
Facebook is Stickier than Peanut Butter - Harj
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2007/02/22/facebook-is-stickier-than-peanut-butter
======
Elfan
The genius of Facebook was getting students at elite universities to divulge
lots of potentially profitable information for advertising. They did this
because Facebook was an exclusive place just for elite college kids (and later
just college kids). Now that its open to everyone it no longer has that value.
I don't see how it can reasonably continue to increase in value (although they
could certainly find a greater fool to sell it to).

~~~
hwork
I'm not sure of the experiences from other early facebook adopting schools --
but my old school (Bowdoin College) was among the first -- and it's still like
crack to them. Not as ridiculous as a few years ago, but it's still wickedly
popular. And from my perspective the alum retention rate, as the article
mentions, is very strong.

I think the genius of Facebook is not just the eliteness, but instead a new
word I'll makeup called 'localness'. Facebook cordons off the scary, wild web
and presents you with people that you know or could at least see yourself
knowing or bumping into. Combine that with early entry into the social
networking world, very strong and appealing UI, and yes, eliteness, and a few
years later, you've got 18 million users.

------
immad
$8 billion for 18 million users values each user at $440. Assuming that the
technology can be reasonably coppied in less than $100k, apart from users what
else does facebook have? They also have a very powerful brand. Given that
myspace went for $440m (correct?) then the facebook valuation probably is
reasonably fair.

Anyone suggested just paying 20 million users $100 each to join and use your
social network for 1 month, hehehe, seems like you could 4 times as much money
:-)

~~~
Alex3917
>Joi Ito, founder of Neoteny, a venture firm, and former chair of Infoseek
Japan, has joined a group of technologists advising Dean ... I contact him to
ask if he tihnks there's a difference between an emergent leader and an old-
fashioned political opportunist. What does it take to lead a smart mob? Ito
e-mails back an odd metaphor: "You're not a leader, you're a place. You're
like a park or a garden. If it's comfortable and cool, people are attracted.
Deanspace is not really about Dean. It's about us."

Facebook is a place. Think of it like Manhattan. What creates value isn't the
population (the users). Nor is it the buildings (the technology). What creates
value is the emergent social interactions and the culture that occur there. To
put it in geek terms, it's not the instances of people, but rather what goes
on in the interstices between them.

To quote Howard Rheingold, "The 'killer app' of tomorrow won't be software or
hardware devices, but the social practices they make possible. The most far-
reaching changes will come from the kinds of relationships, enterprises,
communities, and markets that this future infrastructure will make possible."

~~~
immad
That is interesting. So the question becomes; how do you put a value on a
virtual place?

~~~
Alex3917
Well how do you put a value on a place like Wall Street? It's not the number
of people or the number of computers. It's what people do there and the amount
of money flowing through. As someone said below, when you have this ability to
datamine 18 million kids (in aggregate) then you're pretty much sitting on a
mint. Every time one kid posts on another kid's wall, it's more data to feed
into the system. College-aged kids are probably the most valuable demographic
to marketers in general (not because college kids have the most money, but
because marketers like marketing to them because it makes them feel young),
and college-age kids who actually go to college are even more valuable because
they have more money on average.

~~~
immad
Hmm, I see your point. Value/Users does seem to be meaningless by itself. You
could reverse it around and say $440 is how much value they think they can
derive from each facebook user. But that does not take into account any future
growth and as long as facebook stays *the* college social network it's going
to continue tapping into that valuable demographic.

