OK, As some of you may or may not know I am a pretty big fan and student of social media. I enjoy just watching as news stories, websites, videos and people climb from obscurity to internet phenomenon. One site I have ALWAYS been a fan of is Facebook. I remember in college (yeah, about a whole year ago) when we first got Facebook on campus. I tried to resist as long as possible but eventually I fell to the power of Facebook as it is pretty hard not to when the question “Do you have (a) Facebook?” is second only to “Whats your Name?”

Since the beginning I have seen Facebook as the superior application to MySpace, I find MySpace bland, boring and cluttered with “pimped out pages” and “awesome tunes”. Recently, Facebook has been gaining notoriety as it has opened its doors from virtual college yearbook to social network of the masses AND not only that they have also opened their doors to third party publishers so that little programs and widgets can be integrated into your Facebook homepage. So it is quite interesting to surf people profiles and play with all the virtual toys floating around. Not only that they also have their own personal RSS feed, but not what you would normally expect fro man RSS feed, it is a feed of all the updates from your friends in your network so you can find out when someone changes their status or breaks up with their significant other or changes their profile picture.

With all of this going on it was only a matter of time before someone was going to notice Facebook, their have been rumors of Fox having buyers remorse from MySpace, rumors of an IPO from Facebook and even rumors of Google wanting to snatch them up because they “fear” them, here is an excerpt from an AdAge article entitled “23-Year-Old Mark Zuckerberg Has Google Sweating”:

Just as Google has become what some people call the operating system for search, Facebook is turning itself into the operating system for social networking. While Google knows what millions of people are searching for, Facebook has something the search giant hasn’t been able to grow: a network of connections between people that creates a viral distribution platform unrivaled by any portal or search engine.

Don’t think this point hasn’t made its way to Mountain View. It has certainly made it into the New York offices of News Corp., parent of Facebook’s chief competition. When asked recently by the Wall Street Journal whether newspaper readers were going to MySpace, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, who shelled out in 2005 what now appears to be a bargain sum of $580 million for MySpace, didn’t mince words: “I wish they were. They’re all going to Facebook at the moment.”

Mark Zuckerberg has seen offers rolling in from all over the place including a $1 Billion dollar offer from Yahoo! and various other ranging from $580 Million to $750 Million. Facebook does not seem to want to sell their baby at the moment, I think Zuckerberg is actually interested in seeing this company ushered into a new age of the internet and seeing his vision executed through his own means rather than through some company that will run it into the ground.

Sign up for Facebook and add me as a friend!

This entry was posted on Friday, July 13th, 2007 at 9:40 am and is filed under Entertainment, Google, internet marketing, marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.