Comments on: Facebook Worth $100 Billion?

By: alphafoobar

alphafoobar — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 09:16:36 +0000

Hi lbateman,
I don’t think you can say that the search engine ‘wars’ are over, just like the browser wars have continued.. though IE held nearly 99% for a while.

The technologies are in my opinion just as mature as search engines were in 1999. And the technology just isn’t as tough, search requires crawling massive numbers of webistes and maintaining that data. Social networking is only holding peoples information.

It is much less information and it can be sorted in much more obvious ways.

By: lbateman

lbateman — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 08:55:05 +0000

Its worth pointing out that in 1999, search engine technology was VERY mature. Google came along to solidify all the work that had been done over the years from places like AltaVista and others, and after adding their own new ideas, they created the “killer app” for searching. But its important to note they did it on the back of a VERY mature internet search paradigm.

Social networking like Facebook is in its infancy in comparison. Basically, MySpace was the first attempt on a large scale, and Facebook is its second generation cousin to a degree. In contrast, Goggle was more like the 5th or 6th generation of search engine progeny. I expect to see several more innovations and changes before we see the “killer app” for social networking. Facebook is good for what it does, but the field as a whole is still too immature to produce any sort of final, killer app IMO.

By: alphafoobar

alphafoobar — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 04:09:34 +0000

Haha, yeah I’d be surprised if Facebook was worth $100 Billion or whether it will survive. But one of these things are bound to survive, my opinion is that Facebook is superior to the other major offerings at the moment, but there is a stack of competition… MySpace is more like a webpage community or blog community than a social network… Bebo is a lot like MySpace, with the skinning etc… Orkut seems to be a failure for Google - I’m not sure why they purchased it… Web360 is probably why - Yahoo tried to simply integrate their existing customers with social networks and Blogs… Hi5 would be great if I could speak spanish… Studivz would be cooler if they let me join (or told me what was going on in English).

I think the strength Facebook has is the vampire biting applications. With 1 fad, steam runs out after a month. With user driven applications, Fads keep coming… and I’m not just talking about vampire bites, that obviously appeals to the same people that forward chain mail to avoid bad luck. But other applications exist for other people as well… I have 30Boxes for calendar integration, distributed file storage integration, ergscores.com training log and admittedly less useful applications like twitter, movies, scrabulous…

Most useful applications represent tools that I can use outside of Facebook, but wouldn’t have looked for without Facebook. The more gimmicky ones just pass the day.

Bebo will be opening their developer API soon, so we will quickly see it go the way of Facebook. Then I’d say the match will be Facebook vs Bebo.

However that is just my perception, if you check out the Alexa rankings, My Space is ranked #6 and Facebook #8…. Hi5 surprised me with a rank of #10, in comparison Yahoo is #1, Google is #2 and Bebo is #95.

However looking at where the people are that goes to these sites is also interesting… 48% of people on myspace are from USA, 28.8% on Facebook are from the USA (10% Canada, 10% UK, 3% Egypt, 3% Puerto Rico), Hi5 has a breakdown of 12% Peru and only 1% USA. I think this indicates a much stronger international appeal. My Space is popular now but locked into the US market…