Speaker by Various Artists

AOL has just bought Bebo for USD850M -- about $20/customer.

AOL has just bought Bebo for USD850M -- about $20/customer.

And Facebook is really worth **sixty times as much?**

I'm not so sure.

I was quite taken with Simon's Willison's vision of "decentralised social networking" via OpenID. I wonder if that's the long-term challenge to facebook, and not another centralised service that has to justify its value by making unfeasible amounts of money without betraying the trust of its users.

And Facebook is really worth sixty times as much?

Yeah, but I think we're in that decade. It's the new dot.com revolution.

I mean, hands up who thinks trademe was worth $700 million NZ? That's $35/customer.

thirty five million people (half of the total userbase) return daily

:Shocked-face:
That is quite mind-blowing.

That seems reasonable for Trade Me. I've probably made them a fair bit more than $35, and I'm not heavy user... Trade Me has a clear revenue stream and doesn't need to be devious to acheive it.
I don't see how bebo/myspace/facebook/xing et al can ever have as robust a model. They don't offer me anything, and I suspect they don't have much to give advertisers.
An open source option, though, and maybe one which offers a sort of portable/transferable/exportable "e-portfolio" - that would be interesting...

I don't see how bebo/myspace/facebook/xing et al can ever have as robust a model. They don't offer me anything, and I suspect they don't have much to give advertisers.

thirty-five million people (half the userbase) return daily.

I'm not buying advertising, but that many people, with facebook knowing that much about them for targetting advertising... I think they've got a little something to give advertisers.

Trademe will only ever be NZ based, so it's limited to NZ. It'll never get much bigger than the 2 million or so that it has now, facebook/bebo etc are growing like crazy.

New Zealand has three hundred and seventy thousand members

Maybe so. But if some of them are like me, they joined because they got invited and didn't want to hurt the inviter's feelings. After a brief flurry of activity, us has stopped.

If I was a Facebook shareholder, I'd take the money NOW, before it is realised that even 35 million pairs of eyeballs on a social networking site only generates this much revenue long term.

Not to mention the fickleness of the user base. Remember when Yahoo! was the "it" thing? And then Hotmail? And then MySpace? and then Facebook?

The trick is to be there 10 years from now.

As I said - SELL SELL SELL

us = it (why can't we edit while the cookie is till active eh Cactus Lab?)

I was quite taken with Simon's Willison's vision of "decentralised social networking" via OpenID. I wonder if that's the long-term challenge to facebook, and not another centralised service that has to justify its value by making unfeasible amounts of money without betraying the trust of its users.

I think a key thing that would turn people off Facebook was if there was a significant scare around privacy information. There is a significant number of people out there who get worried about "the government" holding on to personal information - and here we have an instance where large amounts of very personal information about the day-to-day lives of a person is being held by an overseas corporation who (as I understand it) have admitted in the past that they will use that info for marketing purposes. In fact, until recently there was no easy way to actually remove information from Facebook if you decided you didn't want these details held.

I'm a Facebook user myself, but I must admit that I am wary of these things. As is the case with so many pages on the net, it is worthwhile wondering what would happen if something you said 10 years ago could come back to bite you. Now, if Facebook had a specific policy of securely deleting information after a set period of time, that would be helpful...