Category Archives: facebook

Face Bookie?

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John Battell is wondering if Facebook might even reject a 6 billion dollar offer given how high they are flying these days.  I’m trying to read between his sarcasm but he seems to think they’d (foolishly) reject it.  I’m guessing the big money Facebook buyout buzz may be a little more opportunistic and that they’d love an offer like that, playing hard to get just long enough to firm it up.  I would have to admit being *very wrong* to suggest they should have taken the billion from Yahoo last year.   Facebook is probably not even worth that, but they can get more easily now due to the buzz of irrational exhuberance.

Recommendation to FB: Take the 6 billion and laugh all the way to the bank.

Recommendation to MS: Don’t spend this you fools!

Companies with the biggest buzz (YouTube, Facebook) have what appear to be extraordinary buyout valuations that are not consistent with their profitability or what even seems like a realistic, risk adjusted long term analysis.

Why? Market movers as players combine with speculative frenzy and lead many to assume they’ll get out before things change. It’s more like casino thinking than Warren Buffet thinking. Big players like Google and MS can afford to make what I think they’d see as “strategic” high offers but what a reasoned analysis suggests are foolish bets.

Lots of this happened in late 90s and only a handful of the players are left standing, most at a small fraction of their values at the pinnacle of *that* irrational exhuberance.

Facebook – Myspace = 100% revenue share

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Josh at Redeye VC has some *excellent* points about the coming big battle between Facebook and Myspace for web developers:

If you ran a venture-backed company and had to decide whether you wanted to focus your effort on: (a) a property that welcomed you in and let you keep 100% of the revenue you generate or (b) a company with a vague policy that doesn’t let you generate any revenue, which would you choose? I don’t think it’s even a decision. It’s an IQ test.

However, it is significant that Myspace remains far larger than Facebook in terms of a user base and also important is that users, not developers, have driven the success of Myspace.

Facebook is hard to analyze because until very recently they had a much more restrictive policy on new accounts, opening them only to groups associated with businesses or universities. To join Facebook I initially had to contact my old alma mater – University of Wisconsin – to get an alumni email set up, then redirect that to my current mail. No big deal but certainly a barrier to entry. Facebook now (wisely) has opened itself up to everybody and (also wisely) is pursuing a very open approach to API usage and social media. Most importantly Facebook is going to allow those who build applications around Facebook to keep 100% of the revenue those create.

I think this “100% revenue share” is a brilliant approach because the Facebook “whole” will be much greater than the sum of these parts. Thus Facebook can make a *lot* of money through the extra traffic and advertising created by websites and developers and users gravitating to the Facebook social media ecosystem. The loser in this equation would be Myspace and other sites (that would be MOST sites) that try to create social media environments but don’t share much of the revenues.

Local Voices Needed – Apply Here… or There….

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Got a blog? Want to start blogging?

Locals know the best things to do, places to eat, and more about their regions. We’re looking for a few … hundred thousand … who want to tell the world about their own town in their own way.

Yes, we want you!

Click here to sign up

Hey, what kind of nut would write a pitch like THAT?  Oh, it’s me.
I’m still not sure if Facebook is the best platform for the local blogger project I’ll soon start in earnest but it seems like a good place to start the search for other local voices.

One great aspect of blogs and the internet is the ability to connect locals to visitors before, during, and after a travel experience.   I’m big on blogging and travel and would love to join with others who share that interest in an effort to eventually “cover the globe” with local voices from every region.

I think the key to success will actually be the *lack* of formal structure for the project, though obviously it’ll be helpful to have a site that will allow easy navigation to the various blogs and will mashup travel information about the regions along these lines.

P.S.  If you are interested in this and don’t want to join facebook or don’t have a blog yet that’s fine – send me an email: jhunkins@gmail.com   I think we can find a good way for  everybody who is interested to participate in the project.

Facebook Rules!

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Today Facebook launches a social media initiative that is significant enough to possibly become a web milestone, depending on how the developer community views and uses all the new capabilities that Facebook is offering to them.

Rafe Needleman‘s got a video of the conference today and Techcrunch will, as usual, have insightful summary of the implications of all this.

Based on my quick first look into what they are up to this really looks like a brilliant move, and a sign they won’t be selling to a bigger player, rather trying to rise up and eat the bigger fish.

If Facebook can capture the imagination of enough developers and become “the” key platform for social media they’ll likely be very glad to have turned down the billion+ dollar buyout offers earlier this year.

