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Facebook valued at $10 billion?

Facebook’s public valuation is of course a moving target, given that they’re a private company, but a recent investment of US$200 million by a Russian investor for a 1.96% stake in the company puts the valuation at roughly $10 billion. Not too shabby. 2 years ago, Microsoft invested $240 million and attached a valuation of $15 billion.

What’s important here is the order of magnitude of the valuation. Facebook is of course positioning themselves for a much better valuation by continuing to grow their membership base to the point where they become more like an 8000 lb gorilla in the social networking arena and can then leverage that power to grow their capabilities beyond their current offerings.

Meebo offering chat bars for other sites; competing with Facebook

meeboMeebo is teaming up with other community sites to offer their chat bar at the bottom of their pages. This is a smart move for Meebo as they move to capitalize on the success of community applications like chat and to compete with Facebook. Their chat bar even looks very much like Facebook’s. It will be interesting to see whether they will be able to wrest away a lot of the market away from FB.

via Techcrunch.

Will Twitter’s ‘mainstream’ popularity last?

Ashton Kutcher and CNN recently went head to head to see who would hit 1 million followers first (Kutcher won by a nose), and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone remarked that it was another watershed event in the history of Twitter.

One reporter said that this brought Twitter mainstream, but in our opinion, that does not mean it will last. Twitter is a bit like radio in that it’s a one-to-many broadcast. The 1-to-1 ‘conversations’ that so many people describe on Twitter are cumbersome at best, and public.

Twitter needs to evolve. And quickly. They’re not the only ones in the social media business. Sites like FriendFeed and of course Facebook may yet ‘eat their lunch’. On the other, there’s a big old world out there with a lot of people not yet connected to the Net, yet alone tweeting…

Article Recap for the Week ending Apr 17, 2009

We started off the week by reporting that Amazon’s Kindle Store has surpassed over 260,000 books with an exponential growth rate – at least that’s not a reason not to own one.

We took a look at the available VHS to DVD converters and other analog to digital converters (both hardware and software solutions).

We featured a bunch of Google-related news. The latest offering from Gmail Labs is a tiny addition but welcome one – insert images directly into email. Next are the many uses of Google Latitude and last is the news that Google and universal were partnering up on a music video website called Vevo.

Rounding up, we pleasantly discovered that Facebook is
not only attracting younger members. Rock Band fan? Nowhere to put your instruments? Then take a look at the ‘Rock Box’ Rock Band storage box.

Facebook attracts an older crowd too

Web 2.0 is coming home to older users as Facebook’s demographics show that for example, women over 55 are one of its fastest growing groups.

Not surprising as Facebook has become the solution to a problem people didn’t really think they had – how to keep in touch with friends and family without expending a great deal of time and money.

200 million users currently and growing at a tremendous pace, it also wouldn’t surprise me to see FB get targeted by governments for various reasons – reigning in/keeping an eye on their citizens, law enforcement, propaganda, information dispersal, etc.

To Tweet or not to Tweet…

Twitter has seen exponential growth that has surpassed even Facebook, well at least on a percentage basis. On a raw user # basis, Twitter has but a mere 8 million members compared with Facebook’s monstrous 175 million.

But lots of folks just don’t get it – what’s the point of Twitter? Perhaps it doesn’t fill an obvious need and that’s their issue. Perhaps Twitter and other similar services (yes, there are others like Plurk) are inventing a need, or at least a service that will precipitate a need. Did you *really* need TiVo?

Facebook tops 222 Million

Even though we already knew it, Facebook has officially surpassed Myspace with users according to comScore. Even though the two sites were fighting closely for the crown mid-2008, by December the clear winner emerged as Facebook grew to 222 million users, 100 million more than Myspace.

The graph above shows the Google Trend utilizing data from google over the past 21 months. 21 months ago Myspace received double the interest as Facebook… but now people are saying “Myspace who?” and “Will you friend me on Facebook?”

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