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Microsoft to Pay $240 Million for Stake in Facebook
Nrbelex writes to mention The New York Times is reporting that Microsoft has beat out Google and Yahoo for a 1.6% stake in Facebook. The investment will cost Microsoft $240 million valuing the total site at somewhere around $15 billion. "The astronomical valuation for Facebook is primarily evidence that Microsoft executives believed they could not afford to lose out on the Facebook deal. Google appears to be building a dominant position in the race to serve advertisements online. Fearing it might lose control over the next generation of computer users, Microsoft has been attempting to match and in some cases block Google's plans, even if that effort is costly."
After hearing so much about mySpace I finally surfed it, set up a page and looked around. It's all rubbish. People ask to join your list of friends to spam you and the interface is clunky at best. I think such a site would be a good idea, but their implementation falls short of the mark by leagues.
Along comes Facebook, cleaner interface, perhaps better ability to keep crap from showing up in comments or messages people send you. Hopefully if you are spammed there's an actual admin who gives them the boot, though it's quick and easy to join so an abuser will likely create accounts as needed for pest purposes. When rot sets in people will leave and go to the next big site, leaving mySpace and Facebook to host an ever shrinking group willing to put up with crap.
Two hundred forty! Million! Dollars!? IIIIII'mmmmmm the CAAAAAT! Seriously this is great news for those who hold ownership in this site, they'll rake in a very considerable profit.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Use adblock and give the finger to MSFT.
... a stake in the face, I suppose.
Let us not become the evil that we deplore.
Fearing it might lose control over the next generation of computer users, Microsoft has been attempting to match and in some cases block Google's plans, even if that effort is costly.
In other words, they didn't spend $240 million for 1.6% because Facebook is worth $15 billion. They paid $240 million because they're in the middle of a pissing match with Google.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Can I be the first?
I'm not sure how a valuation is capable of representing a belief, but it does reflect an acknowlegement of important trends. Facebook's platform is similar to other "Web 2.0" RESTful APIs but is pretty simplistic (i.e. CanvasPages--which is basically an IFRAME, alerts, feeds, and privacy settings, etc.). Don't expect a RoR framework or anything close to Google's API.
Sigs cause cancer.
Not trolling, curious, and not about to set up a page just for the fun of it.
I am curious, but yellow.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
I tip my hat to the badass that turned down $Billion from Yahoo several years ago.
Yahoo would have lamed down the site to the point of being unusable. Instead he made social networking cool again.
Bravo!
I'm sorry but this is ridiculous. MySpace was the last Next Big Thing and is losing users to FaceBook at a tremendous rate. Facebook will face the same fate and so will the next one and the next one and so on.
... it's insane.
In six months' time Facebook will be "worth" half that and in a year it'll be worth nothing.
I like social media, I think it's highly useful and may very well change the face of the internet in the same way the web changed the face of traditional media like newspapers, but this is Dot Com Bubble 2.0 as far as I can see. Crazy prices for Crazy products. Good on them for making the $$$$ but seriously
I am a leaf on the wind
I understand buying a company and using it to accomplish things you might want done, and I understand buying a substantial stake in a company that's going to become an important business partner... but remind me again why .016 of a company will advance your personal agenda? I mean, Yahoo and Google acted like they wanted it, so maybe it was a *really special* 2/125th part of the company, but I don't follow why this is important.
"total site at somewhere around $15 billion."
WTF!?! Facebook is worth of 15 billion dollars? I thought paying more than a billion for Youtube was dumb.
adblock won't kill facebook. if anything facebook has the advantage. they can store ads locally, obfuscating the manner in which they appear. paying people to verify your ads show up on a plethora of other sites can be costly...
That really is funny. I just added facebook.com to the url content filtering block list on my network. I look to keep my kids safe and keep the perverts away....
All content in this message is copyright (c) 2008. All rights reserved. RIAA is prohibited here.