At the least Mark Z and his crew deserve huge props for going for the gusto and offering to take the development community along for the ride.  This is not only great stuff for Facebook and social media evangelism, this appears to be consistent with the grand and open internet community vision that one hopes will ultimately prevail.

Bebos, billions, and why Yahoo is starting to piss me off.

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Yahoo may buy Bebo, the British “Myspace”, for a billion dollars. That is a LOT of money – about 3% of Yahoo’s market cap. Presumably this, like Yahoo’s unsuccessful Facebook aquisition attempt, is Yahoo’s approach to recapturing the market dominance it enjoyed back in the day. Dominance through the aquisition of a social network rather than developing their own.

They should know better than to trust their existing criteria for decisions about aquisitions. Yahoo is the company that aquired Overture’s pay per click technology years ago, and then managed to cede dominance in that area to Google. Ever heard of Google? Yahoo probably could have *owned* Google, but it seems higher management didn’t think search had the monetization potential of … broadcast.com which was purchased for billions.

Isn’t it time for top management at Yahoo to let innovation, not aquisitions, rule the day? This approach has worked very well for Google, who’s main mistakes now appear to be in aquiring things like YouTube which in my opinion is unlikely to recover YouTube’s 1.6 billion price tag and will certainly pester Google with big money lawsuits for decades. Yahoo’s still got a LOT of great technical people, especially in the developer and new business divisions. More importantly, the world is producing hundreds of thousands of new, brilliant innovators every year, most of whom are chomping at the bit to bring new and exciting innovation to the hungry online world. Why not devote the billions to this rather than purchasing companies with marginal revenues and long term prospects that are more hope and prayer than reality?

With the latest flurry of high priced aquistions it almost seems like, to the big players, the billion dollar deal is the new million dollar deal. I remain skeptical that deals of this size pay off in the long run – certainly very, very few of the early pre-bubble ones did not pay off for companies. I’d suggest that the smaller deals (e.g. Flickr) do have potential, but that Yahoo’s top management is looking for a killer deal that simply does exist while the innovation approach (ie much, MUCH more support to the core values and teams at Yahoo) is starting them in the face. Traffic? Yahoo’s got plenty of it. Modest changes can send millions of Yahoo users to any new idea, so why not do this *a lot more* and test *a lot more ideas*.

Edison suggested that there is always a better way, and it’s time for Yahoo to ….. find it.

More Bebo-logy from Techmeme:

Yahoo may net Bebo owners $1bn

 

 

Bebo/YHOO: My Rumor’s Bigger Than Yours

Yahoo May Be Bidding For Social Network Bebo: Report

Yahoo: When You Can’t Buy Facebook, You Buy Bebo

Bebo is not for sale


USA Today goes social – good for USA Today and good for US

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Props to USA Today for going social with their online edition, now complete with blogs, comments profiles, and more.  Here’s the USA Today explanation.

I just set up a profile and it was fairly easy, though it’ll sure be nice when this type of information is portable and one click will sign you up for such things.

Tech folks are currently wrapped up in fairly obscure and/or proprietary issues about how transferable ID information will best move around the web and I hope this gets resolved soon.

Also it’s getting ridiculous to set up a new blog at every Tom, Dick, Harry, and USAToday site you want to post at rather than do what Facebook has done which is allow you to bring your own blog content into Facebook effortlessly. This allows them the benefits of your content without forcing the user to post at several different places.

I should also say that although I’m glad “old” media like USA Today is “getting” the social networks part of the Web 2.0 online revolution, I’m rooting for “pure” online news sites like NewsVine and TechMeme because I think they do a better job of democritizing the news process than legacy media can ever do. In fact I learned about the USA Today changes from Techmeme since I’m not a regular USA Today reader.

Steve Rubel as a nice post about the social networking implications of USA Today’s changes while Matthew Ingram‘s wondering if mom and pop really even care about this stuff.

Social Networks / Social Complainers

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Social networks work because social networking is the new way to interact with folks. And naturally the rise of social networks is leading onliners to complain about … social networks and how people are misunderstanding their significance:

The New York Times‘ Richard Siklos complains that it’s hard to “say no” in the online world, and you’ll aquire more “friends” than you know what to do with if you start hanging out in virtual worlds and social networks.

Brian Solis is concerned that PR people are just not getting Social Networks, especially the large agencies who Solis suggests are abusing Social Network marketing, saying those big agencies:  “… screw the pooch in the public spotlight with highly visible and discussed attempts to fool, capitalize on, or manipulate the market…”

Brian’s also concerned that people are not getting what he meant in his long piece cited above.

