Facebook Nearly Added Twitter To Friends List 124
nandemoari writes "It seems the world's most popular social networking site was just moments away from acquiring another — and few of us ever knew about it. A Facebook executive has revealed that a planned takeover of Twitter only fell apart because of a disagreement over stock valuations.
Despite the rather miserable economy, Facebook is still looking to buy out other firms and says it could make a billion dollars a year from advertising.
Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist who put up some of the money behind Facebook, discussed the deal in a Business Week interview.
Thiel says the two sides agreed a $500 million purchase price and that Twitter would receive the payment in Facebook stock rather than cash — which is a common solution in large takeovers where there simply isn't the money available for a buyout."
Facebook are a bit too much talk, not enough walk. (Score:5, Interesting)
Go on then.
I could say I can make eleventy dollars a furlong from my blog; that doesn't make it true. Only a dribbling moron would base a business decision (such as exchanging their website for stock) on such a claim.
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Makes me feel kind of sick...
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Facebook? Or my blog? ;)
Re:Facebook are a bit too much talk, not enough wa (Score:5, Insightful)
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As inane as it is, you have to admit that when you have Senators and Representatives in DC [google.com] , it's worth money. [tweetcongress.org]
Furby's were inane too.
Re:Facebook are a bit too much talk, not enough wa (Score:5, Insightful)
Furbys were inane too.
And look what happened to them...
Fads are great if you think you will be able to capitalize quickly on your investment, but you don't want to be stuck holding the bag when it's all over. Web fads are even more volatile because, unlike tangible goods, there is no "collector's market" after popularity wanes. All you have is a defunct, devalued service that can no longer command the ad revenue to support itself.
Re:Facebook are a bit too much talk, not enough wa (Score:5, Interesting)
Twitter and the twits that use it can be used to do incredibly powerful data mining and forecasting. If you just analyze the twits coming in (I like to refer both to users and their messages by this term, it is slightly confusing but makes sense in its own way - and often, the difference is unimportant) then you can find out all kinds of things, like (to borrow from your example) where in a city it is raining, or where automobile accidents have occurred, or where the police are beating someone to death, or where the police are being beaten to death, or whatever the fuck is going on! Forget predicting flu outbreak with google, that is way too slow and has far too little resolution. :)
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Don't forget using Twit data mining to determine facility usage [penny-arcade.com]!
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I thought the messages were twits, and the users were twats.
Re:Facebook are a bit too much talk, not enough wa (Score:5, Insightful)
No matter how trivial and useless it may be, a lot people use the site. If a lot of people use the site, corporations want to advertise there. Thus the money thing....
Re:Facebook are a bit too much talk, not enough wa (Score:5, Insightful)
90% of the peopel that use twitter never go to the site they use the API to post and read the messages through an application.
Any ad's would not be seen unless they start figuring they will simply spam all the users as ad tweets.
The next day twitter will have no users.
they could probably still make some money at it (Score:1)
I'm not sure if it's worth the $500m price being thrown around, but if Twitter's only goal was to make some money without totally alienating its users, it doesn't seem that hard. Put a few ads on the website, and even if only 10% of users go to the website, it's still quite a few. Offer a few minor premium services for $5/mo. Etc.
It's not really that hard to make money at Web 2.0 (or even Web 1.0). The companies that fail are the ones that try to exploit it too greedily and drive off their users. I mean, Cr
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http://twitter.com/public_timeline [twitter.com]
Although it looks like about 75% of users are using the API.
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10% of a lot is still a lot and most of the 90% at least occasionally hit the website. As a network those 90% add a lot of value even if they are not advertised to directly, and as the system gets more mainstream it will also get more webbased, so that 10% could grow to 20 or even 50%.
additionally twitter ads can be very targeted .'. profitable
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What is it about about your iPhone, Wii, BlackBerry or power locks on your car that aren't trivial?
Welcome to the economy where triviality is worth trillions of dollars a year.