...the wooden vampire-impaling kind of stake? Because if so, I think Microsoft's got it all backwards.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/16/0015203
"A few weeks ago I wrote an open letter to my former friend from school, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, telling him to take Yahoo's money before it's too late."
http://www.aarongreenspan.com/letter/index.html - hire this dude, he's a visionary
Free market and competing corps. Where is the news?
Facebook, now with 1.6% fail!
Facebook, Bill Gates is your friend.
Facebook, following vista all the way down.
Facebook, overruling a minority shareholder and using ads from a company that doesn't suck ass.
The past couple of days, I've been listening to my co-worker talk about hitting the wrong button and 'hugging' a large group of people. Not only is he freaking out that only the men have returned his 'hug', he is trying to figure out how tell these people that he did not mean it without alienating them.
Who needs soap operas?
it was hacked recently and many people are making clones from the exact source
Microsoft buying stake in a company makes that company look mediocre
OR
Microsoft always buys stake in mediocre companies (left overs from Google buy outs)?
Based on the giant upgrade to IE7 suggestion that started popping up every time you log in, I'd thought this had already happened.
Some have speculated that this could be a move to drive adoption of the Silverlight plugin to compete with Adobe's flash. There is evidence that could work too. When MySpace was hacked that involved some clever javascript and a SWF, the admins pushed Flash Player 9 (which had added security) on the userbase and it's adoption rate, many have speculated, is largely due to that. One of Microsoft's biggest challenges with unseating Adobe's Flash is it's insanely high adoption. (something like 95% of computers have flash 8) and now they just bought into a userbase of 20 million "early adopters." Will it be effective? who knows. But I would be surprised if we didn't start seeing Silverlight widgets and ads on facebook.
meep
I'm curious if any other companies have experienced this kind of growth. Does anyone have any examples?
What, Microsoft matching or attempting to block the plans of competitors? Nothing new from them, that's for sure!
I've said this before. No reason to go there. Never been, never will (unless I come across a link which I click and I end up there).
This "investment" is ridiculous, so I'll start with the appropriate ridicule...
Microsoft again shows that it is composed of ignorant idiots.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
I have a plan.
Seeing this level of wisdom, after painstaking, conservative estimates of revenues and dividends were calculated to come up with this value of $15 billion, which would in the "quaint, old-fashioned" world of people who actually built companies to feed their families and those of their workers be requiring something like a billion of yearly revenue and something like $10 billion in assets, I came to the conclusion that we Slashdotters too can take advantage of this insanity.
Here is what we should do: Each of us starts a corporation, with names like "IgnoramusMaximus' Megacorp Consolidated on the Internet!" (that last bit is important for the "traditional" investors) and then we "sell" to each other our "stakes" in these wonders of modern enterpreneurship for, say, conservatively, 20 million US dollars (or Euros) a share, with the price being "paid" in our equally valuable shares of the other Slashdotter's corporations. If we all say our stuff is worth beeeeeelions, who is to say otherwise! After all, we got web sites and email for these corps!!!
Next thing you know, our shares can be traded on NASDAQ, NYNEX and who knows where else, as they are far in excess the required share price for those markets and I am sure we Slashdotters can create sufficient trade "volume" trading our super-shares via email 20 times a day.
All that remains is for the turkeys, known as the "institutional investors" so start biting! After all they gamble on equally reasonably "valued" and brain-dead "opportunities" such as the above mentioned FaceBook. Why should they care if we have no product, no sales, no assets? That never stopped them before, did it?! And we are on the Internet!
And so dear Slashdotters, I am hereby giving you your way to beeeeeelions of dollars (or euros) as easy as filling some paperwork and registering the name!
So here it goes:
I'll admit up front I'm not one of these technology pundits that make endless speculation but something occurs to me. In the big picture doesn't the future of social networking truly depend on the interopability of these social networks? And if so, wouldn't the player that steps up and comes up with a method to bring interop between social networks and then effectively control that method (heck they don't even have to make it proprietary just control the protocol) will be the one you want a stake in if you're yahoo/google/ms?
