Facebook Expected To Go Public Next Week 192
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."
Innovate? (Score:5, Insightful)
Innovate? I think we're already past that with Facebook, no?
If you're looking for innovation, personally, I'd look elsewhere -- Way past the social-network situation that we see graying at a rapid rate.
Facebook Innovation? (Score:4, Interesting)
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They created a social network that, for some reason, people tought was better than the alternatives. That is called inovation.
Now, you can say they stopped inovating. As a consequence, they must have also stopped improving.
Re:Facebook Innovation? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Facebook Innovation? (Score:5, Insightful)
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That is a pretty poor measure of innovation, since it basically defines innovation by popularity.
There are endless innovations that couldn't be monetized and were accordingly never became popular or useful.
Facebook doesn't have much more room to innovate, unless you consider further monetization to be innovation.
Sure, they'll keep tweaking the site design, but feature wise, they've already got the kitchen sink.
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It does not require popularity. Well, ok, it does, up to the point that somebody must think it is usefull. If nobody thinks that, ok, it may still be inovation, but it is failled inovation.
Anyway, if somebody thinks it is better than the alternative, then it is innovation. The reciprocate and the inverse aren't always true or always false.
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The N95 was a great phone as was the N96. Sadly Nokia failed to build on the success of those two products.
Re:Facebook Innovation? (Score:5, Funny)
The world has spoken, and the world said "noobs shouldnt mess with html!"
Re:Facebook Innovation? (Score:5, Insightful)
wha? open source isn't even a question, nor is it related to the situation.
The answer is: facebook didn't innovate at all, they simply had the most popular site by method of exclusivity before they went public. That's it.
that's not "wow! amazing!", it's more a stroke of luck. Their dealings with zynga and microsoft (who surely is positioned to profit from the IPO) highlight that facebook otherwise has no idea what they're doing aside from trying to sell every user's information in every way possible.
Re:Facebook Innovation? (Score:5, Insightful)
You pretty much summed it up. I fear that Facebook is a one-trick pony. "And now, for our next act... uh... hm... where's that card..." What more can they realistically do, other than poach internet services from competitors like Google?
Facebook messaging is encroaching on email turf, but I doubt it will ever replace an independent email service; no one trusts them, and it's unrealistic to force all your email recipients to join Facebook; this was AOL's downfall as well.
The comparisons with AOL are accurate and portend future trouble for Facebook. The broader, out-of-control Internet has a way of bypassing closed systems with ever more flexible and innovative alternatives.
Sooner or later, someone will think of something even easier and more convenient to use than FB, and FB will begin to lose its relevance. I have no idea what; it could be some sort of mobile-to-mobile chat and messaging paradigm that bypasses the website-based interfaces like FB's, or maybe a return to basics because of social network fatigue.
Personally, I've grown tired of FB after using it somewhat extensively for a year or two. It's been a great way to get back in touch with old classmates and the like, but the novelty's worn off and I now find it tiresome to sit down at a computer, bring up facebook.com, and read some oh-so-clever status messages from people who should be working or reading or (God forbid) exercising :)
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The number of my Korean and Japanese friends jumping on facebook would seem to indicate otherwise.
yes 2ch is still wildly popular in Japan. Yes in Korea daum/naver "cafes" (bulletin boards usually dedicated to a single topic, often with a frightening degree of focus) are very popular (also it should be noted that you cannot register for these cafes without a national ID number, so anonymity is not really a consideration). But I don't think they are abandoning social networks by any stretch. If anything, the
Re:Innovate? (Score:4, Interesting)
We should have.... but Facebook did something what WWW couldn't and that is that every person has a own "website" where they have their contact information, photos, journals and so on.
The 90's boom for WWW was that everyone would have a own website.
It did not succeed as now WWW is primarily only used by corporations and teams (projects etc) but the normal people are far away from WWW idea to have homepages.
Facebook is the "homepage 2.0".
Is it innovative? No.... but is it something? Yes.
To get innovation back to people, from corporations for sake of security. We should have easy way to get normal people to make own pages, for their chosen server provider with small fee (like 1-2 euros a month for 1GB storage).
