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."

Where does all that money go?

[JaseOne]

I see all these startups raising rediculous amounts of money and everytime I have to wonder what exactly is the money spent on? Does anyone know? How many developers does it take to maintain something like FaceBook? Just how expensive can their infraastructure and bandwidth be? It just boggles the mind that a site like that can raise so much in venture capital andit is even harder to see how they make enough profit to be able to provide a return on that investment.

Does advertising and/or subscription fees really make that much money for a site? I guess it is just tiny amounts of revenue but spread between LOTS of users.

Facebook

[Anonymous Coward]

I really love facebook, the ability to find anyone at my school if I need to contact them or want to know more about them is great. However, it has so many other cool features: being able to find long lost childhood friends, uploading photo albums, announcing meetings and cool events for on campus clubs etc.

The one thing facebook is really missing is a 'rate my professor' system. At the end of each semester a dialog should come up asking if you would like to rate your professors from that semester. Myspace has it for some reason, and some people at our school set up www.collegesucks.net but have professor ratings integrated into facebook is a no brainer.

Facebook turning into ad-book

[192939495969798999]

They're trying to convert it to a big demographic study/advertisement thing. They recently have this area where you can pick your favorite brands or products. Who in the hell cares what products or brands are my favorite, and why would I advertise that from my profile unless I was being paid something for click-thru or whatever? Totally awful exploitation of the customer base, IMHO.

The future of social networking on the web.

[dominion]

To be honest, one of the reasons I started Appleseed [sourceforge.net] is because of all of the ads that people are bombarded with on sites like MySpace. The whole experience just seems crass.

Right now, social networking is being approached as if the users involved are merely demographics, potential markets, or advertising recipients. And that's really kind of sad for a technology which has so much sociological, political, and even economic potential for change.

I really honestly think that we won't see real social networking until we have an network of open source websites which all work together using some kind of standard commication protocol. Would the web itself have worked if there had only been six or 7 places to host a website? Where would email be if you had a dozen different proprietary methods for sending and recieving?

Why is social networking any different? MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, as far as I'm concerned, these are all the proof-of-concepts, but they're not the way the future will look.

Social networking, by definition, can not be monolithic and centrally controlled.

Facebook, tool of the administration

[everett]

Before I begin, a brief introduction. I'm a member of a fraternity that in years past has run afoul of certain members of my schools administration, nothing terrible, but the end result being that we became unrecognized by greek life. This occured around 1998, and at the time we were a small chapter and nobody was really bugged by it. Since then we've done better with our recruiting and are again at a size where we've begun the process of being re-recognized with our campus' greek life; however, one of the major obstacles we had to overcome was our public image with the administration.

We realised, as I'm sure lots of college students eventaully will, that it's not just students on facebook, but rather anyone that can get an email address from the school, including campus police, administration, greek life, etc.

One of our brothers, notorious for his "liberal" views on drugs and alcohol (college kids do these things, even frat boys???) created a facebook group for our fraternity, and invited all the brothers to join. Several of whom were members of other groups with wonderful titles like "4:20 all day", "Keg stand team", "Party 24/7", you get the idea.

One day we recieved word from the administration that they were considering us for reinstatement on campus, however they strongly suggested we cleaned up our facebook profiles before we submitted our paperwork because, this person felt, that the image we were presenting of ourselves was not conducive to our being reinstated on campus.

I've heard worse horror stories where students have even been brought up on judicial charges for pictures posted to some facebook profiles.

Also employers who are alumnus of universities on facebook have begun using it as a tool for researching potential hires, all stuff to keep in mind, and nothing on the internet is private so be careful what sort of image you project about yourself. While it might make you seem cool now, in four years time you may be hating yourself or that person you really aren't.

Re:Facebook turning into ad-book

[darjen]

It seems like having people's interests on there is kind of the whole point of social networking though. I actually found things out about regular friends that I didn't even know by reading their Facebook profiles. But, I personally don't put all that much info on mine. And as soon as it turns into a glut of advertising I'll probably stop using it.

And it's not exactly exploitation when people are giving up their information to build networks of friends. It's an exchange of value where both parties are benefitting. Ah, the gloriy of markets.

Re:does anyone else hear it?

[IAmTheDave]

As though a million venture capitalists cried out, and were silenced...

Or as though a million venture capitalists lit a firecracker, held it in their hand, blew off their hand, smarted for a little bit, and lit a firecracker and held it in their other hand...

We've learned (ok, apparently only I have learned) that ad revenue does not a company make. Google lives off of it but only because its products are truely innovative to attract and retain a large audience.

Social networking is nice but not a huge money maker of any sustainable growth. Investing in these internet start ups with barely a business plan is going to result in the same thing it did the last time we went through this.

Aren't there any other companies to invest in? Ones with products?