I'm on Facebook, I enjoy it but it's clear to me it's not worth $15 billion. As others have said the "next big thing" will come along and draw people away again. I can already see how facebook is going the way of MySpace, sadly with the number of applications that people clutter their profile with (myself included!). Then when everyone rushes off facebook then what's facebook worth? Hardly 15 Billion but the market seems to responded positively to this announcement and Microsofts stock price has done well today (because they beat google).
My point is that I believe the real stake will be the provider that brings people the ability to use the service that they want and still make their connections. Otherwise people are blowing their money on things that have no real value due to user flux.
Oops, how did this get here?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Afaik Yahoo and Google or whatever had offered 60 billion if I remember correctly, atleast I think someone did.
They didn't took it thought and from that article I got the impression they wanted to have it valued in the range of 100 billion instead.
So the price Microsoft is paying is very low and very cheap. I wonder why they got it at all for that amount of money, guess they wanted some cash without giving away the whole company.
Just because you have a large user base does not mean you have a large source of income. I don't know if Facebook is profitable, but I do have my suspicions that it is grossly over-valued right now. This social networking craze reminds me of a little thing that happened a few years ago. Eventually these companies are going to have to find a way to make money...ads? That's the best idea they've been able to come up with. Eventually though, someone has to buy something for that model to work, and when your user base is a group of people that signed up for a service because it was free don't be surprised when they're not so eager to pull out their credit cards (If they even have them, since, surprise MS, your users are also a bunch of high school students!). The only thing I can think of is maybe MS thinks there is some value in the data, even that I'd say is nebulous at best. This screams of "me-too!" corporate positioning. MS can obviously afford this, they probably weighed the chances of being left out of the social networking fad and losing money on this deal and considered it an acceptable risk. The only major effect it could have would be positive, obviously they can afford it.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
I'm sitting here in my mid-30s, webdeving against abysmal insignificance since 2000 and along comes some highschool punk and cashes 250 MILLLION DOLLARS for a website totalling a nominal 15 billion in worth. Un-f*cking-believable.
... *GASP!* ... *SOB* .... MS Execs with truckloads of cash to burn.
Karma can be tough.
Goes to show a main business rule:
Not what *you* think is a cool interweb app is a cool interweb app. If you can think the concept 'cool interweb app' you are most likely more intelligent than 99% of the poplulation and what you think matters zilch against any possible demografic. What your *customers* think, on the other hand, is *all* that matters in business. Be they 250 Quadzillion Facebook users or a board of half-a-dozen
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Je ne parle pas francais.
Here is my opinion on this deal reproduced from this blog. I don't understand it. Are we back to late 90s? This type of valuation is a signal of late 90s valuation which cannot be justified PERIOD. We first had E-Bay acquiring Skype @ ridiculous valuation and then righting it off. Most likely Microsoft will write off this investment in a few months as well. Given the cash position of the MSFT, this will have little impact on their bottom line. But this completely distorts the market space for near future acquisition and startup activity. The VC money flow starts diverting on ".com" and starts drying off from infrastructure where such valuations are still not there. I loved late 90s. Lots of people made a lot of money. But I was just too young at that time. May be if MSFT/Yahoo/Google keep fighting, I will be able to make some money in late '00s :)
What usually happens is there is a little cash over the table with some other promised cash materializing if the project hits some agreed-upon benchmarks.
Let's say they actually make $150 million this year, since the company is fishing for investors, they are burning through whatever they are making.
Today's lesson: Company seeks investor == Can't grow on it's own capital =~ disfunctional business model.
It will be interesting to watch the flame-out in a couple of years.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
this completely distorts the market space for near future acquisition and startup activity.
Exactly! This pretty trivial investment (for MS) raises the cash barrier to entry for new startups and makes it several times more expensive for companies like Google/Yahoo/Ebay/Sun/Apple to buy new technolgies. MS isn't that concerned about crazy runups in Web2 bubble valuations because it's got its extraordinarily profitable Office business just ticking along.