It should be easy as just drop a package to directory and then open site with editor and drag'n'drop images, resize tables and banners, place input boxes and link to existing data just by drag'n'drop way and automatic galleries with directory hierarchy.
But even today, almost after decade of CMS's and others... It is still too difficult to make a own website. So people love facebook or Google+.
Re:Innovate? (Score:4, Insightful)
I believe live journal, MySpace, geocities, tripod, etc all beat Facebook to your so called innovating by providing people with their own "web page".
Please try again
Re:Innovate? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Innovate? (Score:4, Informative)
Also, if I want to catch up with old friends, I'll call them.
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Some of us are 50, so we don't have every phone number of every person we knew and liked from the 1970s.
Yes, GeoCities was great. That might explain why it is gone.
I'm not saying Facebook is great, I'm saying they are doing a better job, and managing to make a profit, something the other "technologies" never manged to do.
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GeoCities had many very high traffic user sites on it. Just because your world revolves around Facebook, it doesn't mean every other person's Internet use is that shallow.
Also, if I want to catch up with old friends, I'll call them.
Just because your friends are shallow, doesn't mean that everyone uses Facebook in a shallow way.
I love that canard about calling old friends. Some of us have moved out of our mom's basement - I have friends in East Asia, Europe, Australia and the Americas. When it's convenient for them to receive phone calls, it's almost never convenient for me to make them. The reverse holds true as well.
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Likely worth a tiny fraction of the 75B that is laughably being touted, but it will be here.
I don't know why people here are so skeptical of Facebook's market value as a company. Most people spend more time on Facebook than they do on Google. Facebook has a lot more and a lot accurate data than Google has on their users. If Google can become so huge just by selling ads on their websites, why can't Facebook be at least as big as them?
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Given how they've just made the single biggest change [facebook.com] to their interface since the launch of Facebook I'm wondering just what you define as innovating? They've just done a complete re-think of how they tell the story of a person's life through a profile page.
Re:Innovate? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know what the GP defines as innovation, but change certainly isn't inherently innovative. You can make a lot changes that make an interface worse... like the timeline, which on investigation appears to me to be a jumbled mess with no real thought put into its layout.
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IPO of Net ventures (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a sucker game, actually
Back in the 1980's when Al Gore proclaimed the "Information Super Highway" there had been more hype than everything else combined
There were so many example of Net venture wasted all the money being pumped into them, and yet, the financial world never learn
Take search engines for example
The was Altavista, and people was like goo-goo and gaa-gaa all over it
Then Yahoo came along, and the goo-goo gaa-gaa people flocked to it
When Google arrived, Yahoo withered
Take "community", for example
There was "The-Well", AOL, tripod, whathaveyous
How many of them are still left, today?
How many BILLIONS have they wasted?
I do not have a crystal ball, but I can tell you that FB will be just like any of the above-mentioned, and the billions pumped into it would be wasted
I can't remember how much $$$
Re:IPO of Net ventures (Score:5, Insightful)
There were so many example of Net venture wasted all the money being pumped into them, and yet, the financial world never learn
In this case it's even worse. Think about it: What's the point of an IPO? It's so that a company can raise money, to fund expansion or revitalize the company.
So, does Facebook need money to expand? No, they're undoubtedly sitting on a mountain of cash already. They're not a little company that needs capital to expand, and they're not a big company with aging plant and equipment that needs a capital infusion to get with the times.
The reason for the IPO is obviously so that the existing owners can cash out.
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Re:IPO of Net ventures (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yes but perhaps not enough crazy money to warrant an IPO price of 75 billions.
Re:IPO of Net ventures (Score:5, Insightful)
You're missing an important one, and the one that eventually caught up to microsoft. If you're using stock options as a form of compensation you eventually have to go public, because the company cannot have more than some number of shareholders and be considered private.
Facebook may need to expand, a lot. Who knows what their plan is? They may need a massive infrastructure investment to support higher bandwidth in system applications (videos, 3d games, who knows), and they may need a massive investment to hire a large number of staff to start running revenue generating activities, along with a building full of lawyers to go with it all (advertising sales teams mostly). If they're serious about making facebook into a platform rather than just a webpage there's a lot of time and money that could be thrown into basically writing a giant web OS.
