Future of Facebook?

Facebook's collision course with the big portals

I'm always curious about a company's strategy especially when it deals with direction and growth.

"Facebook is about to introduce a basic chat service and have some rudimentary e-mail capabilities. While Facebook executives have been cagey about specific plans to build more capable communications applications, they will evolve to be competitive with what AOL, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo offer.

I would also expect Facebook to include Web search that takes advantage of the social-graph concept. For example, Facebook could implement a search for friends that also surfaces public information about them from the Web, or Web search results, that factor in what friends in an extended social graph click on for similar queries.

Facebook may even take on Google, possibly working with investor Microsoft, to deliver a comprehensive search service with a social dimension. Facebook could also acquire or partner with one of the semantic search start-ups, such as Hakia and Powerset."

If the author of this article is correct then I'm confused what Facebook is thinking, but it's probably the same thing Google is thinking. If they can make one thing better then their competitors they can add a few other things to keep people around. (As a side note I just spent 5 minutes trying to get this text not italic.) Maybe from that they figure they can rule the world. Is that what their thinking? I guess it makes sense that Facebook would try to leverage user base they have, but I have to stick with my current philosophy, "Creating better stuff is more valuable then creating more of the same stuff."