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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."
If you listen closely in the future i hear a loud BANG! as if a big bubble popped. maybe its just me tho!
Well, I think you need to be going to college in order to have a Facebook account. So, right there what, about 75-80% of Myspace users are ineligible.
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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.
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Yes I know I shouldn't feed the troll, but it's precisely because of that 'circus of color, sound, and animation' why so many people despise MySpace. Visiting a MySpace is like playing Russian Roulette, some pages may be benign, but some could scar you for life.
Then again, if you actually were deaf and blind, MySpace's customizability would probably break any sort of standards and thus could almost guarantee any any sort of braille interface would probably die in fits of laughter when it saw a MySpace profile.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Venture capitals are usually funds that invest in business ventures at various stages. Some funds invest in the "seed stage" of a new business to get them started. Others come in after the busness is already started and doing pretty well to help sustain further growth and development. Once the venture capital fund invests in a business, they esentially own a portion of the business, and will require that the money they invest be paid out at a certain time. They will also take a precentage of the profits based on how much money they have put in.
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.
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.
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...)
Way to go Facebook. Each extra million brings you closer to your pie in the sky.
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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!
I don't think you quite understand the differences between Myspace & Facebook. I've used both, and I absolutely loathe Myspace at this point. I currently work at an educational institution, and the Facebook is amazingly widespread.
The way I see it, Myspace is like Frontpage or Geocities for the web of 1998. People are discovering how to "embed", "marquee", and rock out to their horrid animated gif background images. Finally people are saying "Hey, I have a website! Its at myspace.com/whatever!"
The Facebook is totally different. You cannot make your page play music, blink, or CSS the hell out of it. The Facebook is clean and extremely easy to navigate. The most interesting features in my mind are the following:
Bulk uploading of pictures - You can then tag them (by making boxes around people's faces) and later, you can search for that frat boy you've been wooing. You can then enjoy seeing him falling over drunk in 50 other people's photo galleries. At my particular school, the stats show that 1300 pictures have been uploaded today alone!
Pulse - This is simply an aggregator for everyone's favorite things (books, movies, etc). It functions like a stock exchange, and is updated daily. You can watch "Family Guy" move up the charts as more people add it as their favorite TV show. These kind of statistics (per school, no less) would be priceless to any marketing agency.
So sure, Myspace give you freedom to tinker with the ugly layout, but the Facebook revels in its simplicity and navigability. Its a well-built voluntary student directory, and it sure functions amazingly.
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.
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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.
Facebook is about the strangest thing I have ever come across.
I don't know whether to call it great or frightening.
It's a time waster more than anything. When I have work to do, and I want to procrastinate I read other people's Facebook profiles. Some of these people I know very well, other's just happen to be listed as my friend through odd circumstance or what have you.
What's scary is that almost everyone in college has an account. I was back home the other day, and just for shits and giggles, I dug out my old high school year book (I moved half-way through high school, Texas to North Carolina. Except for a few, I haven't kept up with my old, Texas friends), and almost everybody in my grade had a profile!
My sisters' best friend's brother has a Facebook profile, My Grandparent's old friend's son has a Facebook profile. This girl I had a crush on in sixth grade has a profile. Fuckin' frightening.
And what's even more frightening is that Facebook is no longer limited to College students. There's a "high school" version which just requires a valid e-mail address. It used to be that the College and High School version were completely separate, but that's no longer the case. Disturbing.
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.
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
"...so the quality of the pages is better."
I want you read this statement again, then think about it.
I will give into the possibility that there may be a tighter meathead to emo ratio.
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.
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."
When the site first started, they didn't have the url of facebook.com, so you actually did have to go to thefacebook.com. Hence, some of the users who were first on the bandwagon still add in the "the" when they say the name of the site.
If there's anything more important than my ego around, i want it caught and shot now.