But Facebook faces a lot of fundamental problems. First off, if they have a billion users a 75 billion dollar IP values each user at 75 dollars. That's... absurd (admittedly, not 75/year, but even at 7.5/year you're pushing your luck, that requires a lot of suckers giving you 75/year for each user who contributes nothing). Right now they sell facebook points, which is all well and good, but 3rd parties take I think 70% of that. So again, you need to be moving a LOT of money per user.
So how else do you get money? Well advertising. And again, what is a user worth on facebook to an advertiser? My Facebook experience is going to be different than in the US, because they feed different ads to canada, but right now the ads they feed me are for very sketchy (not necessarily illegal, just not really serious big businesses). Valuing a facebook user might be like trying to value television viewers, but 10x harder.
Or you can sell your data to companies. Which is where this whole thing starts to fall apart fast. Facebook is now big enough that they're going to get buried in Laws from every country in the world (see the Twitter story that just got to the front page for another example). Some of those rules are going to be 'no selling data, anonymized or not, without explicit consent' and suddenly your whole revenue stream is first a legal quagmire, and second very very limited. And laws may be written about targeted ads (see previous paragraph), ads to under 13's and compliance...
So yes, the existing owners want to cash out, and I'm sure a lot of them are looking to jump ship ASAP. But google started as just a search engine, and now they have more products than I can keep track of and billions in revenue (and profits), so you never know. I would not be surprised if Facebook has a lot of thought going into what their future will look like and the manpower and infrastructure to support that gets expensive fast (when you're funded by private capital anyway).
Re:IPO of Net ventures (Score:5, Insightful)
But Facebook faces a lot of fundamental problems. First off, if they have a billion users a 75 billion dollar IP values each user at 75 dollars. That's... absurd
Actually, that seems pretty low to me. If Facebook can't harvest information worth $7.50 to advertisers, political parties, and so on from each user then I'd be very surprised.
In the last US Presidential election, Obama spent $7.39 per vote, McCain spent $5.78 per vote (as with every other recent US election, the candidate who spent the most won). In most elections, around 80% of the voting population has already decided to vote for either the red team or the blue team and will always vote for their favourite colour. In winner-takes-all states, the effect of getting a few tens of thousand of undecideds to vote for your team means that you win the election. Facebook has enough information to make a mostly accurate list of who these undecided people are and where they live. How much do you think that information is worth? I bet either party would pay $10/name for it, maybe more if you promised not to sell it to the other party.
Now, of course, not every person in Facebook will be on that list - probably only a few million - but that's just one example. How about the list of people who own cars and are bad at arithmetic? That would be very valuable to a lot of insurance companies...
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That goes to my point about laws though. I agree, the information is valuable, but if Germany france and the UK, US, canada, Overall EU, middle east, india, china japan, etc. all come up with different rules about what Facebook can, and cannot do with that harvested data all those users suddenly become worth a lot less, and the regulatory compliance costs skyrocket.
Then you get into the problem of valuing what a user actually is worth. Lots of facebook users are a casual page and then they check their new
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I do not have a crystal ball [...] I can't remember how much $$$
I love it! I, too, tend to rarely remember the past or the future. But I do have a growing rule set; getting old isn't all that bad.
Re:IPO of Net ventures (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, one problem was that Netscape didn't actually have a history of making money. The other problem is that they didn't even have a clear idea of how they were going to make money. There wasn't a clear business model. It was basically "hey, this is the Next Big Thing! Get in on the ground floor, and we'll figure out that whole profitability thing later. But hey, this is after all the Next Big Thing, how can you lose?"
Now, that's not how IPOs are supposed to work. You're supposed to go public *after* you have a proven track record- consistent profitability, a history of growth. But Jim Clark really wanted to cash in, so he decided he'd just skip those steps. And that basically set the model for the Internet Bubble. Profitability was meaningless, sound business models were meaningless, the only thing that mattered was getting lots of people to use your software/web site/service. The profitability thing, well, they'd just figure that out later. Except, of course, most of them didn't. Inevitably people realized that most of these companies weren't the Next Big Thing, and the market tanked. The only stocks that ended up being worth anything were the old-fashioned ones. You know, the ones with business models. The ones that made a profit.