Da Blog
Google has shown that they are willing to do what they have to do to get users to put as much of their lives on Google as possible. People are talking about how everybody left Myspace six months ago and will leave Facebook in six months too, it seems pretty likely that Google could be the new "Facebook" if they really wanted to.
no it does'nt.. people left myspace for facebook.. and people will leave facebook for something else.. people WILL show up reguardless.
Now they are share holder that have some control. That's what they are after.
Maybe it's just due to inflation or the dollar value ;)
Thought 750 or 900 million or whatever probably WAS 6 billion SEK, so I might have close to read it.
http://www.e24.se/dynamiskt/reklam_media/did_17328904.asp
Is probably what I had read, it says Yahoo offered 7 billion SEK september 2006 and Google 15 billion SEK one month later.
Zuckerman said no and that 56 billion where more close to the correct value (close to 60 billion so that explains where I got it from.)
It also mentions Yahoo tried again this year in may for 11.2 billion SEK, and that Microsoft wanted to buy 3-5% for 2-3.2 billion SEK which would value the company at 65 billion (still close to what I said.)
And finally it says that he seems to wait until the value is raised to 100 billion SEK.
So ok, it wasn't offers from Yahoo or Google which where close to 60 billion SEK NOT DOLLAR but Microsofts offer instead.
And 100 billion SEK value wasn't US dollar either.
I really started dislyking Orkut a while ago (I am brazilian, insert jokes/trolling about it here), but the interface redesign and better photo, video and community tools just made it very good.
But I don't see how any of those community sites could be the next thing or change the internet. They are just what ICQ was once, and before what email was, a way for people to find each other and communicate. I don't see how a clear winner will emerge. Probally the market will be segmented as it is now and people will not be afraid to change from one to another social network. A system that could interact with multiple social networks, as social stream google is studying seems to me a much more interesting horse to bet int.
Nobody used MySpace. Everyone uses Facebook. Because of that it was easy to move people away from MySpace, but it will not be so easy to move people away from Facebook in the future.
Leave facebook and move on to something else, costing Microsoft money with no gain :-)
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
How many of them are spam accounts?
Probably a good portion of them, but that is a large number by any standard.
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
Number of accounts != Actual Users or People
Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?
is the price of pudding.
sig sig sig siggy sig
Zing!
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
http://www.orkut.com/About.aspx
:-)
If orkut becomes as popular in the US as it is in Brasil, then it would have been pretty stupid from Google to sign a deal
it seems pretty likely that Google could be the new "Facebook" if they really wanted to.
Really? Google tried with Orkut. It really did. What did it get? Brazil.
Da Blog
Google is a leader in paid search, which serves only a portion of the advertising on the internet. In fact most folks consider the long-tail paid search area to be played out in terms of revenue.
The longer-term money is in other areas of the "buying funnel" -- namely display advertising. This partnership plays to the strengths of Microsoft'd display space and is more of a competition with Yahoo than Google.
In fact Display Ads is where GOOG is the weakest. That's an area they are trying to improve via the Doubleclick acquisition.
Get me an "active account" number, and you'll have something. Hell, my open personal Myspace account could be considered active, but I mainly only ever go on it to clean out the spam. Everyone I know is on Facebook already, or transitioning to it. I only have one friend whos resistant to it, and the reason is because he can't fuck up the page like Myspace allows him to. He can stay there for all I care given I can't even look at his Myspace page without wanting to scream about HTML standards.
Due to his obstinacy over Facebook he now wonders why no one ever invites him out to do stuff now which I find slightly funny XD
As a guy who has worked in web development for a long time, I can tell you from personal experience those numbers are completely untrustworthy.
An extremely prevalent pattern is for kids/teens/young adults to sign up 2-20 accounts per actual human. They enjoy the "role-play" elements in taking on new identities. At one time, a site I worked with didn't limit "accounts" by email, it was astounding how many accounts per email we had - this was a kid oriented site. I think the average was 4 and a half or something.
So, even assuming they are all human derived (which they're not, but I have no educated guess on percentage), you can safely halve that figure and then you're STILL not accounting for abandoned accounts. I have two on myspace.
