The Public Facebook
Public Facebook: 845M MAUs, 483M DAUs in December – $3,7B revenue and $1B net income in 2011; http://eicker.at/PublicFacebook
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Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Platform
Facebook F8 amplifies the Facebook Platform: Like, Timeline, News Feed, API; http://eicker.at/FacebookPlatform
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Gerrit Eicker
Forbes: “[T]here’s no question – Facebook remains the most ambitious, most technologically sophisticated, fastest-moving Internet company. The changes announced [at F8] were as big as anything the company has ever done – to turn Facebook into a real-time engine for seeing what your friends are doing and joining them right now… The changes are all big, but perhaps the most interesting is that Facebook is becoming a real-time communication service. … Longtime tech pundit and thinker Esther Dyson posted on Twitter today that Facebook was launching the ‘semantic Web’ without calling it that. Good, because hardly anyone ever understood what that meant. … In order to launch these real-time features for its platform, Facebook needed a way for users to access them. That’s why it launched the ticker earlier this week. … The best way to think of Facebook is as infrastructure – the social infrastructure of the Internet. Zuckerberg believes Facebook has far more to gain over the long term by reinforcing itself as a universal platform than by any other means. … Granted, it is potentially problematic for one company to own an essential piece of Net infrastructure.”
SG: “Without a doubt, [the] major keynote at f8 2011 showed Facebook to be making some major changes in the very near future. Starting with a whole new layout and set of functions they’re calling ‘Timeline‘ and moving through app enhancements that have the potential to change the way we use apps on all platforms, we’ve got a guide here for you, the Facebook user, to easily understand what you’ve got in store. This is Facebook as it will exist starting at the tail end of 2011. … There is a new class of application on Facebook now called Open Graph. This class is defined by three principles: Frictionless experiences, Realtime serendipity, and Finding patterns. The goal here is to have subject matter (games, music, video, social apps) spread to friends via friends in as enjoyable a manner as possible.”
AF: “According to Zuck[erberg]… ‘A record 500 million people used Facebook the same day. We’re connected now. The next era will be defined by the social apps that use these connections. … But there’s more to us, to our deepest conversations. You want to express the story of your life in terms of the most important and meaningful parts of your life – this is the heart of your Facebook experience.’ … Facebook has created a new class of apps to deal with the next version of open graph. Facebook’s mission is to make world more open and connected. They want you to have a more personal experience. … Now you’ll be able to eat a meal, hike a trail, and so on, and the activity shows up in the news feed. This means Facebook is adding verbs to the connections in the social graph. … GraphRank may be the new EdgeRank. What do I want to see in the news feed versus someone’s timeline? Different types of relationships work differently – work friends versus family, for example. And this is probably going to integrate the new friends lists and family categorizations.”
Guardian: “While Facebook is keen for its users to stay on the site for as long as possible, Zuckerberg has consistently emphasised that the site is a ‘distribution platform’ to other media companies. – The social network has moved to strengthen its ties with media partners in recent months as it moves closer to its hotly anticipated initial public offering. Facebook was recently valued at $66.5bn on secondary markets. Its global revenues are expected to reach $4.3bn in 2011, up from $2bn in 2010, according to the research firm eMarketer. … [Zuckerberg] wants Facebook to be the centre of your web experience. That’s the purpose of the redesign of the ‘timeline’ – the river of experiences recounted by your friends. Rather than being a river, he’s offering the chance to organise it, with the photos and videos. … The key is that he wants Facebook to become the de facto authentication mechanism of the web.”
Green, TC: “I was one of the first people to join Facebook in February of 2004, and launched one of the inaugural applications on the platform in May 2007. The new Facebook profile and Open Graph announced…, along with the launch of smart friend lists last week, is going to usher in a new era of the Facebook platform. And I believe entire industries will potentially be revolutionized by social, from travel to reviews to health to e-commerce, and of course charity. … I am confident we will see major sectors, from music to reviews to commerce, revolutionized by authentic friend-to-friend interactions. We are fortunate at Causes to have a big start in one of the largest markets around, the $300 billion giving market. It is anyone’s guess if the other major categories will go social with their current leading companies, or if entirely new ones will emerge, like Zynga in gaming. Either way, it will be a fun ride.”
RWW: “Facebook significantly scaled up the amount of information it tracks about you – and many millions of other people. The once humble status update field has been expanded to include 6 types of ‘life events.’ You now automatically share data about what you’re reading or listening to. … Here’s a quick summary of what’s changed: A new Subscribe button, allowing you to follow people you aren’t friends with, plus filter the amount of information you get from current friends. Improved friends lists – easier way to group people into lists, including via semi-automated ‘smart lists.’ A News Ticker that streams a constant flow of user updates in a sidebar (on top of your chat bar). A newspaper-like relevancy filter for your Facebook homepage. Instant sharing of what you read, listen to and watch. A new Timeline profile (a colorful history of you and your ‘life events’).”
