Facebook’s ubiquity and identification of its users as individuals has made it a utility, with the prospect of becoming the leading distributor of media in the future, according to Dharmash Mistry, partner at venture capital firm Balderton Capital.

Participating in the Red Bee Media ‘Tomorrow Calling’ panel debate looking at future developments in network technology, platforms, networks and devices, Mistry said that his bet would be that Facebook would be the leading distributor of media across platforms.

Noting that three of the companies that his company had invested in worked with Facebook, Mistry suggested that at the recent f8 Facebook conference, it was clear that [Mark] Zuckerberg believes Facebook will be the platform for music and for content.

Countering suggestions that Facebook could fall out of fashion and suffer the same fate as other one-popular sites, Mistry suggested that Facebook was “past the chasm” and that “now it’s a utility and the social layer of the web. Its genius was identifying the individual as an individual, not a fictitious person. I’m real and have the data of a real person. They took Facebook outside of Facebook and made it a social layer so all that social recommendation and social thinking can live in an e-commerce or any other site by using Facebook Connect,” he said.

“Now it’s almost ubiquity. If you launch a service, most people in any segment have to think about their social strategy. It’s a twin power to Google in terms of traffic generation and if you want audience, you have to use those,” he noted.

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