Facebook Expanding To Food Orders and Ticket Buying

facebookAs if Facebook was not already a fundamental part of every day life, now the social network wants be a bigger part of your actual social life.

Facebook is launching an initiative to become more involved with your day-to-day doings: from ordering pizza to buying movie tickets to booking an hour at the salon. You are already using the internet to do these things anyway—particularly through services from Google, Yelp, and Foursquare—but Facebook seems to think it can do these things better than the industry leaders. Basically, Facebook’s strategy is to offer you more options from not only national chains (whose ads you see on television) but also smaller local companies who rely on networking through sites like Facebook to market directly to their neighbors.

“There’s a fundamental motivating question which is what we’ve been focused on for a while now,” explains Facebook Vice President of ads and Pages Andrew Bosworth, adding, “which is ‘How can we make Facebook more useful in your everyday life?’”

Another way to look at it, is that Facebook figures people would appreciate the convenience of using Facebook—which they are probably already using anyway—to connect with any of all these things they might be looking for. It makes sense: you are on Facebook and your friend strikes up a conversation about a movie they saw. You can just go to the Fandango page to buy a ticket for yourself.

Or, lets say, you are on Facebook, just reading updates when your partner asks what you want to do for dinner. You agree to order in and have a cozy night at home. Now you can just do that from Delivery.com’s Facebook page.

These are updates that Facebook has to make, all of which will begin rolling out in the United States, on Wednesday. Obviously, that means that while only some people might notice it at first, it is definitely the beginning of a much larger plan to improve Facebook’s functionality, continuing to integrate it more within every user’s online behavior.

Bosworth goes on to say, at a press briefing, “The problem is bigger than what we’re launching today or what we’re announcing today. What we’re really trying to do here is give you guys a flavor of what’s to come.”