player. This idea evolved into serious games for social good.

One of these games is Ways Home, an interactive game developed in cooperation with Fannie Mae that guides users through various scenarios and teaches them how to avoid foreclosure. Another is Leading the Way, developed with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs — the game helps returning soldiers prepare to navigate the worst-case scenarios of re-entering civilian working life.

The company’s website states that WILL is the only entity that “holds the patent for the interactive behavior modification process that has been shown in independent studies to improve individual’s knowledge, attitudes and behaviors.”

The company recently launched the WILL Interactive Challenge, asking players to solve a real-world problem using the game’s interactive technology. In the competition, which began on December 14, 2011 and ended April 20, 2012, contestants were asked to create a proposal detailing a virtual experience that could impact the real world in a positive way. The winner will be announced on June 6 and will be awarded $500,000 to develop the idea using WILL’s technology. If the idea is commercialized, the winner will receive royalties and co-branding recognition on the simulation.

What real-world problem would you like to see solved using serious games? Tell us in the comments.

Series presented by GE

The World at Work is powered by GE. GE Works focuses on the people who make the things that move, power, build and help to cure the world.

Dallas Lawrence writes about emerging media trends, online reputation management, and digital issue advocacy. Follow him @dallaslawrence.

What a difference a week makes. Some seven days ago, media outlets from around the world were stumbling over themselves covering “the most anticipated IPO in history.” Even Facebook and its investment bankers drank their Kool-Aid, upping both the number of available shares and the price in the final hours before the world had a chance to own a piece of Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room brainchild.

One week later with a botched NASDAQ IPO and a tanking stock price, the knives have come out. During one 24-hour period on Wednesday, Google tracked more than 40,000 online news stories about the fumbled IPO. And never one to miss a media opportunity, SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro announced a review of the “issues” that led to the chaotic initial public offering.

In times of increased scrutiny and potential crisis, when it rains, it usually pours. And for Silicon Valley’s golden child, a tsunami of criticism has suddenly washed ashore. The good news for Zuckerberg and Co. is that despite the current coverage and deflated stock price, the future still looks very bright. Here’s why Facebook’s impending demise has been greatly exaggerated.

• Size Matters: Facebook recently crossed the 900 million user mark. While an impressive number, it is the tip of the global iceberg. According to a recent Times of India piece, in just the past six months, new Facebook users have grown 20% in India, 65% in Japan, and 56% in South Korea. This number will continue to grow and Facebook will have no trouble doubling in size in the next few years.
• Data is King: If Facebook unplugged tomorrow they would still own the most powerful repository of global human data ever collected. Age, race, sex, marital status, kids, employer, and education history are all table stakes for Facebook. They also know what we like, who we like, what we don’t like, and what we read, listen to, and watch. It’s all cataloged and tagged. The best part is that Facebook doesn’t have to use creepy data-scrapping technology to gather this information. More than 900 million people voluntarily provide and update it every day. If data is the new currency, Facebook will be printing money plentifully well into the future.
• Humans are Social:Facebook’s in-house cultural anthropologist (they actually have one) often speaks about how, since the beginning of organized civilization, we have gathered together in groups of several hundred. No more, and not much less. When the number gets too large for the kind of social interaction we crave (interestingly a number eerily close to the average number of friends a typical facebooker engages with), the village breaks off to form a new conclave and a new “social network.” This social connectivity is what sets us apart as a species, and Facebook knows how to leverage that.And while every digital platform has their “gee wiz” engagement numbers, Facebook continues to stand out on the metrics that really count. More than half a billion unique users log into Facebook each day sharing three billion likes and uploading 300 million photos. Of their 900 million current users, 398 million visit the site six out of every seven days. These numbers relay far more than just engagement. They showcase social interaction at the deepest levels.

  Think about it. When was the last time you printed a photo to share with friends or family? Why would you when they can see it on Facebook? When was the last time you used an event-planning website to organize a social gathering or even attended a high school reunion? Why would you? All of your friends are on Facebook. Humans are instinctively social and Facebook is providing the organizing conceptual framework we crave as social creatures.

The challenge for Facebook now is to move past their reluctance to forcefully engage in the communications marketplace and remind investors, users, advertisers, and developers of what is working at Facebook. GM may have cut advertising, but thousands of businesses large and small are seeing huge successes in targeted social advertising and will continue to.  Facebook needs to share these stories every day.

And while mobile has been piled on as another touchy point for the company, it’s worth noting that there were still half a billion mobile Facebook users in April 2012. That’s more than twice the number of every iPhone ever sold. And with mobile projected to explode in emerging and developing markets in the next two years, Facebook will be positioned to further leverage its growing revenue potential into areas such as payments, social gaming, and shopping.

To be sure, Facebook’s current flood waters of criticism must be addressed first and directly by the company. It’s completely in their power to stabilize and grow, in spite of what’s happened. What they don’t want is to let their critics –and there are plenty–define them. That could leave the company with decidedly fewer “friends” and “likes.”

Thumbnail image courtesy of Katrina.Tuliao and Crunchies2009 via Flickr