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Facebook Raises Another $25M
conq writes "BusinessWeek reports that Facebook has just raised another $25M from Venture Capital. Along the same lines, Rupert Murdoch has bought a minority stake in SimplyHired and just two days ago the social networking site, Visible Path said it raised $17M from Venture Capitals."
Who are they?
The latest Slashdot meme.
What's with these storied marked red and "under construction?"
Any else see that?
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Is facebook really that great? Everyone I know is on myspace, livejournal, and xanga.
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www.samuraifiles.com - Get Some Videos Here
If you listen closely in the future i hear a loud BANG! as if a big bubble popped. maybe its just me tho!
Since I see so much bitching on this site over MySpace's perceived shittiness, I just wanted to point out that some of us actually appreciate the flexibility MySpace offers in customizing the appearance of our pages. It's a hell of a lot easier, too, than setting up your own domain with the blogs and friend features MySpace provides as a matter of course.
No, this is not a joke. Compaed to the circus of color, sound, and animation that is MySpace, Facebook is totally boring. I don't know anyone who still uses Facebook other than fratboys and squares.
Then again, I'm deaf and blind.
Bonsai Kitten: TNG
Don't worry, we will quickly burn through that $25 million of VC as soon as they put out the free chips, soda and candy.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Another example of a bad fad finding VC it shouldn't get...oh, and they have attracted big advertisers, like Jeep and M$...this isn't Google, the ads won't fund the company forever on a site like this...maybe they'll buy-out myspace or something????
Why go fast when you can go anywhere? O|||||||O
I see all these startups raising rediculous amounts of money and everytime I have to wonder what exactly is the money spent on? Does anyone know? How many developers does it take to maintain something like FaceBook? Just how expensive can their infraastructure and bandwidth be? It just boggles the mind that a site like that can raise so much in venture capital andit is even harder to see how they make enough profit to be able to provide a return on that investment.
Does advertising and/or subscription fees really make that much money for a site? I guess it is just tiny amounts of revenue but spread between LOTS of users.
In the drops - An Aussie's musings on all things cycling
Boom Baby Boom!
The Boom is back!
Rock on!
I've got an idea for selling online pregnancy testing over the web. Please send checks to ac@ftc.gov
What? Where is this money come from, and why do people think they can make money now over before? Before there were no proven business models, and fresh ideas, now things are all a carbon copy of whatever site Yahoo/Google just bought a few months back. I fail to see how they'll earn money in the long term, save for an aquisition.
fak3r.com
I'll see your $25 mil and raise you another $10 mil.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I don't get where all the ad revenue comes from. These sites target the student demographic generally. Are students richer today than when I was in college or something?
I barely had enough money for a beer - let alone for spending on some product that I saw advertised on Facebook.
A call to my parents may be in order about the backdated pocket money I must be owed.
Launch a startup. Invent a product or service that *should* exist, but doesn't.
Spend two years achieving profitability, growing your primary sales channel, and expanding into future R&D.
Witness the miracle of capitalism: watch as your R&D staff design and invent things which put your initial product to shame.
Now that you have something to spend money on, try and go public, and raise a modest sum (say $4 million) to invest into carefully discussed and debated budgets.
As I discovered: this is an absolute fallacy.
Why are websites demanding billions of dollars these days? Because this is the same game in a different century.
Go flip on your favorite TV channel. Then take 15 min to find out who is running the show "behind the scenes". Repeat. Pretty soon these "media conspiracies" are flatout impossible to ignore.
My mistake was in thinking that, somehow, the Internet would be immune to the strip-mining animals who are destroying the America I love.
Sadly, it's not.
Way to go Facebook. Each extra million brings you closer to your pie in the sky.
Blog via SMS text messaging
I really love facebook, the ability to find anyone at my school if I need to contact them or want to know more about them is great. However, it has so many other cool features: being able to find long lost childhood friends, uploading photo albums, announcing meetings and cool events for on campus clubs etc.
The one thing facebook is really missing is a 'rate my professor' system. At the end of each semester a dialog should come up asking if you would like to rate your professors from that semester. Myspace has it for some reason, and some people at our school set up www.collegesucks.net but have professor ratings integrated into facebook is a no brainer.
I need to start my own social networking site! Apparently teenagers will sign up for anything, and people just throw money at you if you own one, no matter how obscure it is! Awesome!
They're trying to convert it to a big demographic study/advertisement thing. They recently have this area where you can pick your favorite brands or products. Who in the hell cares what products or brands are my favorite, and why would I advertise that from my profile unless I was being paid something for click-thru or whatever? Totally awful exploitation of the customer base, IMHO.
stuff |
Where can I sign up for this money?
