It was just reported in The Wall Street Journal that Microsoft is in talks to acquire up to a 5% stake in facebook. This is big technology and business news.
WSJ: Microsoft is in talks with Facebook about making an investment in the social-networking startup that could value Facebook at $10 billion or more… Google has also expressed strong interest…
If successful, Microsoft’s talks with Facebook could give it an up-to-5% stake in the closely-held startup—a stake potentially valued at roughly $300 million to $500 million. The discussions are still preliminary and Facebook could wind up not taking an investment from either Microsoft or Google. Factors in the discussions include the valuation the suitors would offer to Facebook and other business considerations they could contribute to sweeten any deal.
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We know that Facebook is moving at lighting speed to stay 20 steps ahead of the social networking game. Here’s a couple of other features that Facebook has in the works to do just that:
The ability to sort your friends and organize them into groups is an upcoming feature that nicely aligns with the objectives and functionality of Facebook. This will allow you to better determine who sees what kind of content, and simply offers more privacy options within your personal networks.
Another upcoming feature is the ability to read email messages in digest form, which means you can receive one single email with all of your notifications, sent to you on a daily basis. These are small tweaks, but good tweaks nonetheless. MySpace, Xing and Friendster have been modifying their profile pages for the better as well.
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Sam Sethi at Blognation UK has a scoop: apparently, he got a preview of a new instant messaging app for Facebook — and according to his description, it doesn’t require you to download or install anything, or to register, as many Facebook apps do. You just sign in and use it. At the risk of sounding like a Facebook fan-boy, despite the ugly interface I think this could be huge.
I think it could be good not only for Facebook, which has been missing real-time chat — making do with messages and “wall” posts — but for instant messaging as a whole. Like Sam, I see it as a way of doing an end-run around the fact that you still need multiple IM clients to chat with all of your friends, who might be using Yahoo or AIM or MSN or Skype or GTalk
“No more MSN, AIM, GTalk, Yahoo chat — one instant messenger for all your friends.” All your friends who are on Facebook, of course. Still, it sounds like a pretty good solution to a Balkanized IM environment. And it could stand to make Facebook even stickier than it already is.
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Nielsen/NetRatings has released online traffic data for social networking, blogs, and video sites dating from August 2006 to August 2007. The report indicated a 117%, 19 million unique users, traffic growth for Facebook and a lagging, albeit still strong, MySpace growth of a 23% pace of 60 million. In the video sites ratings report, MySpace videos dropped 6%, while YouTube gained 66% and Veoh soared 346%. Has all the spam and glitter graphics finally caused a traffic jam at MySpace?
An interesting item to note in the blog statistics is that the entertainment blog TMZ actually draws more unique visitors than major blogging communities comprised of millions of users such as LiveJournal and Xanga.
Recently Popular Facebook articles
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According to employment law firm Peninsula, social networking is eating up employee time and once again the numbers are huge. Facebook being the main culprit, the firm believes that workers are costing their companies more than about $260M USD (R1.7bil) daily as a result of using Facebook for an estimated 233 million hours each month while on the job. 3500 companies where surveyed on the topic which provides quite a healthy research group. Another firm down under said employees are costing the Australian economy $11 Mil USD daily ‘wasting’ time on social networks.
I think its time for corporations to start developing work-related applications to be integrated into the Facebook platform so their works do constructive work while networking. Blocking the popular social networking destinations wil do little to curb employee slacking.
Blurp from a relatedt BBC news article
Lunch-break option
Mike Huss, director of employment law at Peninsula called on all firms to block access to sites such as Facebook.
He asked: “Why should employers allow their workers to waste two hours a day on Facebook when they are being paid to do a job?”
He said that loss of productivity was proving a “major headache” for firms.
“The figures that we have calculated are minimums and it’s a problem that I foresee will escalate,” he said.
While some firms have embraced Facebook as a motivational tool, others have cracked down.
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Facebook is looking to raise yet more money to support growth and possibly acquisitions. Existing investors include Accel Partners, Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital Partners, and Microsoft could potentially be part of the next round based on the existing deal they have with Facebook to serve ads. The investment would possibly be larger than the $25 million raised back in 2006, with a multi-billion dollar valuation for the company.
According to sources, after getting so many inquiries from investment funds and several bigger companies–such as its ad-serving partner, Microsoft–about grabbing a stake in the fast-growing social-networking Web site.
While who and how much is still unclear and, most importantly, in what form, sources said a deal could come together quickly if the numbers are lofty enough for the site, which has about 40 million members currently.
On a side note the Facebook developers platform also experienced some down time recently.