Gerrit Eicker 16:30 on 2. February 2012 Permalink |
Facebook, Prospectus Summary: “Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. – People use Facebook to stay connected with their friends and family, to discover what is going on in the world around them, and to share and express what matters to them to the people they care about. – Developers can use the Facebook Platform to build applications (apps) and websites that integrate with Facebook to reach our global network of users and to build products that are more personalized, social, and engaging. – Advertisers can engage with more than 800 million monthly active users (MAUs) on Facebook or subsets of our users based on information they have chosen to share with us such as their age, location, gender, or interests. We offer advertisers a unique combination of reach, relevance, social context, and engagement to enhance the value of their ads. – We believe that we are at the forefront of enabling faster, easier, and richer communication between people and that Facebook has become an integral part of many of our users’ daily lives. We have experienced rapid growth in the number of users and their engagement. … We had 845 million MAUs as of December 31, 2011, an increase of 39% as compared to 608 million MAUs as of December 31, 2010. – We had 483 million daily active users (DAUs) on average in December 2011, an increase of 48% as compared to 327 million DAUs in December 2010. – We had more than 425 million MAUs who used Facebook mobile products in December 2011. – There were more than 100 billion friend connections on Facebook as of December 31, 2011. – Our users generated an average of 2.7 billion Likes and Comments per day during the three months ended December 31, 2011. … Revenue 2011: $3,711B, Net income 2011: $1B”
Facebook, Letter from Mark Zuckerberg: “Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected. – We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter. – At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television – by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together. – Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones – the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries. – There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on. – We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other. … We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy. – We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services. – As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.”
Jarvis: “Zuckerberg has his own, social version of Moore’s law – I call it Zuck’s law, though he doesn’t. It decrees: This year, people will share twice as much information as they did last year, and next year, they will share twice as much again. Facebook will expand to more users – from 750 million today to a billion soon? – and users will expand their sharing. Meanwhile, one Facebook investor, Yuri Milner, tells me that advances in artificial intelligence will get better and better at understanding and making use of all the service’s data. It has only just begun. ‘The default in society today still is, OK, I should not share it. The by far default today is that everything’s anonymous,’ Zuckerberg laments. ‘In the future, things should be tied to your identity, and they’ll be more valuable that way.’ There is the master plan.”
RWW: “Facebook shocked no one by filing an initial public offering of its shares today. – The filing was the first glimpse into the company’s inner financial workings and, as expected, Facebook said it would try to raise $5 billion when the company’s shares begins trading – a number that could eventually be raised to $10 billion and would ultimately value the company between $75 billion and $100 billion. – Today marks the day that Mark Zuckerberg goes from being the guy who makes world-changing technology to the guy who makes money. (He could be worth $20 billion when all is said and done). And it also means today is the day you stop being a Facebook user and become a Facebook customer. – That can mean good and bad things for you, the end user. But one thing is certain: Facebook will never be the same again. … A successful Facebook IPO means some restored faith in the social media space. That means more capital and more incentive for the next Zuckerberg to come along and create something earthshaking instead of finishing a degree at Harvard.”
Guardian: “The seismic nature of the Facebook IPO can hardly be oversold. The IPO creates a currency that will allow the company to buy whatever it needs to vertically integrate all the elements of its massive appetites – to be your wallet, your phone, your search engine, your company’s cash register, your entertainment portal, and your publishing platform, as well as your social life. And to do this all in a closed world of protocol enforcement, behavior monitoring and data gathering. – The technology business is an ever-expanding effort at monopoly and control: Microsoft sped past Apple to grab the desktop; Google sped past Microsoft to control the internet itself; Apple reappeared to control mobile devices. Now Facebook seeks to control pretty much … well, you. … That’s, of course, the ultimate Facebook sell: Mark Zuckerberg, a true American savant – Steve Jobs, but better even (and not so nasty) – has created a wholly-owned internet, which can not only monitor behavior but can encourage it, and regulate it, and dominate so much of it that Facebook inevitably becomes the platform for modern life.”
NYT: “With sharing at the center of Facebook, and the new new Web, analysts also wonder if the constant chatter will create too much white noise. As psychological barriers to sharing fall and companies become more deft at leveraging social media, there’s a legitimate concern that platforms, like Facebook, will be less valuable without the proper filters. User growth has slowed in some mature markets. – ‘What are the limits of sharing?’ said Ms. Yi, of the Altimeter Group. ‘At what point does the presence of all these partners on Facebook, all this sharing, begin to degrade the quality of the site overall?‘”
GigaOM: “Brad Silverberg, a veteran of Microsoft and other tech companies and general partner at Ignition Partners, a Seattle-based venture fund, thinks that the IPO could have a corroding influence on the company culture. … Facebook – Mark Zuckerberg’s Hacker Way missive not withstanding – is a lot more mercenary and materialistic. And part of that means employees are likely to cash their chips and run, only to place them on some new startups. And whichever way you look at it, I am pretty sure 2012 is going to be one heck of a ride. Buckle up!”