Facebook's infratstructure is getting overwhelmingly big. They included a photo uploading section because, well people obviously love photos. But their original plan was to distribute the photo load by allowing users to locally host their photos and use a program called Wirehog (I believe) to turn their computer into a share point. This failed because of the complexity and security. The also are looking to hire many people to code and develop as well as maintain their servers (stripped down fedora). I'm not sure what their profits are, but this 25 mil sounds really justified.
To be honest, one of the reasons I started Appleseed is because of all of the ads that people are bombarded with on sites like MySpace. The whole experience just seems crass.
Right now, social networking is being approached as if the users involved are merely demographics, potential markets, or advertising recipients. And that's really kind of sad for a technology which has so much sociological, political, and even economic potential for change.
I really honestly think that we won't see real social networking until we have an network of open source websites which all work together using some kind of standard commication protocol. Would the web itself have worked if there had only been six or 7 places to host a website? Where would email be if you had a dozen different proprietary methods for sending and recieving?
Why is social networking any different? MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, as far as I'm concerned, these are all the proof-of-concepts, but they're not the way the future will look.
Social networking, by definition, can not be monolithic and centrally controlled.
There's nothing like the smell of burning Venture Capital in the morning!!!
In-cubicle massages will be commencing in: 5...4...3...
No matter where you go... there you are.
is for birthdays.
Before I begin, a brief introduction. I'm a member of a fraternity that in years past has run afoul of certain members of my schools administration, nothing terrible, but the end result being that we became unrecognized by greek life. This occured around 1998, and at the time we were a small chapter and nobody was really bugged by it. Since then we've done better with our recruiting and are again at a size where we've begun the process of being re-recognized with our campus' greek life; however, one of the major obstacles we had to overcome was our public image with the administration.
We realised, as I'm sure lots of college students eventaully will, that it's not just students on facebook, but rather anyone that can get an email address from the school, including campus police, administration, greek life, etc.
One of our brothers, notorious for his "liberal" views on drugs and alcohol (college kids do these things, even frat boys???) created a facebook group for our fraternity, and invited all the brothers to join. Several of whom were members of other groups with wonderful titles like "4:20 all day", "Keg stand team", "Party 24/7", you get the idea.
One day we recieved word from the administration that they were considering us for reinstatement on campus, however they strongly suggested we cleaned up our facebook profiles before we submitted our paperwork because, this person felt, that the image we were presenting of ourselves was not conducive to our being reinstated on campus.
I've heard worse horror stories where students have even been brought up on judicial charges for pictures posted to some facebook profiles.
Also employers who are alumnus of universities on facebook have begun using it as a tool for researching potential hires, all stuff to keep in mind, and nothing on the internet is private so be careful what sort of image you project about yourself. While it might make you seem cool now, in four years time you may be hating yourself or that person you really aren't.
Sig withheld to protect the innocent.
But who cares? The streets of web2.0 are paved with gold now.. start something and go raise some silly money of your own to ride the wave.. it wont last, it never does.. but maybe you will be lucky and your startup will survive.
If your startup doesn't survive its no big deal.. you got a year or two of fat vc financed salaries and perks and learned a few lessons to apply when the web3.0 bubble comes around.. which it will, sooner or later.
The Trump Tower or something?
In the drops - An Aussie's musings on all things cycling
One of the clear advantages of myspace, as has been discussed before, is the ability to add recorded songs in the profiles. Do you think some of the money might be going towards investment in inclusion of other forms of media? Videos possibly too? They snuck in the addition of photos and there seems to be no restrictions.
What happened then was that while the features and everything were all new and great, unfortunately the thing that had made those systems initially great was their large user bases. This is the same thing with social networking sites.
What I'm wondering is if there are any plans for something that can merge the data between them...kind of like an aggregator between all of your social networking sites you are signed up on.
Why should I have to go to 15 different sites to check my messages and scrapbook entries when there could be a way for me to go to one site that has my login info for all those sites and aggregates them nicely....perhaps in an RSS feed.
I guess the only thing really preventing this kind of interoperability is the proprietary nature of these sites and the fact that their business models rely on you visiting their sites and being bombarded with ads.
But can anybody here think of a way around that? Perhaps there could be some sort of software that lets you drop a line of code into the CSS of your page and have it send updates to your aggregator feed or something. Any body have any info on this? I'd prefer your comments over your mod points.
