I underestimated Facebook for too long. Then two weeks ago I was in the US Airways lounge between flights in the Charlotte, NC airport (which has amazingly fast free WiFi, BTW) and noticed that HALF of the people who were using the Internet were on Facebook. Granted, an airport lounge is going to pull a certain sub-set of society, but still... Facebook is every bit the social phenomenon that eBay and Yahoo were in the past. I don't know how you put a dollar value on it, but that kind of reach has real value.
This seems to be a microcosm of the problem Facebook is facing. Everyone is on it, yet significant (public company esque) profits have yet to materialize. It is definitely a social phenomenon, but unlike eBay and Yahoo monetizing the service is proving to be difficult at very large scales.
Theres also the problem of advertising on a social networking site. If we could observe everyone in that US Airways lounge's average Facebook session, how many ads would we see people click on out of that group? How many people brought something or signed up for something after clicking those ads? Advertising dynamics on a social networking site are fundamentally different. A question I always ask people when the topic of Facebook comes up is "have you ever clicked an ad on there? I don't think I have" and the answer is always some variation of "actually, now that I think about it I haven't". I'm not going to extrapolate too much on this given my sample size, but if this is the standard response to this question everywhere, then Facebook has a serious problem (despite its phenomenon status).
I agree. My personal anecdote is that I've been to three countries in the past year; Japan, Mexico and Colombia; and later connected with every single person I met that was in their teens or twenties. This includes some fairly rural parts of Mexico and Colombia that don't necessarily have broadband or very good Internet access, in general.
From what I noticed among my japanese friends however, Mixi is a lot more popular over there than Facebook. It's less open though: invitation-only, and you need a japanese cellphone address to register, so I've seen few travelers/foreigners on it.
It's pretty geared towards Japanese cultural norms, from what I've read and what my own Japanese friends have told me. I don't think it would be as acceptable as it is here to meet someone briefly through a friend and then add them the next day on facebook, for instance.
It's an interesting barrier towards global adoption, methinks; it's like how neither Google nor Yahoo can beat Baidu in mainland China, because Baidu just understands what its audience wants better. But, I think that a social networking platform is going to struggle a lot more with adapting to cultural norms than information search is.
It's kind of bizarre sometimes when I think about how I got into facebook in the spring of 2004. I was a sophomore at Cornell at the time, and I don't feel like anyone talks about this that much anymore now that facebook is all-inclusive and so widespread, but we really only got interested in it because it had come out of Harvard and Zuckerberg had started by adding most of the other Ivies and famous top tier universities (Stanford, MIT, etc.) first.
It kind of like getting into an invitation-only country club at the time. It was a bit silly, but that was what facebook's original identity was built around.
I'm 80% sure that facebook would have gone nowhere had Zuckerberg not been at Harvard when he started it.
I'm the other way around - I was like "This is going to be huge" starting around 2005, and now that everyone is using it, I'm like, "They're doomed." If I could short their stock at any market cap over $4B or so, I'd do it - and I wouldn't buy unless their market cap was under $1B or so.
Actually, considering I waited until Akamai was down to $150M before buying, and considering what Akamai does vs. what FaceBook does, I'm not sure I'd buy FaceBook at any price. Doomed!
I do think that Twitter's going to be huge though. Wish I knew how to get in on stock ownership for them. Alas, they turned me down for a job.
While I'm pretty blasé about Facebook from a user's point of view, I am quite interested to know where they will go with an IPO. Google expanded into so many fields other than search after their IPO, I wonder which territories would Facebook venture into. Currently, other than a few LAMP/memcache/API stuff, Facebook isn't doing much outside of the Facebook social-networking world. Google ended up with a phone and transit. Will there be a Facebook channel or matchmaking?
I'm pretty blasé about Facebook from a user's point of view
You and I both. That's Facebook's fundamental problem. I and millions of others will walk in a heartbeat if something more interesting and less annoying comes along.
The potential opportunities Facebook has are TREMENDOUS. I feel like the potential is there, but it's is barely touched, and I'm not sure why.
Facebook's value is in moving toward mobile. They are ubiquitous enough where the chances of having Facebook in your local area is very high if you're a user yourself.
Given all of Twitter's hype, I feel Facebook could easily crush them. While Twitter's monetization strategy is also, of course, questionable, the two companies are tapping into a paradigm shift that has value that isn't quite fully understood.
Imagine people using Twitter, but with the richness of Facebook's content. While Twitter's 140-character limit was intentional, it's ultimately a limitation, since Facebook users utilize the service very much in the same way. Above all, though, Facebook knows profile information about you and your friends. It can not only serve ads based on what it knows about you, but where you are, and who is around you.
Facebook should ultimately strive to be the omnipresent social tool. There is undeniable value and opportunity for expansion in this. They have the user base, they just need to encourage people to use it in new ways. Twitter seems to be moving toward this, yet there is a huge difference between Twitter's user base (6M last I heard) and Facebook's (150M last I heard).
It might be just me, but I don't like giving out all my info to Facebook. I prefer Twitter because I like the fact that people can see only a limited amount of information about me, and visit my website if they need to know more.
I like Twitter because of its simplicity. Facebook is, IMO, just another social network with a few extra features slapped on. Twitter is like that small, efficient UNIX tool that you can combine with other tools to produce something which has much more functionality than the original.
I'm kinda curious about this too, because the conventional wisdom in the investing world is, "If the CFO leaves, short the stock." Does anyone know what Mr. Yu's next job is? CFOs of fast-growing, about-to-IPO companies don't just up and leave unless another really good opportunity comes along. Plus, if FaceBook grants options with a standard 4-year vesting period, I really doubt Mr. Yu's options have vested, which means he's leaving a lot of money on the table.
