Facebook is like an inoperable tumor with roots spread throughout someone's brain. No matter how much people complain about it and become uncomfortable with it, FB ain't going anywhere. I stopped using my account about a year ago and my teenage son and his friends have dumped it for Twitter.
I turned mine off because I'm back in Houston and my girlfriend is still in school. Facebook gives me no privacy because always I will be tagged in places and she will call b****ing ha. I feel pretty free without it except if I'm single in the near future it'd be easier to get in touch with some tail if I turned it back on.
I would buy this at 10 dollars. I think it should have started as 25 billion dollar company not a 100 billion dollar one.
LMAO at people who joined Facebook because they thought their stock packages would be worth a lot. I didn't go there more than a year ago because they were already talking about $ 100 B valuations. In fact, they were talking about becoming the first $ 1,000 B company. I didn't see the upside. Not to say they won't eventually be worth possibly $ 200 B or whatever, but there is more risk/more reward if you do something more early stage.
Failbook. I think even many of the so-called insiders got screwed -- I hear it was trading on SharePost for $48 pre-IPO, as far back as March. Zuck's net worth is down a couple billion already. I don't think he'll be hurrying back to ring the bell in a hoodie anytime soon.
I believe facebook will be around for a long time because it is designed well and simple to use -however using myself for an example as an internety person -- FB is already boring as hell. I check it like I check email and I think the majority of the 900+ million users are doing the same thing. FB is way overvalued right now... a hundred billion dollar company -- unlikely.
Let's not forget what happened to myspace. Facebook is way, way better, but that shows that the business model "online community" can be challenged, even when growth numbers look crazy high. Facebook has a much stronger lock-in, but one never knows.
I think facebook will die the day that it comes out what Zuck is doing with your personal information. This will be the end of facebook once a full report is done on this. I'm in this business, I know it well. I deleted my fb account in the summer of 2010 and haven't looked back. And don't give me the "nothing is private on the internet". I get that, but what you guys don't get is what he's able to compile about you and your habits are scary. Fb will die when this is leaked.
9.72 billion revenue for Google third quarter last year and face book is 4 billion for the whole year. So google revenue is about 10 times as much as face book, but I guess a lot of that are not ad revenue.
on the contrary, google's revenue is predominantly ad. i don't know the exact %, but i understand it's like 95%'ish. all their other stuff, generally, is to support their "eco-system", which keeps you going back to google to search for stuff. just consider, more people use google everyday than facebook. when people use google, they do so with a specific goal in mind - find this, or find that. when they use facebook, it's more of a what's interesting goal. therefore, google's ads are more targeted and better, and they can charge more for them. facebook ads are r****ded. nevermind the fact that if you are on mobile, you don't see them anyways. i just logged in on the computer to check, and the ad i got was for McDonald's. I don't eat at McDonald's - why? Because I don't eat meat. That;s why GM pulled their $10 million worth of facebook advertising recently. they saw no cause and effect. this is the real dilemma for the company. because if they can advertise to you better and more efficiently, on a mobile device, then they can justify their current valuation. It's a much tougher road than facebook. going to facebook and being inundated with ads inherently pisses off the consumer. going to google, and searching for "chinese food", for example, and then being shown an ad, is actually value additive, and expected. It doesn't seem like any of these ad driven businesses on the internet should be so successful. but from what i read, something like only 13% of total advertising is done online - the rest is still print and other media (tv, radio). so the online ad space should continue to grow exponentially for the foreseeable future.
Facebook failed to embrace mobile like they should have a long time ago, and are now scrambling trying to catch up but all the ad revenue from that segment is going straight to Google and Apple. This is the big weakness of FB right now. They're trying as hard as they can to become more relevant in mobile, but it's still not nearly good enough. It's for the same reason that Zuck rushed out to buy Instagram without even seeking board approval. Now I hear the FB phone (which already failed miserably once) is back on the table again. And whether they realize it or not, Google+ is a massive, massive threat to them for that same reason: mobile integration. Google+'s integration on Android is light years ahead of any other social network and they've taken sharing to levels that FB can only dream about right now. The effect of this will slowly become apparent as newer versions of Android (4.0 & up) begin to achieve high levels of market penetration. Much ado has been made about the relatively slow adoption of G+, but I think Google is playing the long game here and FB doesn't have anything concrete to show as a long term challenge. Don't get me wrong, I don't think Facebook is doomed to die. I just think that their ambitions of world domination are a little far fetched at the moment, and the market has called their bluff -- they don't have a realistic revenue model to justify the pomp and hype.
