This past week I was able to tool around with facebook at an creative garage they held @wunderman. Like any good reporter / blogger I had a # of burning questions for them. [mainly to feed a few topics I am covering in a project I am working on called the "friendshift"] How connected can facebook make us? Will there be a facebook phone? With a trend towards "real friends" will FB be investing in a one-to-one video chat?  Those questions were ususally met with PR perfect faces.

The theme of many of conversations centered on the possibilities of the open-graph. Disperate data on it's own is usless history. When you combine data with a purpose to provide relevancy what you get is stonger connections.  When Tal Alter stumbled on to a random piece of code in the Facebook - it helped validate what I think may be the future of social media. 

Enabling REAL connections.

Location was the first phase. What happens when you combine it with live video?  Check this out.  It's an code object, which is called VideoChat. It appears to have everything one would beed to introduce video chatting functionality.  The most interesting portion of this code object  are the properties which refer to Skype. They clearly suggest indicate a video chat function that allows you to connect with Skype users. Or something as simple as being able to associate your Skype id with your facebook identity.

[ Via Tal Alter ]

Since the begining of it's launch, Facebook has planned it's interace as a platform - not a destination. With millions of active users contirbuting to the social graph across the web, is the next revolution as simple as providing a global conduit for real-time relevance with real people?  Could the "REAL" mean using augmented reality to develop 1-to-1 Holograms or something more sci-fi?

What do you think?