Facebook Raises Another $25M

conq writes "BusinessWeek reports that Facebook has just raised another $25M from Venture Capital. Along the same lines, Rupert Murdoch has bought a minority stake in SimplyHired and just two days ago the social networking site, Visible Path said it raised $17M from Venture Capitals."

Re:Venture Capitals?

[TallMatt]

Venture capitals are usually funds that invest in business ventures at various stages. Some funds invest in the "seed stage" of a new business to get them started. Others come in after the busness is already started and doing pretty well to help sustain further growth and development. Once the venture capital fund invests in a business, they esentially own a portion of the business, and will require that the money they invest be paid out at a certain time. They will also take a precentage of the profits based on how much money they have put in.

Re:Facebook v. MySpace

[schnikies79]

Most people I know have both facebook and myspace. I personally can't stand myspace because the profiles are usually too cluttered to be readable. I'm also not a fan of 300 animations and a soundtrack starting up when I view someones profile.

Facebook has a clean, usuable apperance.

Re:I don't believe it...

[koweja]

Yeah, it is in some ways. Since it is limited to college students you don't get the pre-teen and young teenagers, so the quality of the pages is better. Plus Facebook uses templates for user pages so you don't have the fucked up and illegible pink text on fuscia background that you get on myspace, the background music, the scrolling text, etc. It's not perfect and there is a lot of stupidity and too many people trying to get 100,000+ people listed as thier friends.

Re:Facebook v. MySpace

[L7_]

the ability to mark uploaded pictures as other people alone is priceless.

for those that don't know: userA can upload pictures from an event onto thier facebook profile under EventX. Going through those pictures, they can label portions of the pictures as other users on the site. For instance, there is a picture of userB kissing userC, or another of userC throwing up. When you visit userC's profile, (assuming you are marked as thier friend) you can view all the pictures that other people labeled about them! When viewing those pictures, it then lists all the people in it...

It is 1000x better than anything that myspace has.

Re:I don't believe it...

[beefstu01]

Just about everybody here at my college is on the Facebook, while damn near nobody does the MySpace/LiveJournal/etc... thing. Mind you that my school was one of the first to be on the Facebook, so that may have something to do with it.

The Facebook is really nice compared to everything else in that it has a very clean and uniform layout. Also, it's a bit exclusive, and in general the signal to noise ratio is just a bit better than on MySpace. You're able to avoid the high school students (well, for the most part...)

Re:Facebook v. MySpace

[iny0urbrain]

I don't think you quite understand the differences between Myspace & Facebook. I've used both, and I absolutely loathe Myspace at this point. I currently work at an educational institution, and the Facebook is amazingly widespread.

The way I see it, Myspace is like Frontpage or Geocities for the web of 1998. People are discovering how to "embed", "marquee", and rock out to their horrid animated gif background images. Finally people are saying "Hey, I have a website! Its at myspace.com/whatever!"

The Facebook is totally different. You cannot make your page play music, blink, or CSS the hell out of it. The Facebook is clean and extremely easy to navigate. The most interesting features in my mind are the following:

Bulk uploading of pictures - You can then tag them (by making boxes around people's faces) and later, you can search for that frat boy you've been wooing. You can then enjoy seeing him falling over drunk in 50 other people's photo galleries. At my particular school, the stats show that 1300 pictures have been uploaded today alone!

Pulse - This is simply an aggregator for everyone's favorite things (books, movies, etc). It functions like a stock exchange, and is updated daily. You can watch "Family Guy" move up the charts as more people add it as their favorite TV show. These kind of statistics (per school, no less) would be priceless to any marketing agency.

So sure, Myspace give you freedom to tinker with the ugly layout, but the Facebook revels in its simplicity and navigability. Its a well-built voluntary student directory, and it sure functions amazingly.

Facebook Justification for $25 Mil

[lababidi]

Facebook's infratstructure is getting overwhelmingly big. They included a photo uploading section because, well people obviously love photos. But their original plan was to distribute the photo load by allowing users to locally host their photos and use a program called Wirehog (I believe) to turn their computer into a share point. This failed because of the complexity and security. The also are looking to hire many people to code and develop as well as maintain their servers (stripped down fedora). I'm not sure what their profits are, but this 25 mil sounds really justified.

Fully Linked Version

[Takuan]

The poster neglected to link to the sites involved.

Here's a fully linked version:

"BusinessWeek [businessweek.com] reports that Facebook [facebook.com] has just raised another $25M from Venture Capital [businessweek.com]. Along the same lines, Rupert Murdoch has bought a minority stake [cnn.com] in SimplyHired [simplyhired.com] and just two days ago the social networking site, Visible Path [visiblepath.com] said it raised $17M [visiblepath.com] from Venture Capitals."

Re:I don't believe it...

[demeteloaf]

When the site first started, they didn't have the url of facebook.com, so you actually did have to go to thefacebook.com. Hence, some of the users who were first on the bandwagon still add in the "the" when they say the name of the site.