My take is that social networking has reached that uncomfortable level of prominence where crass, objectionable commercialism is both undesirable and inevitable.   At the last WebmasterWorld Pubcon people were strategizing about how to manipulate social networks to promote commercial sites and clients and I expect this to become more pervasive very fast.  I think  Solis would say that quality PR can be done without compromising the integrity of the social network experience and maybe that’s true but as with all things commercial we’ll see more obnoxious and manipulative stuff than quality promotion.   And hey, that’s OK because this … is …. America and we like our commercialism crash, superficial, and obnoxious, right?

Google + Kiosks = Coolness!

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Wow, I sure hope the rumors about a Google Kiosk project are true. I like Google and I like Kiosks. Here in Oregon I was involved in computer kiosks for over ten years. Back in 1990 I managed one of the USA’s earliest multimedia projects using IBM Infowindow Touch monitors, computers, and laserdisc players. That was a US Forest Service partnership with my former employer the Southern Oregon Visitors Association, and we had 30 units in tourism places all over Southern Oregon.

This project led to a new project I designed and deployed as part of a SOVA, State, and National Scenic Byways partnership that put internet connected units in about 15 places. The internet solved many of the problems with the early kiosk project such as real time information availability, though it brought a host of new problems with rural connectivity issues and eventually a lack of enthusiasm for a complicated, grant driven project.

Could Google bring the necessary ingredients to make Kiosks commercially viable? I think they could by deploying broadly and with enough of an advertising footprint to interest national players who would appreciate being both in the programs and on the sides of the cabinets.

Good luck Google, I’ll always root for touch computer kiosks!

Related link – HUGE touchscreen with mapping demo – fantastic!

Face it, Facebook isn’t even close to being worth what’s going to get paid for it

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Like many frothing at the mouth online analysts and social networking ravers, Pete Cashmore suggests that Zuckerberg is right to act like he’s in no rush to sell Facebook, but this is silly. Zuckerberg is playing high stakes poker and he has a LOT to lose – certainly hundreds of millions if Facebook hits any major snags or if some newer and hipper online community takes root. I suspect he knows this but is loving the game, and I certainly admire this young whippersnapper for that and for creating such a magnificent web community. Magnificent, but only “worth” a fraction of the 1+ billion Cashmore suggests Facebook is now worth as an independent business.

But then what do I know, I traded my Apple for WCOM back in the day.

I do think Google will now scarf them up as part of their “empty the lake of big fish” marketing strategy, and I predict they’ll pay about 1.1 billion, but this is the luck of timing by Zuckerman, not a market based assessment of the value of Facebook as an independent entity, which everybody seems to be wildly overestimating. YouTube’s the same situation, where it’s value is not in streaming 100,000,000 crappy videos per day, rather in the fact that it helps Google, now awash in high valued stock, consolidate their position as the key online advertising leader.

The funny thing is that the *same rationales* used in 1999 are rearing their silly heads again, and only a handful of investors are noticing this. Unlike 1999 there are now many *real companies* out there with moderately long and profitable online histories, but ironically they appear to be very undervalued compared to the more speculative plays.

Myspace to Facebook migration underway. Next Facebook to ?

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Washington Post piece suggests Myspace may be in trouble as teens migrate from there to Facebook, which until a month ago was a college socializing website but now covers the globe. I’m not sure Facebook will be the endpoint though. Seems to me that the ‘need’ for a social network separate from the internet network is a transitional thing. What we’ll see eventually are socializing applications/gadgets/routines that will collect information from everybody’s online activities and disperse the info in ways over which we will have a fair amount of control.
For example as I write this blog entry (or do anything online) I should be able to click a button and have all the content dump into all my other web “spaces”. (This actually happens at Facebook already and kudos to them for the blog import feature).

Seems that any writing I want to make public should be placed in any and all appropriate places and be completely searchable from many search engines within minutes. We are a long way from that but I see social networks as a transitional form, not a final form, of online socializing, content creation, and content distribution.

Complicating the commercial analysis of the migration is the fact that users of Myspace are getting older, and probably are less likely to shift once they have established themselves on a social network.

However, it would seem to me that the most profound aspect of social networking has not really surfaced yet and that’s the fact that people will become increasingly frustrated with the fact that their Myspace / Facebook web pages and web views are primarily and overwhelmingly benefiting those companies rather than the content producers.

Heavy online users often don’t even realize that simply surfing around online and composing new and original content is a key component of all those juicy ad dollars flowing to many in the food chain like Google and Myspace and Facebook, but not to the owner of a Facebook or Myspace page.