Facebook's path toward complete world domination is filled with peaks and
valleys. Mark Zuckerberg and his team make decisions on how to run their
business that thrill and terrify in equal measure. The 2010 introduction of
Facebook Credits , a virtual currency purchased with cash and used to buy
services and goods in the social network from movie rentals to Farmville items,
has proven extremely lucrative for the company. Meanwhile, other choices like
the network's latest redesign have given users and analysts pause. Of the many
announcements made during this week's f8 developer's conference , the only
people that should be concerned are the company's rivals. Here are three of
Facebook's new initiatives and the companies that will be impacted by the
network's evolving business: Netflix The announcement that Netflix (NASDAQ:
NFLX ) has entered into a partnership with Facebook could not have come at a
better time for the company or its shareholders, who still are feeling the burn
of the streaming video company's meltdown. Although Facebook integration into
Netflix is only available in Canada and Latin America at this point, it will be
coming to the U.S. as soon as the company finds a way around a law preventing
U.S. members from sharing what they watch . As Facebook has ramped up its own
video rental services, it looked as though the network would be competing with
Netflix , but their partnership creates a unified front against other streaming
competitors. In particular, Dish Network 's (NASDAQ: DISH ) new Blockbuster
streaming service, Amazon 's (NASDAQ: AMZN ) Amazon Prime streaming video, and
the News Corp. (NASDAQ: NWS ), Disney (NYSE: DIS ) and Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA
)-owned Hulu should all prepare for Netflix to recover some of its lost ground
thanks to the support of Facebook's 750 million users. Spotify The U.K.-based
streaming music Spotify isn't the only Internet radio company Facebook
announced a partnership with at f8. The company also is teaming up with MOG,
Rdio, Slacker and iHeartRadio to make for a unified front of web music services
on Facebook users' profiles. The service undoubtedly is going to cause trouble
for the already embattled Pandora (NYSE: P ), but that's hardly the only
publicly traded company in the music business that potentially will lose
business to Facebook and its partners. Amazon and Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL ) are just
two of the companies trying to transform their download-based digital music
businesses into cloud-based services this year (through Amazon Cloud Player and
iTunes Match/iCloud, respectively.) With Facebook heavily promoting streaming
services, these bigger companies will have to work even harder to promote their
new wares. Facebook News Facebook announced partnerships with News Corp., The
Washington Post Co. (NYSE: WPO ) and Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO ) that will go a long
way toward transforming how news is consumed through Facebook. The social
network no longer will act as a jumbled series of links to stories posted on
user profiles, but a wide-ranging news aggregator providing articles through new
pages on the network and mobile apps. These include the Washington Post's
Social Reader app, Yahoo's Into Now app (which previously focused on
television rather than news), and News Corp.'s previously iPad-only The Daily
digital paper. These partnerships should help YHOO and WPO a great deal by
bringing in new prospective audience members. These partnerships are bad news
for other major news aggregators, particularly Google (NASDAQ: GOOG ). Facebook
already is cutting heavily into Google's display advertising revenue, and lost
viewership at Google News will only exacerbate the problem. As of this writing,
Anthony John Agnello did not own a position in any of the stocks named here.
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