There is a real move away from user account stat usage these days, thankfully. I've been mocking it as a statistical tool for years so I feel a certain vindication. More useful now are page views and time per session (this is qualitative generally, but less so than 'account number')
Congrats to MS on purchasing a share in a great product that's clearly jumped the shark. As someone mentioned, the userbase of facebook doesn't have a lot to lose by jumping ship for a better product. Facebook seems like a smarter than the average
Wow, congrats to those 'hackers'! Now they have a bunch of cold fusion code. Enjoy running that on your warez version of adobe's cold fusion server. Never mind the fact that you can replicate 8/10ths of myspace functionality in a few weeks with a couple of competent coders and not worry about, say, the legalities of that theft. I imagine the code base of Myspace has enough oddity that anyone foolish enough to make a public site without SIGNIFICANTLY modifying that code stands a real chance of being found out by an automated tool Myspace is/has made. As a fun mental exercise :
Indentify 3 or 4 unlinked CFM pages in your code
-AND/OR-
Take some recent bugs in your bug database
Scrap google for new social networking sites
Test your 3 or 4 URLS / reproducible bugs against new social networking sites
Email whois data on the domain to your security dept when a match appears
Profit!
Unless they significantly modify the code (and then why steal it?), you're doomed unless you keep the site private. What's the point of a private Myspace?
Facebook apps will make Facebook accounts the one login to rule them all. Something Microsoft failed to do with Passport.
I am writing a Facebook app and am surprised by how willing people are to give up their personal info and social network, to send somebody a virtual "gift". They remind me of those cutesy forwards, on steroids, except you can't participate in them unless you add the sending application to your account and give away your data. Every time I think about it, I picture a bunch of lemmings walking off a cliff. Am I overreacting? After all, the apps are just a tool. I don't respond to every spam message a I get, and I tend to ignore forwards.
Here is something I got when I logged in today -
"Marty Mcfly would like to play Texas Holdem Poker with you. If you join, Marty will receive 500 chips. Help out a friend and install Texas Holdem Poker."
Well if I don't join, Marty won't get his 500 chips. Also, not to mention Marty might feel snubbed if I don't want to play poker with him. Decisions, decisions.
As a developer on a very large kid-oriented site myself, I share your personal experience with the inflated metric of user accounts. However, MySpace has a very large audience by any account—certainly more than "nobody"—and that is what I was trying to illustrate.
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
According to http://www.theage.com.au/news/web/myspace-is-just-so-2006/2007/10/22/1192940966782.html facebook is " where more of the thought leaders and influentials go."
So, if you want to build a circle of "friends" with Nobel prize winners, and join the most high-brow discussions on the planet, sign up to facebook. (Microsoft got it).
I'm a software visionary. I don't code.
NT
As a public service, took the bait to look this over. Absolutely nothing original here, and the Facebook-like logo is being the worst kind of lame.
I wouldn't quit the day job.
Yup, I totally agree with you, myspace is and will be a big site in the community scene for a long time to come. Eventually it'll pull a geocities and fade into the background, while never really going into the dark.
As someone in the kid space, how do you look at the valuation of facebook? Hype or reality based?
Myself, I'm a bit torn. I can see the value of their database and marketing power. I've not seen any of their financials nor do I know anyone there. So it's speculative.
Cheers!
"Facebook isn't concerned with you then, just like you aren't concerned with Facebook. Facebook is concerned with the millions of other users who do have a reason to go there. "
All of who will forget their login when their braces come off and get boyfriends.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Wow.
Facebook is tiny. It's this one little building on Hamilton in Palo Alto, next to the nail salon and the foam store. The servers are in some colo elsewhere.
"Web 2.0" is starting to look way overvalued. Companies are buying "clicks" and "eyeballs", not revenue. Remember what happened last time.
Basically Microsoft just peeled off a few bills to give to Facebook to keep it out of Google's hands. They basically can afford to pay out this money without blinking -- and now Facebook has a valuation that's way too rich for it to be acquired or go IPO now.