FC: “Zuckerberg first love has always been the Facebook product itself. There’s nothing he loves more than rolling up his sleeves and getting down and dirty with a set of mockups and a prototype or two. So while the Zuck will toss on the old jacket-and-tie and tap dance through the IPO dog-and-pony, as soon as it’s all over, it’ll be back to Menlo Park and the product, while COO Sheryl Sandberg (and CFO David Ebersman) continue to sweet talk advertisers and analysts alike.”
Gerrit Eicker 08:28 on 3. February 2012 Permalink |
Guardian: “So is Facebook worth it? After a fevered day and evening reading the S-1 document filed with the US securities and exchange commission (SEC) – an event that proved so popular online that the SEC had to devote an extra server to handling demand – the answer seems to be that it’s not worth $100bn (£63bn), but it might be worth $75bn. … Analysts say it can’t continue: ‘The hypergrowth is probably over,’ said Michael Pachter, head of research in the private shares group at Wedbush Securities. ‘The low-hanging fruit of the western developed world’ has already been grabbed, he said. ‘It’s just kind of obvious that they’re not going to ever get every single person that lives on the planet.’ … Some analysts believe that Facebook’s reliance on advertising is a weakness. … And Facebook is now wandering among giants – with one in particular eager to crush it. Google’s annual revenues in 2010 were $38bn, ten times larger than Facebook’s, and almost all of that comes from advertising. Google is setting up its own social network, Google+, and trying to tempt people away from Facebook through come-ons in its search results in the US which have pushed Facebook results down.”
VB: “‘The issue of click-through rate was not mentioned as a risk in the S-1,’ said Peter Adriaens, a professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Michigan’s Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies. That omission stood out for the Internet IPO expert because research suggests that the percentage of Facebook users who actually click on ads is quite low, and that means advertising dollars could eventually drop. – Facebook does not publish its average click-through rate (CTR), but independent analysis from Webtrends on more than 11,000 Facebook campaigns showed that the average CTR for Facebook ads in 2010 was 0.051 percent, which is about half the industry standard CTR of 0.1 percent. The rate, according to the Webtrends report, dropped from 0.063 percent in 2009, which points to a downward trend. … ‘(Facebook) talked about the risk of privacy laws … but what was not mentioned is that the European Union issued a list of 35 requirements related to privacy that Facebook is going to have to adhere to,’ Adriaens pointed out. ‘(Facebook) can’t automatically collect the data that it might be collecting in North America … so what I see going forward is this challenge … of having to deal with very fragmented privacy laws. Those privacy laws are directly going to affect the value of Facebook’s data to its advertisers.’”
GigaOM: “Of Facebook’s 845 million monthly active users (MAUs), 425 million accessed Facebook in December alone through a smartphone or feature phone app or through its mobile-optimized website. In 2011, 85 percent of Facebook’s $3.7 billion in revenues came from advertising, but none of it came from its mobile platforms, over which it doesn’t serve up display ads. Despite that huge gap, Facebook is doing nothing to discourage the shift in use to handsets and tablets… As the S-1 points out, most Facebook members use mobile to supplement their PC activity, not replace it, so the company does ultimately put its ads in front of their eyes. But that won’t always be the case. … Facebook’s problem has an easy fix: It can simply start putting ads in its mobile apps and website. … My guess is that Facebook just doesn’t want to put apps into its mobile products – at least not yet. There is limited real estate on a handset screen, and Facebook probably doesn’t want to clutter up its slick interfaces with display ads, especially while it is still formulating its mobile strategy. … Either way, Facebook’s filing makes it clear that it has to do something to monetize its mobile traffic soon. The company will soon be public, and while it will likely be controlled by Zuckerberg and those loyal to him, investors will question why Facebook is devoting so much effort and so many resources to building a mobile business it makes absolutely no money from.”
Gerrit Eicker 07:48 on 6. February 2012 Permalink |
Winer: “To me Facebook already feels over. I really don’t feel like I’m missing anything. Look at it this way. There’s lots of stuff going on right now that I’m not part of. That’s the way it goes. Me and Facebook are over. It’s going to stay that way. And if I’m on a ship that’s sinking, well I’ve had a good run, and I can afford to go down with the ship, along with people who share my values. It’s a cause, I’ve discovered, that’s worth giving something up for.”
Boyd: “Facebook is the new AOL, despite the market cap. But it’s headed for a hard landing for other reasons than Winer is pushing. Facebook will fail because of the imminent rise of social operating systems – future versions of iOS, Mac OS X, and Android – which will break the Facebook monolith to bits.”