Facebook Adds $2 Billion Song To Go With $2 Billion Dance

from the silent-auction dept

Mon, Apr 3rd 2006 11:03am — Carlo Longino

Facebook started down the Skhype path last week by selling BusinessWeek on the "scoop" that it was holding out to sell for $2 billion. Proving it paid for the full course on manipulating suckers, not just the abbreviated version, it's now trotted out one of its VCs for the Wall Street Journal, getting him to say it could be worth billions, emulating Skype backer Tim Draper's similar move. What exactly did the WSJ expect one of the company's investors to say? This is all going according to plan: a huge figure gets tossed out, people debate it, a VC "validates" it, reasonable people question it, then some sucker swoops in and pays because they see it as a zero-sum game and don't want to miss out. So congratulations to Facebook, not for building a business, but for successfully utilizing the Skype System For Inflating Your Purchase Price(TM).

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21 Comments

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TriZz, 3 Apr 2006 @ 11:40am

Facebook
...sucks.

I hate it. I'm on it and myspace and myspace is so much better.
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WebSerf01, 3 Apr 2006 @ 12:21pm

utilizing the Skype System For Inflating Your Purchase Price(TM).

Wait, wait. Isn't there a PATENT on that?
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Shohat, 3 Apr 2006 @ 12:36pm

Re:
No no,
Copyright .
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jon, 3 Apr 2006 @ 12:38pm

Wai
You think MySpace is better than FaceBook? FaceBook has hardly any advertisements, is exclusive only to college kids (no half naked 15 year old girls making me feel ill) has no annoying pictures/sounds/videos playing on every page, and is not horribly ridden with errors due to a combined CF5/BlueDragon/ASP.Net architecture which blows.
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VC???, 3 Apr 2006 @ 12:39pm

I think TechDirt is worth Billions!!!!
I think TechDirt is worth Billions!!!!
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Anonymous Coward, 3 Apr 2006 @ 12:42pm

Re: Facebook
Facebook = college social network.

MySpace = Every lame HTML effect that every aspiring web programmer puts in their very first web page. complete with , obnoxious colors, and 'lolz!'.

Of course, I don't use MySpace or Facebook currently, but have in the past. MySpace lacks a certain characteristic that facebook has. I would call it class. MySpace users might call it 'st00pid cuz u cant put like 40 stupid picz on teh front page n look at em and stuff!'

But, to be honest. I hope facebook flops. Being a college student, I'd sell it for my tuition and beer costs. Let alone $750 million. But to ask for $2-4 billion? That's just selfish.
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Chris, 3 Apr 2006 @ 12:43pm

Re: Wai
Wait, you mean you don't like all the half naked 15 year old girls on myspace? Blasphemy, I say.

On a serious note, my first impression of facebook : A far more mature site then Myspace. It doesn't have random chunks going offline constantly, they don't have to recode the site and rebuild databases every month (or at least can do it transparently) and it focuses on content and networking, rather then seeing how many html filters you can fit on a single image.
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James, 3 Apr 2006 @ 12:46pm

suck, but...
This sucks, but I agree with Jon that it is superior to MySpace in every way although it is hard to compare them because I feel they have drastically different markets. MySpace for instance is great for unsigned bands... but Facebook is actually a good social networking site. I'm not embarassed to admit that I met my current girlfriend of 7 months on Facebook. And as for the whole selling out thing... I am totally for people having a good idea and trying to get as much as they can out of it, ploys like this only make it more fun to keep up with.
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Jimmy Bear Pearson, 3 Apr 2006 @ 12:48pm

MySpace and Facebook have value
Both sites are based on great ideas (as are other "idea" sites like Digg.com and Audiri.com).

Whether or not the execution of Facebook or MySpace is super-excellent, they have value. People use them because the sites do something that folks want. Is FaceBook worth $2bUS? No. But it IS worth quite a bit. Good ideas like those don't come along very often, especially when they make a hit in the marketplace..