I don't think Microsoft expects to get this money back. They just basically did it to screw everyone.
The problem with both of these sites in terms of future value, they are simply just a small microcosm of the overall world wide web, doomed to a limited existence. Cheap web serving appliances and IPv6 will be the death of both myspace and facebook.
M$ making the typical Ballmer blunder by buying into a section of the web at inflated prices as it's demise is on the horizon, well, at least to those who have at least some understanding of the changing nature of the internet, as hardware reduces in price, software becomes free and broadband bandwidth grows.
For either google or M$ to buy into facebook is an addmission of their own incompetence in managing their web portals and being unable to create their own desirable virtual community or in the case of both of those companies, to so mismanage their existing virtual communities, that they to lose to relative new comers.
You only buy competitors when you can't compete. As for web advertising dominance, expect a come from behind, old world mass media, fracturing of that business space. They have a depth of expertise, as well as extensive libraries of content. Admittedly slow to the party, which sees them currently behind, but they will leverage their existing media distribution systems to push out and marginalize what is basically just a 'search engine'(google) and an 'OS/office suite'(M$).
Did no one pay attention to how Newscorp sutlely promoted myspace by inserting references to it in their news papers, television shows, cable network and movies (the most interesting targeted ones were references to myspace in Sunday paper cartoons). As well as of course the expected advertising as news articles.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
I totally agree. Wasn't there another social network site that WAS really hot? I forgot the name already. Friend-something?
The CBC show 22minutes last night had a sketch facebook - think about it
What a way to show to the millions of young and hip teens the "facts" about Linux.
In reference to accusations contained in: http://www.albumoftheday.com/facebook/
Does buying 1,6% give Microsoft the right to use the information Facebook gathers from its users?
If it does, then it really doesn't matter how long the website stays alive and active now does it? Microsoft has already made a pretty good deal from a marketing perspective.. 240 mil isn't much for so much data on potential customers. In the world of marketing, information is pow... money.
Have you seen facebook recently?! Whilst it isn't quite at mySpace proportions there is a fair amount a person can do to fuck up their profiles*
(*and annoy me whilst they're at it.
FB: "friend" has invited you to become a pirate
JCII: FUCKOFFFUCKOFFFUCKOFFFUCKOFFFUCKOFF
FB: "friend" has been removed from your list of friends)
Dear Mr. Gates,
I have a 1985 GMC pickup truck for sale, with very little rust. I'm quite certain that you don't want to see it go to Google, so I wanted to give you a chance to pick it up for the low low price of only $6 million. It's capable of hauling large loads. Imagine yourself hauling Balmer's broken chairs, piles of money or boxes of Vista to the the dump. Better hurry, because the Google guys are coming buy this afternoon.
Check or Cash would be fine. No Microsoft stock, please.
Ken
Place nail here >+
"Cheap web serving appliances and IPv6"
I doubt this will be their downfall. It's more likely that a competitor will emerge, get more fashionable and their users will just switch to the newer, cooler, site. It happened before in other markets.
As for cheap servers and IPv6, Facebook's assets are the relationships between the accounts, not the accounts/people themselves. It's the relationships that drive traffic, not the content.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
15 billion $ - the social network bubble keeps on growing...
Magazine 13 - We like to think its funny... sort of
NO. Facebook has a huge database of users, all over the world, and how they all relate to each other. You really think that's not worth any more than having the email address and peoples' random web pages?
Time to close the facebook account. It was fun while it lasted....
Dude, that's HARD. CORE. I mean, only the best of the best warez a product you can download for free!
(FWIW, most J2EE server platforms are based on deployment licensing rather than per-copy licensing. So it's usually cheap/free and easy to get a copy. That being said, Coldfusion/JRun is a POS. Like yourself, I don't recommend it.)