So how does FaceBook stack up? Well, according to Reuters, Facebook raked in $1.2 billion in revenue the first 9 months of 2010, and earned $355 million on that, a profit of 30%. That's a lot of money, and that's a really good profit margin. And they're growing. According to a Reuters article, Facebook earned $500 million in just the first six months of 2011. FaceBook is not another Internet Bubble company. They actually know how to make money, and a lot of it. Whether the stock is a good investment will depend entirely on how much you pay for it. Right now, a typical company trades at around 20 times earnings- that is, for $20 for every dollar of profit. This is the P/E (price/earnings) ratio, which is the single most important number to know in looking at stocks. Anyway, If you're paying several times that- 50, 60, or 80 P/E- FaceBook will have to increase its earnings massively in the future to justify that price.
So it's all about how cheaply you can get it. A terrible company can be a great investment if you can get it really cheap. A great company can be a terrible investment if you pay too much. The Wall Street Journal and other publications are going to be chattering a lot about how much the company is really worth. The reality is that the average Slashdot reader probably has just as much clue as they do about Facebooks long-term viability.
So I'm curious. What do people here think- is FaceBook here to stay? Or is this just another social media fad that will go the way of Friendster and Myspace, as soon as something better goes along? Do people still use FaceBook, or have people sort of reached a saturation point with it?
Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Yes, that's exactly what I thought. Well, actually what I thought was 'I wonder how much money the investors in the Goldman Sachs Facebook fund will make out of this bubble,' but your version sounds better.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
My thoughts were more aking to: "They didn't sell the company yet? What are they thinking? That they have a sustainable business?"
Good news everyone; It's going to DIE! (Score:2, Interesting)
It's the beginning of the end for facebook. I know people have been predicting that forever, but now it's as certain as the pull of gravity.
Once it's gone public, the pressure to maximize short term profits will force their hand, and really put the screw on the user.
Internal bureaucracy, not innovation is dominant for a company at this stage of its life, and totally dependent on the network effect (must remain above critical mass or else).
Facebook is going to be torn apart by tidal forces, and there is noth
Re:Where's the numbers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who bought those Goldman Sachs shares?
This is private information, so won't be disclosed. The public filing will just say that GS owns 10% (or whatever) of the company. The people who own the shares in the fund do not have to be disclosed.
Who at the SEC decided that these 'non-shares' that Goldman's wanted to sell were garbage enough not to be sold in the USA, but somehow could be sold outside the USA?
My understanding is that nobody did. Someone at GS decided that not selling them in the USA let them avoid the need to bother with SEC approval.
So will this shadowy group of Goldman's customers now manipulate the IPO?
Possibly, although I suspect that the IPO means that GS has decided that the bubble is now over. They hyped the shares, sold them to their preferred customers (at a big profit) hyped them some more, got their customers to sell them to other people, and now they have no further interest in Facebook. It can go public, people can review its books, and it could file for chapter 11 next week for all GS cares. They've moved onto the next bubble.
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Possibly, although I suspect that the IPO means that GS has decided that the bubble is now over. They hyped the shares, sold them to their preferred customers (at a big profit) hyped them some more, got their customers to sell them to other people, and now they have no further interest in Facebook. It can go public, people can review its books, and it could file for chapter 11 next week for all GS cares.
This is exactly it. GS didn't buy Facebook shares because they thought Facebook was a good company, they bought Facebook shares because they knew they could sell them. They paid a high price because they knew they could sell them at a higher price. They are the middle men, they buy in one place and sell in another. It's a good gig if you can get it.
"company's ability to innovate"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when has Facebook innovated since its creation?
shifting around the GUI elements every few months is NOT innovation.
Re:"company's ability to innovate"? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:"company's ability to innovate"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Innovation in social networks will involve the shifting from company held servers to a distrusted social network via IPv6 and router/modem/firewall/web server/mail server/file server in the residential environment
The social network company providing the links between like minded people, backups and redundant services for blackouts.
