Microsoft to Buy 5% of Facebook Valuing at $10bn

l-ascorbic writes "The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Microsoft is poised to buy 5% of Facebook for $300 million to $500 million, valuing the company at up to $10 billion. Microsoft already handles advertising for the site."

$10 billion

[Anonymous Coward]

$10 billion for a site that has 34 million active users ~= $300 per user. Hmm. I think this site is highly overvalued. But let MS waste their money if they want.

This feels like 1999 all over again

[Paktu]

How the hell is Facebook worth $10 billion? Less than a year ago, they were estimated to be worth $1 billion...does anyone seriously think this site can bring in real revenue?

Well, that's one way to get Silverlight adopted...

[mad.frog]

...just require 34 million active Facebook users (who are probably mostly young, rabid web users of other sites too) to install it.

How long till we see some cool new site feature -- or, hell, even an existing, basic feature -- reworked ("enhanced") to require Silverlight?

Re:This feels like 1999 all over again

[monk.e.boy]

How the hell is Facebook worth $10 billion?

Repeat after me: BUBBLE

Next month it will be worth ONE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS, and the month after it'll be worthless.

Re:Weak.

[ShatteredArm]

Though I really despise the ridiculous amount of profile clutter some of the more myspace-y users have, I don't think their opening up is a bad thing at all. Yeah, I was able to connect with a few people at my school and whatnot before, but after opening up, I was able to connect with far more people. Not everybody I know goes to school, and the increased universality seems to have compelled some of my friends who do go to school who hadn't joined previously to join. And thus far, Facebook has avoided some of the biggest plagues of myspace, which are bright backgrounds, music, and blinking text.

Re:$10 billion

[Chineseyes]

The problem is that sites like myspace and facebook ARE NOT long term hubs for people to visit. They are trendy sites, back in '99 when I was in a freshman in college the place to go was blackplanet, mi gente, Asian Avenue, and livejournal. After these sites it was friendster which was ethnically all inclusive. Now the new trend is myspace and facebook. All of these social networking sites are just fads and when something that looks better comes along everyone will abandon myspace/facebook/whatever and start aggregating friends somewhere else.

Oh, goodie ...

[the bluebrain]

... then we can expect similar groundbreaking, innovative improvements as we saw when hotmail was microwashed.

Re:wow

[gtall]

Looked at another way, myspace has already been borged, Microsoft is merely corralling more sheep for branding.

Gerry

Facebook is nicely done

[hey]

Facebook is nicely done. They keep everything lowkey. No blinking, no spam, etc. They appear to respect user's privacy.
Its what users who aren't children want. That is one of the reasons it got so many users. Well, that and the network effect. But niceness certianly helps. Of course, Microsoft knows nothing about making an application low key and pleasant to use.

Re:Hell!

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlike Zuckerberg, Jobs actually innovated and evangelized real technology. Facebook rehashed a viral formula in a niche market and grew it successfully. Facebook is valuable because the site is popular, but this can change on the whims of a user-base. Facebook has made no significant technological contribution to the internet and overvaluing popularity is a huge mistake for long-term investments---it's almost like we don't remember 1994-2001 anymore.

The "White Pages" for eMail

[willy_me]

I've come to see Facebook as being the "white pages" for eMail. People change their eMail addresses constantly - usually due to changes in employment or SPAM overload. What is needed is a way to find your friends current eMail address. This is the role that Facebook serves. If I need to send a message to a friend I can just use Facebook and it matters not how they have changed their eMail.

I'm not suggesting that this is a perfect solution but it does help explain the popularity of these sites. It is the reason why I joined Facebook.

Willy

Re:Depends which 5 percent they're getting

[Kobayashi Maru]

I'm all for low-brow off-color humor, but there comes a point where a joke, even stated "ironically," isn't funny. Yours isn't funny, and it's because it lacks context. Over half your post is devoted to an inappropriate joke that doesn't have anything to do with your point. The fact that you have to throw a disclaimer in there should have been an indication that it isn't funny. Racist humor can be funny (in my opinion), but not when it's delivered like a knock-knock joke.

Facebook is the future

[rinkjustice]

According to the latest ish of Wired magazine, Facebook has 40 million active users (real people and not sock puppet accounts, thanks to the fact users can only view other's profiles upon confirming relationships) who generate more than a billion page views a day. Lately, Facebook has also been signing up 1 million new users a week.

Facebook also has that supercool Newsfeed feature which aggregates the latest activities on friends, family and associates, and manages to connect people who haven't seen each other in twenty years. Admit it, it's like nothing we've ever seen before (Myspace shouldn't even be in the same category).

I'm not a Facebook fanboy (alright, maybe I am), but I marvel at how well its connecting people in meaningful ways. It's a social universe within the internet. It's going to be bigger than money, because of it's worth and usefulness to you and I.

I don't like Microsoft one ioda, but they made a smart move here.

Re:$10 billion

[ketilwaa]

Myspace set the standards on what a social site is supposed to be

Um...No. Myspace has set the standard in bad layout and webdesign.
The majority of pages look like a five year old ramblings, sporting a broken arm in a cast, that were signed by each and every person within 10 ft of a magic marker.
Shudder...

Re:wow

[timmarhy]

i smell another dot com bubble rising.

there's no way facebook is worth 10billion. they dont' produce anything.

Re:wow

[Nullav]

Because it's an internet pissing contest for ad revenue. You don't have to produce anything as long as you can make your site popular and make the corporate monkeys think that people actually click on ads.
It really looks like another bubble, but I can't help but wonder how long this could go on. After all, most of the people throwing the money around are already rooted deeply into the ground and wouldn't suffer too much if their investments went bust.

Re:wow

[Nasajin]

What facebook produces is a social networking space, where users are convinced to enter information about themselves into a gigantic, glossy, friendly-looking, panoptic database. Those of us who are facebook users become the product - specifically, our attention for advertising becomes the product - and that is sold to advertisers. It's a reversal of traditional commodity based modes of consumption: rather than commodities being sold by a corporation, through a middle man to a consumer, the consumer's personal information and advertising potentialities are instead sold by a middle man to the corporation.

Simple.

Re:Datamining

[yada21]

Imagine the wealth of info a company with a good algorithm and access to all of facebook's data could do.

So your saying google should have bought facebook?