TechDirt - worth lots, too!
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Anonymous Coward, 3 Apr 2006 @ 12:51pm

Re: suck, but...
I am totally for people having a good idea and trying to get as much as they can out of it

A good idea? back in the days of i2Hub (and the horrific tragedy that accompanied it's death), there was a little site affiliated with i2Hub called connectU. Here's the story I happen to have archived from the i2hub login:

"The brief version is this: the founder of TheFacebook worked at ConnectU.com, a college-oriented social networking site, for approximately four months. Apparantly he stalled the ConnectU.com team and kept saying that he had finished aspects of the site, but just hadn't upload them yet. In a meeting on January 14, there was no mention of TheFacebook.com, a domain that was registered three days prior on January 11. The ConnectU.com team first heard of TheFacebook like everyone else by reading the school newspaper! Needless to say, the working relationship was terminated. In the same article that announced TheFacebook launch, the founder bragged about creating the site in 1 week. Interestingly, he had worked with ConnectU.com for exactly 66 days prior to the launch of his own site, and he was unable to finish their site. He left ConnectU.com crippled. ConnectU.com had been effectively stalled and their ideas had been stolen."
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Jack Crow, 3 Apr 2006 @ 1:00pm

Re: Re: suck, but...
Oh man, ouch... Sucks for connectU

Personally I don't really care for either service. I don't believe that it would be fair to compare them, as they do serve similar, yet different functions. Myspace is great for fucking around and being Like BLAH BLAH about myself, but Facebook is great for getting to actually know other peoples. Anyways, whatever.
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ZOMG CENSORED, 3 Apr 2006 @ 1:20pm

Re: I think TechDirt is worth Billions!!!!
I think you forgot to clean that poop off your nose...

Actually, TechDirt, Slashdot, Digg, etc. probably could sell for a lot of money, but "Billion" is such an astronomical sum to pay for something that "essentially" doesn't even exist in a tangible sense...
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Dan, 3 Apr 2006 @ 1:25pm

Re: Wai
"and is not horribly ridden with errors due to a combined CF5/BlueDragon/ASP.Net architecture which blows"

NERD ALERT...
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AnonyCoward, 3 Apr 2006 @ 1:32pm

This is a waste of breath, but...
Comparing myspace to facebook is much like comparing techdirt to slashdot: although each site is tailored to a slightly different audience, they serve the same basic purpose and are full of whining bitches who are spiteful of any Internet-based service that caters to *gasp* the general public instead of just the tech-savvy.

Pull your heads out of the sand. Myspace IS ugly and clunky, but with the hundreds of millions of dollars it sold for, I'm pretty sure they're going to put some professional developers to work on it and maybe even bring it up to web standards. But I'm willing to bet you still won't accept it simply because the masses do. Maybe if you had more friends to keep track of than rss feeds, you'd understand.

Bu-bye!
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Ann O'Neimus, 3 Apr 2006 @ 2:12pm

Re: This is a waste of breath, but...
OH SNAP
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Anonymous Coward, 3 Apr 2006 @ 2:39pm

Re: Re: This is a waste of breath, but...
Possibly off-topic but:
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
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Hamlet, 3 Apr 2006 @ 3:08pm

Missing the point
I think everyone is really missing the point. Too many technies arguing style points and technical issues. Myspace is popular and most non-technies and teens love it which equals potentially more money down the line. IBM OS2, Linux, BSD and Mac OS X are all probably better then Windows, but who's making the money? DEC made great RISC machines a decade ago, but where are they now? Marketing and Sales are more important then who has the better design, technology, etc...
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Mark, 3 Apr 2006 @ 8:34pm

Facebook is an advertiser's dream
Once Facebook is bought by a bigger company, it will almost certainly allow more types of ads from companies rather than just students...Facebook is used by people age 18-25, which is THE key demographic for advertisers. It is restricted to college students (and high school, but that's another story), so users are generally well-educated and will eventually be well-off financially. Unlike myspace, which is mainly used by pre-teens and a younger demographic, Facebook targets the people with real (albeit future) purchasing power.
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fsckr, 4 Apr 2006 @ 12:13am

Advertiser's dream?
I agree with Mark, from an advertising standpoint FB is an amazing online property. However, given the fact that that demographic is innately fickle and that so many new/interesting sites launch every month or so, I think it is unrealistic for FB to hold on to their 2bn figure. In addition, most companies sitting on 2bn have seen (& hopefully learnt from) eBay's purchase of skype.
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Mahir Dundar, 4 Apr 2006 @ 3:02am

A very, very interesting article on the subject
Check this out... A very, very interesting article on all this stuff that you guys are discussing...

Bubble 2.0: Facebook, MySpace, Desperate Dinosaurs, Web 2.0 buzz machines, and gazillion other startups

So a lot of discussion revolving around MySpace, Web 2.0, business models, what is hype, what is real, why the entry barriers to the social media space are very minimal, and how a popular service can quickly lose its cool... And all that...
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Anonymous Coward, 18 Feb 2007 @ 2:15am

alert("hi!")
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