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My what?
Sorry, don't own any of that junk. Power locks... that's funny, I haven't locked a door in years.
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It doesn't matter; bridges traditionally aren't built with doors. Having a troll living under them makes them inherently secure.
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Go on then.
I'm pretty sure they're referring to the amounts of money they'll get if/when they sell all the users' private data to those online pharmacies and the likes.
you're not a very good businessman (Score:3, Informative)
hey, did you know they beam radio and television signals out in the air for free?
and its an profitable venture
twitter, as a new kind of media, is simply in the stages of establishing itself
google also was heavily used and made no revenue for a long time
once a media's userbase is large and stable enough, advertising can be injected, and lots of cash can be made
the media business is not like manufacturing, like making and selling cupcakes, where you spend a little money and immediately get a little money back
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Go on then.
I could say I can make eleventy dollars a furlong from my blog; that doesn't make it true. Only a dribbling moron would base a business decision (such as exchanging their website for stock) on such a claim.
Twitter doesn't know how to make money either. Twitter's best hope is to be bought by some other company so the owners can cash out. Of course, if they're bought by someone who only makes "theoretical" money like Facebook, and only paid in stock, they won't be any better off. However, if they never get bought out by anyone, their theoretical billions of dollars will never materialize into real money, because their service is very difficult to monetize.
Facebook is at least still mostly accessed via web br
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I am not positive, but...
1) Even if Facebook were a public company, there may be a limitation on how soon they can sell (e.g. similar to selling limits after an IPO).
2) Since Facebook isn't sold publically, at best I believe they could sell to other insiders, but even that is limited.
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Facebook is at least still mostly accessed via web browser
I don't use facebook or twitter but whenever my sister uses my wifi to access facebook her phone goes nuts with sms messages. Being a twit, she is right in the target demographic for both applications so a merger would seem to make sense.
Websites come and go (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone is so hot for Facebook these days, but a year or two ago it was all anyone could do to not jizz themselves over MySpace. These things come and go, websites get hot, then fade away.
I just got a message from MSN groups that some group I had subscribed to a few years ago was going to be deleted. No big deal, I've moved on and found other places where I can post intelligent comments and engage in lively banter.
There is so little that is static about the Web. Facebook is right to strike now and make as much money as they can while the sun shines, because a year or two from now they will be a bad memory.
Re:Websites come and go (Score:5, Funny)
You have? Why don't you post them here too then? ;)
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Amazingly enough, I still have no idea what Twitter even looks like...
Somehow I've managed to avoid it for some reason that I cannot explain.
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Same here. I don't do Facebook either. My wife spends lots of time on it though, and that is plenty to let me know that I don't want any part in it. If I want to contact someone (or them to contact me), I've got more phones than I need, and there's always email. Hell, I have a few friends who still send postcards.
One thing I find a little sad is the demise of the handwritten letter, the type where you could enjoy the anticipation as yo
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sadly (or happily? I don't know) same here. Blogging and that stuff to me is alot like having a personal website and being expected to document your thoughts on the front page.
Since I've seen this stuff around since even before geocities (not called blogging, just called a website), the novelty wore thin enough that this was laughed at.
Re:Websites come and go (Score:4, Interesting)
I was under the impression that facebook was late maturity/early decline stage.
Very soon something "old that's new again" will come along for people to jizz themselves over.
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a year or two ago it was all anyone could do to not jizz themselves over MySpace
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3a-ajsVVus [youtube.com]
Re:Websites come and go (Score:5, Insightful)
Something better might still come along, but its going to have to be pretty good, and I don't see it completely replacing Facebook in a year.
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So, what's it like to work in a brothel for the elderly?
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yeah because the average person dies at 40... wtf?
I can understand the brothel joke, but mid-late 30's even having an age joke attached to it?
That's like joking that a 21 year old is close to retirement, or some other stupid made up joke...
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Something better?