The only really meaningful, interesting social interactions are (for the most part) with the friends you bring with you to facebook. The discussions occuring in the groups they have are mindnumbing compared to usenet newgroups (which is saying something). So it's not a place (imho) to meet people, but in keeping up with friends and friends of friends or in finding old, lost friends, it's quite reasonable. I have come into contact with some old friends with whom I've lost touch via facebook so for that alone, i'm happy to have an account. Some of the developed apps are cute and fun and they do add a component to socializing with your friends. My vampire gets attacked all the time, a sheep is thrown at me, a cookie is given to me, ...
And some of the apps are actually interesting: flixster embedded in facebook to allow for comparing movies and sharing reviews with friends, visual bookshelf to list your books read/want to read/currently reading and compare against friends.
Yes, I like facebook ok and i can really see how kids in high school, just graduating high school, in college, or just graduating from college would find it a Killer App.
And before either or those, there was Friendster, which everyone abandoned to go to myspace (and before that was Hot or Not, and before that, message boards, and arguably , ICQ, IRC, News Groups, BBSs, etc). Whats so different now? More features? What happens when the next big thing comes out with even more? There will always be The Next Big Thing, until someone comes out with a flexible enough platform that can allow that Thing to be incorporated into it seamlessly, and easily, as well as allow the users themselves to develop that Thing from the ground up. Who knows, maybe its already out there, though I doubt Facebook's API qualifies.
tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
What's different now is that my parent's and even my grandparent's generations are on it. A college student might be quick to jump around, but the older folks will never take the time to learn yet another social networking site. The other services you mentioned never reached the critical mass required to last. Facebook has.
But I think you'll need to wait a few years before you can say whether FaceBook is a fad or not. Your assumption that people will continue to use FaceBook to keep track of old college friends is untested.
Just anecdotal, but I personally don't keep in close contact with college friends ten years on. Heck, I don't keep in touch with Army buddies that I was in combat with, and it's hard to imagine a shared bond closer than that. Not that there aren't/weren't site available for that to happen, either. But once you move on, get a job, wind up in a different city, get married, discover new hobbies and interests and meet a new set of IRL friends, I'm not sure how valuable your FaceBook interactions are going to be to you. More importantly, when you stop being so close to those "old" friends, you're going to be visiting less which means less ad revenue for FB.
Of course, everyone is different and it could be that there will be a lot of folks who keep in touch regularly via FB after they graduate. Before the 'net there were folks who corresponded regularly for years with old college friends. But I'm not sure that it's a given.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
else on facebook is doing. Trying to collect the most friends. Wait until some kid tells them about the de-friend button. Chairs will be flying.
0x7279727972797279
On the other hand I don't know that Facebook is worth 15 billion. Microsoft reeks of desperation here. As for google, I think they screwed up big time with Orkut. I remember wanting to join that ages ago and couldn't because it was invitation only. Now I have a facebook account and while Orkut is wide open I have no interest in switching because not only are my friend not using it, but I'd have to build my profile and network from scratch.
It wasn't hacked, one of the webservers was misconfigured and didn't interpret a few PHP files correctly.
And only a very small portion of the source was exposed, too. Not nearly enough to just upload it somewhere and get a working clone.
He's talking about Facebook, not Myspace, so it's PHP.
But only a small fraction of the source was revealed, too. Not nearly enough to get a working clone, or even a good idea of the inner workings of Facebook itself.
(As to what's the point of a private Myspace, Facebook worked very well as a private, college-only network.)
It is all content, the method of creating and sharing content is the only difference. The other big thing, is whether they are your relationships, or just targeted invasive corporate marketing vectors. There is now way, that the old, corporate controlled and manipulated so called "social networks" aren't going to be seen as third world in comparison.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
It used to be the dev version was limited to binding to localhost alone(as I recall). I haven't touched CF since the 97. As you say, total POS and it didn't even run credit cards : P
As to what's the point of a private Myspace, Facebook worked very well as a private, college-only network.)
I would not call "anyone in college" private in the sense that you'd be servicing that audience with easily identifiable stolen goods and PRESUMABLY not wanting to go to jail. : )
'Private' in conjunction with stolen goods is generally far more restrictive.