Facebook ipo - Page 18

surftheiop · 05-21-2012, 05:21 PM

The question in my mind is if facebook will ever be able to cut into i-tunes realm somewhat. With their user-base, it only seems reasonable that facebook will/could become a major hub for purchasing and selling content.

dc_publius · 05-21-2012, 05:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by CalledDownLight

Also, the thing with FB is it cant really ever go to 0. The worst thing that can happen is it becomes obsolete and then they have a wealth of information about a huge majority of the first world population that can be auctioned off to whoever is willing to buy it. Sure, they would never do that in the current state, but if the social network part of the business falls by the wayside somehow then this is a pretty solid liquidation plan and one that any decent board would push for given the value of information.

How much is that 'social graph' really worth? If it's worth so much money, why isn't FB making much money?

-Facebook hasn't figured out how to make money using this information, and neither have the advertisers. Everyone has been complaining about the abysmal FB ad performance for ages.

-There are other groups out there that have much better information on you than Facebook, for example Acxiom.

-Information goes stale very quickly. If FB becomes less popular and fewer people use it, their social graph ages and becomes pretty useless for marketing purposes.

dc_publius · 05-21-2012, 05:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by surftheiop

The question in my mind is if facebook will ever be able to cut into i-tunes realm somewhat. With their user-base, it only seems reasonable that facebook will/could become a major hub for purchasing and selling content.

With 1 billion regular users, Facebook can hypothetically become a big player in pretty much anything. They can become a better groupon, they can become a better carmax, they can become a better amazon... The question is, will they?

Larry Legend · 05-21-2012, 05:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dknightx

Actually, that "rant" was made public because Google has an internal G+ that looks exactly the same as the external version. If you aren't paying attention, its very easy to post to one when you mean to post to the other.

That said, Google's culture is one where those types of rants are common place, encouraged, and respected. Why people want to read into a rant by a single engineer is beyond me. Besides that, the rant had many valid points, but none of them were really about the success of G+ or Google as a company, it was mainly about Google's approach towards developers and spending more time on developing APIs that are full featured and well supported.

This is all well documented online if you want to confirm, its just that the techblogosphere loves to make a juicy story where there isn't one, and usually the clarifications only come days after when no one really cares anymore.

I am familiar with the whole back story, I wasn't trying to say this was the entire case for why G+ sucks, but I think I remember part of that post mentioning how G+ was not very user friendly, and for a Google Developer, how much more user friendly can it get?

bigdottawa · 05-21-2012, 06:02 PM

The bitching about timeline always made zero sense to me.

Not only is it the same **** that's always been there, it was just as easy 2 years ago to find all the information as it is with timeline. Just as easy to remove stuff now as it was before.

Fear change, even when it's the same damn thing I guess.

cres · 05-21-2012, 06:09 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dc_publius

With 1 billion regular users, Facebook can hypothetically become a big player in pretty much anything. They can become a better groupon, they can become a better carmax, they can become a better amazon... The question is, will they?

really? maybe that's the total accounts out there, but lets just use 2+2 here. How many accounts are gimmicks of gimmicks of gimmicks? How many people don't see or click on any ads, and a true test could be, Would they pay $10 for their account. I'd say maybe the core is a single digit % of the total accounts.

jb9 · 05-21-2012, 06:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by surftheiop

The question in my mind is if facebook will ever be able to cut into i-tunes realm somewhat. With their user-base, it only seems reasonable that facebook will/could become a major hub for purchasing and selling content.

They could and plenty of businesses would be happy to partner with them.

But they will have to start respecting privacy more if they want people to buy stuff from their site.

five4suited · 05-21-2012, 06:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bigdottawa

The bitching about timeline always made zero sense to me.

Not only is it the same **** that's always been there, it was just as easy 2 years ago to find all the information as it is with timeline. Just as easy to remove stuff now as it was before.

Fear change, even when it's the same damn thing I guess.

Your (and the average 2p2er's) age and IQ give you/us a biased outlook imo (obv, I know).

if jmakin can't be bothered to sort through his page and hide stuff, is ZBT's 59-year-old mom even going to bother? xx% of fb users don't continuously adapt (and I suspect xx is a number greater than 33). for them it's use or don't use. and as horror stories/urban myths propagate among older people, they'll just quit, absent an effort to simplify privacy protections that zuckerberg has unequivocally stated he won't be making.

another question I'd like answered is how many hours of the average user's time is spent playing social games. does that time count as FB use? let's say ZBT's mom spends 10 minutes seeing what her friends did that day and 15-20 minutes on farmville. the people I know who play those games say that zynga's efforts to get players to spend real cash have gone beyond annoying and now amount to spam.

all in all simple innovation won't be enough. and as another poster noted above, they will start losing their top engineers. from articles i've read over the weekend, those guys are in it for the challenge. small incremental improvements don't satisfy that urge.

dc_publius · 05-21-2012, 06:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cres

really? maybe that's the total accounts out there, but lets just use 2+2 here. How many accounts are gimmicks of gimmicks of gimmicks? How many people don't see or click on any ads, and a true test could be, Would they pay $10 for their account. I'd say maybe the core is a single digit % of the total accounts.