I think there are still a lot of people out there who have one of those "real lives" with "real friends" that don't require them to post lots of useless crap about themselves (though there is certainly no shortage of egoistic loons posting their every "deep thought") or to read random crap written by people they barely know.
I've been on FaceBook a total of maybe an hour since I signed up (at the urging of an old high-school friend) and I just don't see any value. I don't really care that so
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Would those people include a sub-class which spends time posting their view that Facebook is for people with no lives to 'geek news' sites like Slashdot? If so, surely you could have in 'real life' talked to 'real friends' about it.
Many people, myself included believe Facebook is a great tool for helping keep in touch with people bet
Unique? Not really (Score:2)
When you make sweeping changes to your site and receive nothing but criticism from the majority of users (think less Terms of Service fiasco, more "we changed the layout to serve more advertisements" fiasco), it is obvious you are on the outs and hit your peak a while back. In sites that are "up-and-coming," those kind of big changes are welcomed as the, "We're getting bigger and better,"
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When you make sweeping changes to your site and receive nothing but criticism from the majority of users (think less Terms of Service fiasco, more "we changed the layout to serve more advertisements" fiasco), it is obvious you are on the outs and hit your peak a while back. In sites that are "up-and-coming," those kind of big changes are welcomed as the, "We're getting bigger and better," scenario instead of f-ups.
I would argue that people get in a tizzy about these changes because they feel personally invested in Facebook and care about it a great deal since it's part of their daily lives. People who are apathetic to a product or service wouldn't raise such a furor.
No, I'm not a Facebook shill, but I find it enviable that they have a user base that's so clearly passionate about their service.
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... They are the first site I think that could finally get it right...
Getting it "right" (you didn't define which values of right) never meant you were going to succeed on the web. Does Twitter get it "right?" Does Myspace (a hugely popular site) get it right? Does Ebay?
What was wrong with all the sites we've never heard of that just didn't make the cut? Did they get it wrong somehow? What was wrong with Orkut?
Does Facebook get it right at all? How right is it if I can't delete my account?
What is way more important than getting it right is getting the right people in. If the
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What're you basing this on?
Message boards have been around since the dawn of the web. They're still going strong. You can just look at Facebook as an upgraded form of message board. It makes communications comparatively easier than email, and instant messaging. So I don't really see how it's going to wind up being a bad memory. Unless they really bugger things up and determine that they've been selling peoples credit card numbers to terrorists. Even then, I doubt people would care..
Re:Websites come and go (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, I'm pretty sure I've been on Slashdot for six or seven years now...
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Well, I'm pretty sure I've been on Slashdot for six or seven years now...
what, only 6-7 years? ;-)
There's nothing wrong with posting on the same boards for many years, as long as enough similarly-minded people stick around. Sadly, Usenet is pretty much dead nowdays anf far too many people jump on the newest fad bandwagon (such as twitter/facebook).
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Well, I'm pretty sure I've been on Slashdot for six or seven years now...
what, only 6-7 years? ;-)
Yeah, I'm a newbie. :-)
There's nothing wrong with posting on the same boards for many years, as long as enough similarly-minded people stick around. Sadly, Usenet is pretty much dead nowdays anf far too many people jump on the newest fad bandwagon (such as twitter/facebook).
Usenet is one place I still hang around as well. It is actually surprisingly un-dead now that it's relatively marginal enough that the spammers mostly leave it alone. If you get a high-quality feed (text-only services such as individual.net are usually the best) you can enjoy the discussions without any spam at all. Most groups are dead, of course, but so are most websites. You just visit those that matter.
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Me too, but I never read or post here any more.
Re:Websites come and go (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone is so hot for Facebook these days, but a year or two ago it was all anyone could do to not jizz themselves over MySpace. These things come and go, websites get hot, then fade away.
