Facebook wants to be a lot of things to a lot of people, it seems. With the announcement of new features of f8, Facebook is turning into a hub for all of your life activity, whether it is watching a movie, listening to a song, or keeping track of the food you eat, places you travel, and athletic activity. Clearly, Facebook doesn’t ever want you to leave the social network, and with these new features has enabled the platform to serve as a one-stop-shop for consuming content. To put this mission into effect, Facebook has teamed up with dozens of content publishers to make it easy for Facebook users to read and share news with friends, as well as discover what friends are reading, right within Facebook. With these new services, Facebook is striving to make the entire consumption of media a social experience.

Though this feature — like other new services introduced by Facebook at f8 including the ability to watch movies and listen to music right within Facebook — are not live for all users yet, the potential of Facebook as soon as these features are available in full is almost frightening. The theory of a social network becoming in all-inclusive hub for sharing and consuming all types of media is reminiscent of AOL when it was a dial-up service. Despite the limited access the majority of the population had to AOL, it was used by many who had Internet access and was incredibly successful and other services couldn’t compete — at least until they tried to do too much else.

Facebook seems to have studied this story quite well, as it is replicating the exact same model. AOL was a walled garden that reduced the need to open a Web browser (like Netscape) and also enabled its users to share and communicate media with each other without bounds. At f8, Mark Zuckerberg explained that new features — with duplicate aspects of AOL circa 1996 — are possible due to the size of the user base. To demonstrate the sheer monstrosity that Facebook has become, half of a billion people were using Facebook at the same time last week. With all these users, Zuckerberg believes Facebook can develop social apps and make services available that will keep users on Facebook because all their friends and family use the service, as well. And if Facebook can keep all of its users on Facebook, the potential Facebook can kill all of its competition is more likely than ever.

But is the lack of competition a good thing? Will users really want to dump and track all their personal activity and data only on Facebook? Let us know what you think in the comments.