Rupert Murdoch got a deal when he bought MySpace for $580 million, because the next social site to be bought will be Facebook but it’s going to go for over a billion dollars.
$1,000,000,000!
There were rumors a few weeks ago about Facebook going after another round of venture capital funding with a high 9 figure valuation attached to it, but I can’t imagine why they’d need any more money. Facebook is still a smaller company, and their corporate-sponsored groups and advertising pull in the megabucks (from what I’ve heard.) I’ve heard from a few sources close to the company that they recently turned down an acquisition offer that was close to or right at $1 billion, and BusinessWeek’s latest article on Facebook puts a $750 million number on that rumor so my sources were pretty accurate.
MySpace is king of the younger and music-oriented demographic, and Facebook is king of the college and early 20s demographic. MySpace is the Hollister to Facebook’s Abercrombie, and we all know that once middle school kids get out of their Hollister phase what clothing line they run right into.
85% of college students (whose college is registered with Facebook) use the service, and that number has nowhere to go but up, if that’s even possible. So just like MySpace youngsters get older and go off to college and use Facebook, college students graduate and go off to the real world and then use, what…. LinkedIn? Yup, that’s the progression. I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook provided a service to bring together Facebook users who have recently graduated and now want to network with other people not just to party and have casual sex, but to find jobs (and still have casual sex.) We’ll have to wait and see.
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I think eventually someone is going to throw together a simple protocol/standard for the functionality of “friend” pages (just like blogs) and people will gradually shift over from these centralized sites. These sites have come a long way to define what a page should consist of… but I don’t think we really need them as a intermediary on all of our virtual-social-interaction. Just like there are blog search engines, eventually we’ll have “friend” search engines. Or something like that ;)
I have to agree with your assessment. As a recent college student who was lured onto LJ by friends (LiveJournal) and then whose school got onto Facebook not too long after, it really is a 1-2 punch.
If only we were in on the finders fee with the firm that is doing the deal.
So confused about this line —
85% of college students (whose college is registered with Facebook) use the service, and that number has nowhere to go but up, if that’s even possible.
Why does that have ‘nowhere to go but up’? Seems like plenty of room to plummet downward.
Haha, yeah seems like they everywhere to go but up ;)
Consider my words, minced.
I think the natural progressional is international. Personally, I prefer: MySpace is to AIM as Facebook is to Google Talk or Skype. ;-)
I don’t think LinkedIn is going to be the place to find jobs and still have casual sex… but hey… who knows right?
i dont know about the hollister and abercrombie analogy is a little off. though hollister is some how part of abercrombie ( a sister company or something) at first it was myspace then they opened up facebook to high school students ( me ) and the transition begain. everyday you would go on and people from my small school of 150 would be getting facebook. facebook is much better designed and i think is worth more then myspace because of the design, the better community, and the better privacy. Although myspace is still used for connections with peope from other schools and for music. but within my school facebook seems to be the choice.
also 85 % is really good plus the photos feature is one of he most important features. overall facebook is in the transistion state and rocks my socks
There has been a lot of great comments but i would like to add there is going to be a new competitor entering the social-mania know as social web logging. i dont have much information but look to see a mass market shift in about a year or so…it should be very interesting!!!
ken