It's not web sites, but social networks which behave like that. As I've pointed out before, social networking sites have a life cycle, just like nightclubs. They open, they may become cool and grow, they become popular, the losers move in, the cool people move out, and they decline. Has-been social networks include AOL, GeoCities, EZboard, Friendster, Salon, Nerve, Tribe, and MySpace. Alexa traffic stats bear this out; most of those peaked years ago; Myspace peaked in Q1 2008.
From an investment perspective, social networking sites have to pay off within a small number of years, or they're toast. Facebook might have gone public several years ago; now it's too late. There were, I think, two tech IPOs in 2008, and those were early in the year.
I expect that almost all the money-losing free services will disappear, or go into zombie mode like Tribe (two employees left) before the end of the year.
Zombie mode, incidentally, is the fate of many venture-funded startups. They can't make anywhere near enough money to pay off their investors, but, after shrinking, they can generate enough cash to cover their current bills.
Amusingly, nightclubs come and go, but strip clubs are forever. Similarly, dating sites have very long lives, much longer than social networks.
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I think the death of MySpace was pretty widely visible.
90% of its user base HATED using it. It was a terrible webpage. And it was incredibly limiting. 10 pictures? What is this?
Facebook is a photo app. I thought that the first time I used it, and have felt pretty backed up by that statement ever since.
The first time I used facebook was to put up photos and the ability to tag people and associate it with profiles is what I found incredibly useful. (Not to mention unlimited photo uploads was handy.)
Fa
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Facebook is going to survive because it's going to be a friends and family photo album + event planning.
Don't forget its most important function: Scrabble.
What are you doing right now? (Score:1)
Advertising revenue (Score:5, Informative)
Okay, first a disclaimer: I'm not a marketing expert with five hundred years experience and zero percent APR. I am a graphic designer, however. Here's the thing about advertising revenue. There's payment for the ad to be displayed, and there's a return on investment. The cost to run an advertising campaign can be from a few hundred dollars to ten million dollars, depending on medium, placement, demographic, etc. And almost always, the revenue stream does grow from a well-done marketing campaign. But there is never a way to prove causation. That is to say, an external factor could have accounted for all the extra business that cannot be accounted for. There is not, and never has been, a direct link between advertising and improved revenue. Of course, there will be people who try to tell you otherwise -- and it's conventional wisdom that it does help. What nobody can predict though is impact. I can't say with a much confidence that if I invest 1 million dollars in a marketing campaign I will see a 3 million dollar increase in gross revenues over the next 12 months. Improve, yes, how much -- who knows.
My point is this -- nobody who knows what they're talking about will quote numbers, not this way at any rate. A billion dollars is a pipe dream.
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You're comparing chalk and cheese. Facebook aren't talking about increased revenue from advertising themselves; they're talking about revenue from selling advertising space. Which is much more predictable (credit crunch notwithstanding).
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Someone once said "I know that h
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If you do things right you can track your advertising impact. Many ads have 'click codes' embedded in the URL, on sites I've worked on we registered in the DB when someone clicked in from an ad site, we kept that info in a cookie and tracked it as they viewed products, and added it to the invoice when they made purchases, we could directly link the number of people who clicked that ad, browsed the product catalog, and purchased items from the website.
It's not hard to do, it's just a lot of little steps goin
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If you do things right you can track your advertising impact. Many ads have 'click codes' embedded in the URL, on sites I've worked on we registered in the DB when someone clicked in from an ad site, we kept that info in a cookie and tracked it as they viewed products, and added it to the invoice when they made purchases, we could directly link the number of people who clicked that ad, browsed the product catalog, and purchased items from the website.
Which isn't much different than people coming in with clipped-out coupons. Yes, there's some information available. I'm not arguing that, there are ways to estimate, there is data available, but what I am saying is that these are edge cases. I don't think many people would suggest using that as their sole source of information to gauge the success of a campaign. The process is simply too organic... It's measured with margins of error and includes soft factors like "consumer confidence". I can't say with cer
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Hmm.. (Score:5, Insightful)
There, fixed that for you
Re:Hmm.. (Score:4, Interesting)
If you had said "proven, long-term, sustainable value", then I might agree.
