Facebook Expected To Go Public Next Week

First time accepted submitter foozie writes "Many credible sources, including Forbes and CBS, say that Facebook will finally IPO next week, raising about $10 billion and valuating at $75 billion, almost three times the valuation of Google at the point of their IPO in 2004. This shift raises questions about how the new ownership will affect the company's ability to innovate and remain on the forefront of social media."

Re:Facebook Innovation?

[jhoegl]

The only reason Facebook was better was because MySpace was its only competition. I mean, a virus laden social media platform that you could customize with terrible backgrounds, fonts, oh.. and music embeds vs friendly banter messages and drunken photos.
The world has spoken, and the world said "noobs shouldnt mess with html!"

Re:Innovate?

[Pharmboy]

I believe live journal, MySpace, geocities, tripod, etc all beat Facebook to your so called innovating by providing people with their own "web page".

Yes, a webpage that 5 people saw. Blogs made it possible for ordinary persons to have 12 to 20 people see their webpage. Facebook users typically have 50 to 500 "friends" who are forced to see updates about their cats, or the latest shared "image that is really only text" bit of wisdom. More importantly, it created networks with all their personal information available to the platform, and most importantly, Facebook figured out how to get people to give them this information for free. Some even pay for it, by purchasing game credits.

Facebook is different, and is the "necessary evil" of the month if you want to catch up with old friends from high school, etc. Other than conversation and "free" games that are designed from the ground up to be addictive, it offers very little to the user, but it offers tremendous value to the advertiser. Five years from now, Facebook will still be here. Likely worth a tiny fraction of the 75B that is laughably being touted, but it will be here.

Google brought advertisers millions of people. Facebook tells the advertisers where they live, what they like, and who their friends are. The problem of course is that everyone goes to Google when they are looking to buy something, not Facebook.

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Re:Facebook Innovation?

[TheRaven64]

Except that in Apple's case, they actually do innovate. In fact, I can think of a department in Apple that probably innovates as much as the whole of the rest of the industry. What other company has a legal department that would think of patenting screen-shaped as a shape for a tablet?