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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."
Most people I know have both facebook and myspace. I personally can't stand myspace because the profiles are usually too cluttered to be readable. I'm also not a fan of 300 animations and a soundtrack starting up when I view someones profile.
Facebook has a clean, usuable apperance.
Gone!
Yeah, it is in some ways. Since it is limited to college students you don't get the pre-teen and young teenagers, so the quality of the pages is better. Plus Facebook uses templates for user pages so you don't have the fucked up and illegible pink text on fuscia background that you get on myspace, the background music, the scrolling text, etc. It's not perfect and there is a lot of stupidity and too many people trying to get 100,000+ people listed as thier friends.
the ability to mark uploaded pictures as other people alone is priceless.
for those that don't know: userA can upload pictures from an event onto thier facebook profile under EventX. Going through those pictures, they can label portions of the pictures as other users on the site. For instance, there is a picture of userB kissing userC, or another of userC throwing up. When you visit userC's profile, (assuming you are marked as thier friend) you can view all the pictures that other people labeled about them! When viewing those pictures, it then lists all the people in it...
It is 1000x better than anything that myspace has.
Just about everybody here at my college is on the Facebook, while damn near nobody does the MySpace/LiveJournal/etc... thing. Mind you that my school was one of the first to be on the Facebook, so that may have something to do with it.
The Facebook is really nice compared to everything else in that it has a very clean and uniform layout. Also, it's a bit exclusive, and in general the signal to noise ratio is just a bit better than on MySpace. You're able to avoid the high school students (well, for the most part...)
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.