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There, fixed that for you too
disagree on that (Score:3, Insightful)
A website with millions of daily visitors has some non-zero intrinsic value, even without considering any potential revenue streams, just due to the fact that there are a lot of people out there who like soapboxes, and something with millions of visitors has value as a good soapbox.
I would personally pay at least $50 for Twitter if nobody else outbid me, just so I could own it and fuck around with it. Probably other wealthy people would pay more for similar vanity or having-fun-with-it reasons.
Re:disagree on that (Score:4, Insightful)
Yea, the intrinsic value is a whopping huge bill for servers and bandwidth and employees. I wouldn't pay 50 bucks for Twitter, because I'd go broke long before I figured out how to monetize it.
Having a zillion page views is nothing but a liability if no-one wants to pay for ads or services.
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already done (Score:3, Insightful)
"The actual value of a company or an asset based on an underlying perception of its true value including all aspects of the business, in terms of both tangible and intangible factors."
A site with millions of daily visitors has a non-zero intangible value.
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There's huge value in any website with millions of daily visitors.
That is true, it means that most of these visitors get what they wanted. However, it also means a huge cost (most of the time) and not everything that has value can be turned into a healthy business.
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Twitter has economic value? (Score:4, Insightful)
Last time I checked, Twitter was free to use and does not have advertising. In other words, its income cannot be anything more than a trivial amount. It's true value is probably a lot closer to $0 than to $500 million.
This is how the dot.com boom of the 90's happened. Users != revenue or profitability.
Re:Twitter has economic value? (Score:5, Insightful)
It does not have advertising YET. Plus, you can always make a company account and post PR crap(which several companies do already) for the cost of manhours.
Also, it is easily mine-able. Several companies are already integrating twitter into their analytics packages so that you can see whenever someone mentions a keyword(ie Time-Warner), when it appears with other words(ie Time-Warner+internet+sucks), who says it(ie me), and how many people are follow that twit(nobody). You can also map relationships and reach easily, compared to websites, and pinpoint people to consider bribing
Advertising, PR, & research goldmine.
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Also, it is easily mine-able.
Everyone thought the same thing about myspace. They quickly learned that they were wrong. The problem is that, while there is a wealth of data there, the data is worthless. Nobody CARES that you're "taking a poo in the loo, haha!", there is no value there.
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There is plenty of value, it's just not the majority of the data. The secret is to be able to separate the good stuff from the dross, which is just another analytics problem.
The question is whether or not that's a viable revenue stream, and whether or not the users will stand to be data-mined in that fashion.
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Re:Twitter has economic value? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll say it again, this is EXACTLY what happened about 10 years ago. Investors started throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at websites without bothering to contemplate the fact that they didn't have a business model, and most of them failed for obvious reasons.
Consider also, that even if Twitter does start to accept advertising, nobody is going to see it. Why? Because a lot of Twitter users (most?) use 3rd party clients, especially the hardcore users. And you know everybody is going to use clients that don't bother them with ads.
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And you know everybody is going to use clients that don't bother them with ads.
Sure... seen any non-slashdot-user using ICQ or MSN lately?
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The lose money on every Tweet, but they make up for it in volume.
Like the poster below says, I think their value, if any, might be in the mine-ability of the info rather than the potential for ads.
As far as I'm concerned.. (Score:1)
Twitter is a bit more professional for updating coworkers, relatives, friends, and generally everyone by the single fact that you're also not able to look at last weekend's crazy drunk fest. I don't understand why Facebook would want to take over Twitter, except for the fact of sprea
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It basically only gives you the option of making status updates like Facebook, and that's pretty much it.
And to answer questions, with 35 characters to spare!