So greater personal control and privacy, with access to your files from your hardware and shared access that you specifically have control over.
As Facebook aren't into hardware or software they are screwed. This is a battle between Google, Apple and M$. Then new distributed social network portal who gain the lead first.
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Innovation in social networks will involve the shifting from company held servers to a distrusted social network via IPv6 and router/modem/firewall/web server/mail server/file server in the residential environment
The social network company providing the links between like minded people, backups and redundant services for blackouts.
So greater personal control and privacy, with access to your files from your hardware and shared access that you specifically have control over.
As Facebook aren't into hardware or software they are screwed. This is a battle between Google, Apple and M$. Then new distributed social network portal who gain the lead first.
You know, I agree with this to a massive extent. I would however like to see it on a 'large local' scale, ie. 'City' wide, Town wide, Burrough-wide.
I imagine something like this, but running over a town-wide MESH network, being an absolutely positive force in that of a moderate sized community. Actually bringing people together, that live in a 10 (or whatever) mile radius. A scaled back internet, a scaled back 'social network', where the social aspect is a given, because the people involved are the people y
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I'd have to ask, why? A distributed model could be useful for load sharing (hosting files and such like) and for failover, yet for those to be of much there'd have to be some way of sharing the data across the network - same for the idea of the company providing backups and redundant services. Wouldn't this set-up undermine the notion of greater control and privacy?
Security and privacy may in fact suffer if the system is reliant on each user securing their own systems. The main advantage I can see of a dece
Re:"company's ability to innovate"? (Score:4, Interesting)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-to-source_compiler [wikipedia.org]
BUT BUT BUT IT IS SO ORIGINAL, THEY DID IT WITH PHP AND C++ UNLIKE ALL THE OTHER ONES OUT THERE!
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RTFA (Score:5, Informative)
It won't IPO next week. It might *file* for it. Sigh.
Given Goldman Sachs' non-public/non-US offerings.. (Score:4, Insightful)
This just sounds like a cashout opportunity with the IPO folks holding the bag.
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At least some of that information should come out in the IPO filing. They generally have to file financial reports before they can list.
Re:Given Goldman Sachs' non-public/non-US offering (Score:4, Interesting)
...I'd like to know how much ad revenue have they generated in the past year, which would be a small fraction of it's valuation....
To extend on those remarks, two years ago the entire online advertising market was about $25B annually, with about half that going to GOOG for search placement. Old timers like myself will be surprised that only about a third of the online ad market is banner ads. I suppose adblocker-type technology will eventually completely kill off that market segment, or at least I hope it does. Anyway, FB can only be a small fraction of $10B ad revenue.
In normal market conditions companies used to sell for P.E. ratios in the single digit-ish range, but for a couple decades ultra high PE ratios have taken over. Once the baby boomers cash in their 401Ks that'll drop back to normal. Anyway it would not be all that out of line for a couple billion in revenue to account for a couple dozen billion in valuation.
Also the data they have is useful for spam services that are not online. Expect it to be mandatory to link your postal spam mail address and your social security number to your FB account, supposedly to cut down on griefers and spammers, but more likely to make the data they have on you more valuable.
Re:Given Goldman Sachs' non-public/non-US offering (Score:4, Informative)
...I'd like to know how much ad revenue have they generated in the past year, which would be a small fraction of it's valuation....
To extend on those remarks, two years ago the entire online advertising market was about $25B annually, with about half that going to GOOG for search placement. Old timers like myself will be surprised that only about a third of the online ad market is banner ads. I suppose adblocker-type technology will eventually completely kill off that market segment, or at least I hope it does. Anyway, FB can only be a small fraction of $10B ad revenue.
In normal market conditions companies used to sell for P.E. ratios in the single digit-ish range, but for a couple decades ultra high PE ratios have taken over. Once the baby boomers cash in their 401Ks that'll drop back to normal. Anyway it would not be all that out of line for a couple billion in revenue to account for a couple dozen billion in valuation.
