

Fortune: RIP Facebook? "...watching it now is like watching an unattended child play with a pack of matches in a wooden house." - nickb
http://techland.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2007/12/04/rip-facebook/

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Alex3917
The problem with Facebook is that their valuation was too high. Now in order
to justify their hundreds of millions of dollars they've taken they are going
to have to keep upping the ante in terms of selling personal data and
implementing crazy marketing schemes. This will ultimately be their undoing.
It wouldn't surprise me if Zuck's new investors won't let him cash out until
he hits certain numbers, so now he's pretty much stuck going for broke.

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shawndrost
The hundreds of millions they took from Microsoft should not be thought of as
a venture capital investment. It isn't made by people that are engineering a
5x + ROI and that maneuvered for the power to prevent Facebook from exiting
with anything less. As I understand it, it was largely an advertising deal.

I think Beacon is a lot like the news/mini feeds. Both were radical ideas that
faced heavy privacy opposition. Facebook rode out the wave once and seemed to
be planning to do it again, but I think they miscalculated on one thing: since
Beacon is openly commercial, Facebook looks more evil than misguided. I think
there's a new idea behind Beacon that is plainly good: aggregating stuff about
your friends that's happening in the general internet. (Paul Buchheit's new
company is doing this.) The right move would have been to release that
function with no commercial facet, and work that in later when this idea is no
longer new.

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pg
_watching it now is like watching an unattended child play with a pack of
matches in a wooden house_

Actually it's like watching a typical startup founder. Which to someone used
to the way big companies do things is indistinguishable from watching a child
play with matches.

Zuckerberg didn't get where he is now by accident.

