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Facebook Toast? Hot Today, Dead Tomorrow--Like AOL?
- tptacek 19y agoArticle thesis: though Facebook exceeds expectations on the only established empirical metric for its success, it fails all the author's subjective metrics, like "thrilling older people". Eagerly awaiting news of Google's imminent demise as well; yes, it makes huge amounts of money, but the graphic design minimalism so crucial to its success has been slipping.
- astine 19y agoI think that the author's point is that even though Facebook has a huge number of users, they haven't yet figured out a way to properly monetize their business. They're making peanuts compared to Google and income is a very well established metric for success.
- tptacek 19y agoWe don't know their income; they're a private company.
- aston 19y agoThey have, however, told us their numbers. http://kara.allthingsd.com/20080131/chatty-zuckerberg-tells-all-about-facebook-finances/ http://kara.allthingsd.com/20080131/chatty-zuckerberg-tells-... They are not, as you'll see, Google-esque.
- t0pj 19y agoTo summarize, income determines outcome. I like the sound of that. Although, I think they wouldn't need to figure out that monetization problem if a liquidity event occurs. :) Whether they finally successfully monetize or simply sell for big money, good for them!
- hugh 19y agoIt's not that hard to monetize: just stick ads on pages and sell them. If they had been happy with a billion-dollar valuation, they could simply do that, and everybody would have been happy, including their blissfully unzombified users. Unfortunately, they're not happy being a billion-dollar company, they want to be a 15-billion dollar company, or perhaps a hundred-billion-dollar company. To justify that kind of size they need to think up all sorts of new ways to monetize their users (e.g. Beacon) at the possible cost of annoying their users (e.g. Beacon).
- astine 19y agoYes, I think that is the point of the article.