Also the data they have is useful for spam services that are not online. Expect it to be mandatory to link your postal spam mail address and your social security number to your FB account, supposedly to cut down on griefers and spammers, but more likely to make the data they have on you more valuable.
Facebook has become a giant in web advertising. Their revenue was estimated at $3.8 billion in 2011 (slightly lower than their own prediction of $4b), and to reach $7b next year (2013). Similar numbers have been reported many places, but one source: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1008598 [emarketer.com]
Total online ad market is at $31b, so Facebook has 12% market share of the global online ad market. source: http://www.iab.net/insights_research/industry_data_and_landscape/1675/1816825 [iab.net] . Their market share of users and time is even higher than that - 16% -- source: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-is-destroying-google-in-time-spent-online-chart/4183 [zdnet.com]
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Thanks for the much more recent data.
Three interesting things about 50% growth rates
1) wall street is notoriously bad at fairly pricing on the upswing at that rate
2) that growth rate cannot go on forever
3) wall street is notoriously bad at fairly pricing on the downswing at that rate
Its going to be a fun rollercoaster to watch.
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Timothy You Dolt (Score:5, Informative)
This headline and summary are totally incorrect. The story is that Facebook is going to FILE for an IPO, which is a big difference from actually going public. It will be months before that actually happens. For any gullible readers, you won't be able to buy or sell FB shares next week.
Once again, come to slashdot to see news stories mangled up beyond recognition by incompetent editors.
Does that include inflation .... (Score:2)
Over three times of that of Google, does that factor in the dwindling over inflated USD?
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There's been virtually no inflation since 2005 in the US, so that's not a factor here. Prices for some things have gone up, but there hasn't been any real inflation, at least not based on any official numbers.
yeah other than food, energy, transportation, (Score:5, Insightful)
and everything that the lives of ordinary people depend on, there has been no inflation.
oh wait, maybe the modern 'science' of economics is a gigantic pile of horse shit? maybe 'inflation' is a political number manipulated by assholes at the Fed in order to support various fucked up ideologies, policies that benefit the already rich, and whichever corrupt bribery machine happens to be in power at the moment?
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Yes, exactly like unemployment figures, which are manipulated to meet political goals, not to report facts.
You'd probably find the free data at
http://shadowstats.com/ [shadowstats.com]
to be very informative.
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Okay, so consider but my question is still valid. If the overall value of technology is dropping cloud computing, saturated markets, tablet pcs, cheap notebook pcs.... How is this 10x figure estimated? Is it more than 10x then?
In any case the dollar may not be domestically changing, internationally it has, oil / gold prices keep going up, and the US keeps printing money like it's going out of fashion. I guess one could call it the unofficial inflation :)
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3x figure ... Sorry don't know where 10x came from:)
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The Fed's balance sheet and the price of gold suggest otherwise...
Asset inflation is mainly driven by monetary expansion, but asset prices are usually not included in 'official' inflation measure which are almost entirely based on numbers tightly coupled to wages. As production outstrips demand we're not going to see significant inflation in wages as there is a huge oversupply of labour as we leave the age of scarcity behind.
Separating official 'inflation' figures from real inflation has many political adva
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Probably the fact that facebook hasn't had as much b2b contact as say google had. Adwords is what really kept google afloat, all other sponsored advertising companies pale in comparison to adwords really.
To not steal the words of the late Kurt Cobain "I'm too busy acting like I'm not Naive. I've seen it all, I was here first."
Where does facebook have to go? Where google / bing / yahoo hasn't already been?
How can i bet on a falling stock price again? (Score:2)
.com bubble is calling.
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dont worry. i anyway thought this more of as an ironic comment than a request for advice..
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FBI wants a new keyword monitor for Facebook (Score:2, Offtopic)
Careful if you Web 2.0 about terrorism, surveillance operations, online crime and other criminal matters in any of 12 languages.
800 million members - whats that in Persona Management Software terms?
Don't chat about insider trading - before big valuations.
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This is good advice, but especially good advice when applied to publicly posting on the internet.
Someone please remind me ... (Score:2)
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They sell ads. And it looks like their ad revenues has some space to grow.