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Or, as I phrase it when I'm asked, "It's basically Facebook but without all the shit that makes you want to stab people over the Internet."
ah, Peter Thiel (Score:2)
Is that Peter "there's absolutely no bubble in technology" Thiel? Good luck [youtube.com] with that...
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It's arguably correct; there is no technology-specific bubble. The world's economies are all looking shaky right now, not least because everyone whose economy is not directly tied to the US is heavily involved with someone who is. It seems more like the tech jobs are decreasing mostly in proportion to economic activity in general. The jobs just happen to be leaving the USA, so from a Yertle the Turtle kind of viewpoint it looks like tech is going in the toilet. Well, maybe it is, but no more than anything e
to some extent (Score:2)
I think there was a (mostly popped) bubble of speculative investment in Web 2.0 type companies, where VCs would throw money at anything with "social media" in the title. Around 2006-2008 it didn't take a lot of effort or a very plausible-sounding business plan to get backing in that space.
It's less visible in valuations than the late-90s bubble was, because this time around most of the companies never IPOd, and there were fewer to begin with. But I guess we could speculate as to their current values. Bebo w
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Well, even the Skype founder said they overpaid... and eBay took a $900 million charge because of it.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article2570267.ece [timesonline.co.uk]
Twitbook (Score:2)
98.5% of companies got this takeover wrong. Are you smarter than Facebook? Take our survey to find out!
It was mostly worthless facebook stock. (Score:5, Insightful)
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/why-twitter-turned-down-facebook/ [nytimes.com]
Who would want facebook stock? It's like being bought with sub-prime mortgages as the payment. "They're worth it, I swear!"
bullshit (Score:2)
all they are doing is trying to increase the market value of their company before getting bought up.
Tired of this nonsense (Score:2)
From TFS:
Y'know, I'm getting tired of this... Yeah, the economy is bad - but life goes on people. You won't survive the bad economy, let alone grow when times turn good again, if you just circle the wagons and try to ride it out.
Before i get scooped on this article below... (Score:1)
Related to facebook.... (I won't bother posting in my journal since i won't get the opportunity/fact of being presented anyway...)
"Facebook users suffer viral surge "
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7918839.stm [bbc.co.uk]
Once a frackingain, facebook needs to get off its ass and create a better, more public, more user-controlled anti-rogue apps procedure. It's NOT enough to "refer to the user security/privacy guide.
facebook's rank policy of allowing any app you add ALL ACCESS to your profile, friends, and such is
and few of us ever knew about it (Score:2)
@twitter: (Score:1)
sorry, i had to take a dump.
Some choice quotes since none of you RTFA (Score:1)
"At that point, Facebook offered Twitter around $100 million in cash, with the rest of the deal in stock. Facebook said it would come up with the $100 million by selling more of its stock to outside investors. Twitter agreed on one condition: that the Facebook stock it received be valued at the price company shares garnered on the open market. Facebook blinked and the deal talks ended. "They wanted to buy us but there was not much conviction," the person says."
"Analytics Web site Compete
Next in the news: (Score:2)
Portfolio's interview with Twitter's CEO:
I can't imagine how many times you've been asked, "But how will you make money?"
We will make money, and I can't say exactly how, because we can't predict exactly what's going to work.
Twitter adopts a new user policy: "You hereby grant Twitter a perpetual, irrevocable license to sublicense, retain, publish, edit, use, alter, fondle, misrepresent, [...] any information you tweet, your personal information stored in user settings, your IP address(es), your pictures, your mother, your car [...], by breathing you accept the above terms."
That's how they'll make money. It's how Facebook "makes" money.
stock valuation (Score:3, Interesting)
The deal only fell apart because... they did not agree on the price. Bummer!
Just wondering (Score:2)
Good example (Score:1)
I thought they almost added twitter as an app in facebook.
Facebook Ads (Score:1)
I did for one of the ads and now it's the ONLY AD I SEE!
Facebook has a sick sense of humor.
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