OK, then reread my thread saying they have 100M regular users (or whatever you think is accurate). Does the exact number really change anything? It's still a massive community with potentially massive unrealized potential.

If Google can make a ton of money from essentially the same people, then one could argue that FB should be able as well. FB has some sort of working relationship with Microsoft. Maybe instead of people going to Google.com to search for stuff, they will integrate Bing into FB and people don't need to leave FB to do searches?

I don't think anyone will ever pay for FB as a subscription, but as you know they have been testing 'promoted' posts...

One thing that I think could be their downfall is how they let various apps spam people's feeds. I think this has potential to turn a lot of people off.

cres · 05-21-2012, 07:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dc_publius

One thing that I think could be their downfall is how they let various apps spam people's feeds. I think this has potential to turn a lot of people off.

not FB related, but I just realized google has coded their aps to install on my smartphone, from a desktop page. That is something I am not entirely comfortable with. Sure it can make for an effortless experience for some, but remote access by anyone, even myself, doesn't offer much in the way of security.

Dr. Zoidberg · 05-21-2012, 07:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ZBTHorton

I completely agree with your second point. It is not worth 100b right now. I have no idea how much it is truly worth, but you are definitely betting on some sort of future badass monetization idea.

I just have issue with people saying "MySpace failed, FB will too, something will come along....". MySpace sucked. It was a truly awful product, with almost no use for a giant percentage of internet users, and the user base was miniscule in comparison to Facebook currently. Not to mention it came around before the mobile internet became much more usable.

Facebook on the other hand is a remarkably simple website that is fairly easy to use for even the worst internet users. Even though some people dislike the timeline or whatever they complain about, the fact remains that virtually every person I
know(28 years old) has an account and an astonishing percentage
of those users are active on a fairly regular basis. Even people
who don't post still read posts to catch up on stupid day to day ****. That's before we begin talking about the fact that my
59 year old mother, who basically never used the internet at home in her life before a few years ago checks her account almost every night and all of her friends also have accounts and do the same.

Anything is possible when it comes to the internet and someone could find some really revolutionary way for all of this information to be centralized even better than Facebook, but it has such an enormous head start and seems to dedicated to buying out
companies that have good ideas, I just find it very difficult to believe that it is ever going to "fail". In 3 years we may be looking at a 40b valuation, but that's not a failure on the level of MySpace. It's just a failure in comparison to the ridiculous amount they initially released the IPO at.

Is this really a good thing for Facebook? I'm far from the barometer of cool, but if Facebook is starting to seem so 2009 to me, what are 12 and 15 year-olds thinking about it? That's the real question to me.

mmbt0ne · 05-21-2012, 07:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dc_publius

OK, then reread my thread saying they have 100M regular users (or whatever you think is accurate). Does the exact number really change anything? It's still a massive community with potentially massive unrealized potential.

FB has 485M DAU, fwiw.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/02/...ctually-visit/

**ZBTHorton** · 05-21-2012, 08:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dr. Zoidberg

Is this really a good thing for Facebook? I'm far from the barometer of cool, but if Facebook is starting to seem so 2009 to me, what are 12 and 15 year-olds thinking about it? That's the real question to me.

I really haven't seen that as an issue at all. All of my cousins who are younger all have facebook accounts, etc.

andr3w321 · 05-21-2012, 08:23 PM

The whole ya but they have a lot of users is so dumb to me. Gmail has something like 350M users, but that doesn't mean it's a huge profit center for them. It costs them $x/year to store all your data and they're providing it all for free.

Also everyone is saying, yeah but in the future they will figure something out to monetize their users and earn a bunch. Well, maybe, or they may be at or near the peak of their popularity they better start capitalizing on it NOW before their popularity fades to the next big thing.

Remember when we all had hotmail e-mail addresses paying AOL ISP fees so we could get online and chat with our friends on AIM or search for things on yahoo? Things change. They better make their money while they can. It baffles me that these businesses can be valued so big without even proving their very basic business model.

five4suited · 05-21-2012, 08:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mmbt0ne

FB has 485M DAU, fwiw.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/02/...ctually-visit/

keep reading...

Quote:

Originally Posted by NY Times

Facebook counts as “active” users who go to its Web site or its mobile site. But it also counts an entire other category of people who don’t click on facebook.com as “active users.” According to the company, a user is considered active if he or she “took an action to share content or activity with his or her Facebook friends or connections via a third-party Web site that is integrated with Facebook.”

Come again?

In other words, every time you press the “Like” button on NFL.com, for example, you’re an “active user” of Facebook. Perhaps you share a Twitter message on your Facebook account? That would make you an active Facebook user, too. Have you ever shared music on Spotify with a friend? You’re an active Facebook user. If you’ve logged into Huffington Post using your Facebook account and left a comment on the site — and your comment was automatically shared on Facebook — you, too, are an “active user” even though you’ve never actually spent any time on facebook.com.