I'd be more concerned about how they intend to keep their ever moving customers from moving to the next big thing once it appears on the horizon.
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They sell you to advertisers and game companies. It's big business - just as Google how well your habits and interests can generate advertising revenue.
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how facebook makes money. The real foldy stuff, not stock prices that are based on hopes of increased stock prices at some nebulous date in the future.
Have you seen a facebook addict after being forcibly removed from the service for a day or two? Not a pretty sight. Apparently, amongst the addicts, it rates just below breathing, but above all other bodily functions.
They'd be doing a huge disservice to their stockholders by not charging at least a buck a day for the "heavy users". I could see something like your streamy-line-thing only updates once a day (or once per hour, etc) for free, but if you're a paid member then its realtime. Or paid members ge
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I could see something like your streamy-line-thing only updates once a day (or once per hour, etc) for free, but if you're a paid member then its realtime. Or paid members get realtime but free members live perpetually 30 minutes in the past...
That's be the best thing that could happen for Google+.
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That's be the best thing that could happen for Google+.
Yeah because the MBA types always move in lockstep herd-like mentality, so having to pay 0.1 bitcoin to make a post on G+ would act as a nice filter and make the Mighty GOOG even mightier.
You know what else would be hilarious? How about if your ISP/telco/cellphone provider peers directly with us so we pay no transit costs, then you get free service, if not, we post your telco's customer support hotline number and bill you $1/day for access to pay for bandwidth until your telco peers with us. This would be
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That's be the best thing that could happen for Google+.
Yeah because the MBA types always move in lockstep herd-like mentality
Except that Google has vanishingly few MBA types, and basically none in any decision-making positions.
your tax dollars at work (Score:4, Informative)
and who will be the 'bookrunner' for this IPO? who will suck up untold millions of dollars, while hundreds of thousands of joe blow investors get screwed by the IPO process? who are the favored few hedge funders and well-connected who get to make a lifetime's savings in a few seconds simply for knowing the right people?
is it Goldman Sachs, is it Merrill Lynch? Morgan Stanley?
Well, there is one thing we know for sure: the Bookrunner would not exist, unless you, your tax dollars, bailed them out in 2008. Because god knows, without these hard working wall street guys and hedge fund managers skimming tens of millions off of the process of an IPO, there is no way that we could ever have innovation or progress.
Re:your tax dollars at work (Score:4, Interesting)
http://whoownsfacebook.com/ [whoownsfacebook.com]
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Oh Good (Score:2)
The end of Facebook (Score:3)
This is it. As soon as an IPO is done the owners will begin to lose control and probably get forced out the "suits". See Ted Turner as an example. Personally I think Facebook has "jumped the shark". Only old people hang out there anymore and since I can't stand old gossips, or gossips in general, I avoid it. Not to mention the crappy ads and the security breeches.
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Is that some kind of Victorian chastity device for men? Sounds unpleasant.
Bubble Collapse imminent? (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
Raises? No. (Score:2)
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.
No, quite the reverse. This shift answers all those questions in one fell swoop.
Listed on? (Score:2)
"IPO" is an acronym . . . (Score:3)
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. . . for "It's Pretty much Over", isn't it?
93 Escort Wagon likes this
They Have to Go Public (Score:2)
They're forcing themselves to use Timeline and there's no other choice. Duh. Old news.
They just pulled out their thorn (Score:2)
I'd say the timing has to do with the Ceglia case.
With a recent judicial decision to sanction Ceglia [buffalonews.com], Facebook most likely believes they are in the endgame of that suit and can move forward with an IPO without the suit causing problems.
Think about it. Would you file for a $75B IPO (or whatever bullshit figure they've come up with) if there was an open suit with someone claiming they own half of the founder's shares, and backing it up with a signed contract?
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Easy.. just use your brain to formulate which sections aren't relevant to you (and examples), and just don't read them.
If you want all those features, make a web page that pulls and processes the article, only showing the sections you'd like to see based on your criteria.
Personally, between targeted Google searches and Wikipedia, I think it works just fine.
You could also try wolfram alpha