When former Facebook employee Frances Haugen testified before Congress in September 2021 that there were “conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook,” many believed massive changes were coming for social networks as we know them.
A month later, when Facebook experienced its longest outage in more than a decade, it seemed even clearer that the social network may no longer reign supreme. Then, just a few weeks later, Mark Zuckerberg revealed his technology group’s new name, “Meta,” short for metaverse, and social networks got new life through the merger of online and virtual worlds made possible by virtual and augmented reality and blockchain.
In the Web3 revolution, social networks are likely to transform into a powerful ecosystem called social finance—SocialFi, for short—that will merge the existing capabilities of social networks with blockchain and NFTs. As a decentralized network, it will see the onus of data ownership shift from social networks back to the users themselves. Even influencer marketing, born in the Web2 revolution and has been used by 93% of marketers, as of 2019, will get an overhaul by allowing brands and creators to own the digital assets that they create.