Other Facebook news:
Facebook costing companies billions daily
Facebook to raise more cash
Video: Facebook “inventor”
Facebook acquires Web OS
Facebook reaches 30 million users
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We’re told that Facebook will be launching its joint project with Comcast’s Ziddio, Facebook Diaries, at about 9 p.m. tonight. The eight-episode weekly series spotlights topics like heartbreak, road trip, and wild nights, with pilot episode “Who Am I” already queued up at http://www.facebook.com/diaries.
Facebook has been playing around with the project for a while now since announcing it in February, even shooting some of its own video, but the series will be completely user-contributed clips, with editing and motion graphics by producer R.J. Cutler of Actual Reality Pictures.
Randi Zuckerberg, a two-time NewTeeVee Pier Screenings runner-up (and sister of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg), is one of leaders on project.
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Part of the source code of Facebook has been leaked. This means people might have your password and information… Now how secure is Facebook? How much damage will it bring to the “company” that was just starting to get extremely popular? They posted a comment on the Techcrunch blog post regarding this stating no user data was compromised.
Here is some of the leaked code
include_once $_SERVER[’PHP_ROOT’].’/html/init.php’;
include_once $_SERVER[’PHP_ROOT’].’/lib/home.php’;
include_once $_SERVER[’PHP_ROOT’].’/lib/requests.php’;
include_once $_SERVER[’PHP_ROOT’].’/lib/feed/newsfeed.php’;
include_once $_SERVER[’PHP_ROOT’].’/lib/poke.php’;
include_once $_SERVER[’PHP_ROOT’].’/lib/share.php’;
include_once $_SERVER[’PHP_ROOT’].’/lib/orientation.php’;
include_once $_SERVER[’PHP_ROOT’].’/lib/feed/newsfeed.php’;
include_once $_SERVER[’PHP_ROOT’].’/lib/mobile/register.php’;
include_once $_SERVER[’PHP_ROOT’].’/lib/forms_lib.php’;
include_once $_SERVER[’PHP_ROOT’].’/lib/contact_importer/contact_importer.php’;
include_once $_SERVER[’PHP_ROOT’].’/lib/feed/util.php’;
include_once $_SERVER[’PHP_ROOT’].’/lib/hiding_prefs.php’;
include_once $_SERVER[’PHP_ROOT’].’/lib/abtesting.php’;
include_once $_SERVER[’PHP_ROOT’].’/lib/friends.php’;
include_once $_SERVER[’PHP_ROOT’].’/lib/statusupdates.php’;
// lib/display/feed.php has to be declared here for scope issues.
// This keeps display/feed.php cleaner and easier to understand.
include_once $_SERVER[’PHP_ROOT’].’/lib/display/feed.php’;
include_once $_SERVER[’PHP_ROOT’].’/lib/monetization_box.php’;
// require login
$user = require_login();
print_time(’require_login’);
param_request(array( ‘react’ => $PARAM_EXISTS));
Other Facebook news:
Facebook costing companies billions daily
Facebook to raise more cash
Video: Facebook “inventor”
Facebook acquires Web OS
Facebook reaches 30 million users
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Facebook announced its first acquisition today – a low-profile and unlaunched Web OS startup by Firefox founders’ Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt called Parakey – for an undisclosed sum (tens of millions?).
This doesn’t sound that big until you note that Blake Ross launched Firefox, the open-source browser that seriously threatens Internet Explorer. Parakey is focused on the space between desktop and browser, and aims to move much of the action on one’s hard drive (e-mail databasing, file storage, software apps) directly in to a browser.
The obvious impact of this acquisition is the Facebook Platform. Ross and Hewitt are reportedly going to be immediately joining Facebook, and if it is anything like it sounds, we can start expecting some really cool stuff from Facebook soon.
So all of this just goes to say that Facebook will head for an IPO soon and when it does, it might be the first big signal that the tech boom is back.
Other Facebook news:
Facebook costing companies billions daily
Facebook to raise more cash
Video: Facebook “inventor”
Facebook acquires Web OS
Facebook reaches 30 million users
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The Facebook blog says there are now 30 million users. Take a look at the active users chart (Unlike MySpace, Facebook doesn’t pad its numbers with dead accounts) on Mashable showing that the number has doubled since the beginning of the year.
Facebook has been making the news a lot since the opening of Platform which you can read about here, with new applications being announced regularly.
“With this evolution of Facebook Platform, we’ve made it so that any developer can build the same applications that we can. And by that, we mean that they can integrate their application into Facebook—into the social graph—the same way that our applications like Photos and Notes are integrated.” says Katie Geminder, Director of Product at Facebook.
A good list of Facebook “awesome applications” can be found on Mashable, and you might want to check out the Facebook blog.
There is also a video (less than 3 minutes) explaining the social-networking site’s expansion of services.
Graph - Mashable
Other Facebook news:
Facebook costing companies billions daily
Facebook to raise more cash
Video: Facebook “inventor”
Facebook acquires Web OS
Facebook reaches 30 million users
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