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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.
Left 4 Dead Gaming Group - http://www.l4dgg.com
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.
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...)
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.
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.