When I used to play football in 8th grade, there was a person who flew a small remote-controlled airplane at almost every practice. So, as you can imagine, when I first heard about drones the image of flying a remote-controlled plane around was the first thing that popped into my mind. What kind of a practical application could that have?
Well, it turns out that I had the idea of a drone wrong. After seeing the promotional Amazon video displaying a drone carrying a package to it's destination, that put drones into a new light for me. Of course, the drone is not implemented yet, but its potential is very high. The beauty of a drone, compared to an remote-controlled toy plane, is that drones can be programmed such that they can fly without any human control: they can be completely autonomous.
The potential is so high, that Facebook is looking to build and implement their own drones, code-named Aquila. The purpose of their drone is to beam Internet access down to the places that do not have the luxury of Verizon, Cablevision, Comcast or other ISPs. With internet access, they'd presumably be able to access Facebook assuming a computer in the customer's possession. The beauty of these drones is that they will be solar-powered, so they will not contribute to global warming. The truly unbelievable thing is that Facebook will be doing test runs as soon as this summer! Facebook's vision is to have a 1,000 drone fleet in the sky. This effort by Facebook is only one of the initiatives that they have taken to access more of the world's population.
To me, it doesn't seem like they're doing this as a "noble" cause (i.e. to better the world by connecting more people via the Internet). I believe their intention is to generate more revenue because, in the grand scheme of things, Facebook makes their money from advertisement views and clicks. Facebook is developing an Artificial Intelligence to better analyze what content can interest the user. If they know this, than their targeted ads can be more accurate, thus making them more money. Consequently, if Facebook has more of a target audience via the drones, they can gain even more revenue.
Take the computers in their data centers for example. HP is going to sell computers with Facebook designs, so that it would reduce the cost for Facebook to purchase. Less cost means more profit. Another example is their Messenger app: they have recently changed the app such that other companies can build apps on top of its current functionality. Again, by doing this, Facebook will have an even stronger base on mobile devices, since these apps are going through the Messenger app.
It seems to me that Facebook is taking a similar approach to Google. Google started out as a search engine company, then began to add News, Images, they purchased YouTube for videos, implemented Gmail for email and took over Android for mobile devices. Google is almost omnipresent on the Internet, and it looks like Facebook is heading in the same direction.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/technology/drones-beaming-web-access-are-in-the-stars-for-facebook.html?ref=technology&_r=0
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