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I have been intereseted in the idea of social networks since the "6-degrees" days. I got a friendster account when it was new, before it sucked. When their network preformance was consistantly bad I switched to MySpace. Everyone of my friends is some one I've met in person, and the majority are people I interact with socially IRL regularly. MySpace will let you do anything pretty much on your profile. I hate it when people make god-awful pages, but that's the price you have to pay for openness and configurability. I've never been to the facebook site, because I've never been a college student. I guess it appeals to college students I'm not one so it doesn't appeal to me. Strange how that works. I have several friends who are in college and we use MySpace to communicate sometimes. I think the majority of people don't use myspace a tool for communicating with their friends as much as they use it as a substitute for pr0n.
"It's because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything." -Homer Simpson
Gotta love that it's a rumor site, but according to Valleywag, Greylock Ventures, the guys that just gave them $25 million, actually valued them at $525 million, which is not really that close to the $2 billion that they were rumored to be looking for.
Under the table: Greylock thinks Facebook's worth $525 million
Check this out... http://www.encrypted-world.net/?page_id=22
All I have to say is I love Firefox. I love how I can make all the ads go away on facebook apart from the "facebook fliers" which are text only and usually pertain to events on campus anyways.
Long-live Adblock for the Ad-Book Facebook.
Some of the earlier posts indicate that it's yet another social-networking type of site, aimed at college students. For those of us who now work for a living, would it have been too much to ask to mention that in the article?
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Man, I hate how I never have mod points when a rare truly insightful post crops up.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Take a look at the FOAF XML format. It's a way to provide a feed of social networking info. LiveJournal supports it, I expect other systems do too.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
The poster neglected to link to the sites involved.
Here's a fully linked version:
"BusinessWeek reports that Facebook has just raised another $25M from Venture Capital. Along the same lines, Rupert Murdoch has bought a minority stake in SimplyHired and just two days ago the social networking site, Visible Path said it raised $17M from Venture Capitals."
In addition to the above-mentioned larger advertisers trying to get college students loyal to brands, there is a lot of money in campus-wide advertising. Say you pay $100 and get 3000 students to notice that your group is going to have a concert on Friday night. How much would that cost you were you to make posters and distribute flyers? It is really reasonably priced and extremely efficient at getting your message to an entire campus or region. So assume that each ad you see brings in 3 cents and you see 500 ads a year. That's $15 of advertising revenue made off of you alone. And how is it recouped? If in that entire year you end up going to 3 events because of the ads and spend $10 there, it's worthwhile to the advertisers too. While I am highly skeptical of most online advertising (and think facebook is overvaluing itself a bit), there is true money to be made here, even working with a student's budget and small disposable income.
The only reason people use any of these sites is to gain yet another glimpse into the life of a person they know nothing about. I never really understood these sites - you post information about yourself that your friends already know and that others shouldn't know. Seriously, what's the benefit?
For everyone who is bothered by the fact that MySpace allows users to customize their pages: Why?... One look, one set of functionality, one way of doing it all, is that what you want? If you're bothered by the existence of what you don't like, or wouldn't have envisioned, get off the internet and watch infomercials; they're made for people like you. Millions of people are learning to code, sometimes badly, but even so, you have to see the beauty of it all. Or not :-)
PS-It's ok, I value your opinion too!!!!!!
Here are the money makers:
Now consider the fact that Facebook will have a constant stream of incoming college freshman joining the site. Graduates (at least for a few years) will remain active, ensuring a separate stream of advertising revenue.
These guys have a business plan and since they're first to market with this idea (maybe not first, but they're doing it better than anyone ever did) they can probably build up a massive user base that will support itself without any advertising.
That's important because a lot of companies burn through amazing amounts of VC cash to advertise their product. These guys have advertisers coming to them.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
We've learned (ok, apparently only I have learned) that ad revenue does not a company make.
Apparently you haven't noticed broadcast radio, TV, print magazines, newspapers, free weekly magazines, billboards, bus stop signs, and probably a lot of other things that don't come to mind in 10 seconds or less.
Those industries all are based on ad revenue. Some print media charge a subscription fee that doesn't approach the cost of producing the magazines/newspapers to give you a small barrier to entry so you don't just subscribe and never look at it. Plenty of others, such as alternative newsweeklies, just give the stuff away in boxes on the street.
I just learned something. So yeah, informative.
I once made it to a test because I was able to look people up who were in the same class as me and call somebody to ask where it was. Also, it's the home base for the campus CTF. Myspace has nothing on either one of those.
If I understand Dirac correctly, his meaning is this: there is no God, and Dirac is his Prophet. -Pauli
i share the same feeling about being locked in to systems when they could easily talk together.
i see a future when people make use of xml/rss for data interchange. the goal of your appleseed is already technically feasible.
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So if Rupert Murdoch owns the sites does that mean that they will only show resumes for right wing fox news viewers?