Facebook

Facebook just announced that they've acquired FriendFeed. Although, Facebook already has a lot features that FriendFeed has, I suspect that the acquisition has more to do with the technology and live stream feed. Right now you have to manually update the feed on Facebook, which is a huge hassle. FriendFeed's is live and doesn't need to be.

FriendFeed also has a powerhouse team of ex-Googlers who likely know how to scale this type of technology and already have it built out. Sometimes its more cost effective to buy a technology rather than redevelop it yourself. That seems to be the play here.

If Facebook is able to enhance their feed, it'll give Twitter more of run for their money. It'll also help Facebook aggregate user data and activity from other applications from across the web. It begs the question, will Facebook kill Twitter? 33% of people from our previous poll believe that Facebook will kill Twitter. 54% believe that Facebook won't kill Twitter. What do you think?

What other applications can Facebook acquire to enhance the shareability of user activity?

Here is Facebook's Press Release:

PALO ALTO, CALIF.—August 10, 2009—Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.

“Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,” said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps. “We can’t wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.”

“As we spent time with Mark and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they’ve built and their desire to have us contribute to it,” said Paul Buchheit, another FriendFeed co-founder. Buchheit, the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, added, “It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook’s engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group.”

Taylor and Buchheit founded FriendFeed along with Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh in October 2007 after all four played key roles at Google for products like Gmail and Google Maps. At FriendFeed, they’ve brought together a world-class team of engineers and designers.

“Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use.”

FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has 12 employees. FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.

Here are several other articles on the story:

First Interview After Acquisition With FriendFeed And Facebook

Facebook Takes FriendFeed To Take On Twitter

If you haven't heard, there's a Hollywood movie planned for Facebook. It's based on the lasted book by Ben Mezrich, "The Accidental Billionaires," that tells the story of Mark Zuckerberg, the founding of Facebook, and its tales of "sex, money, genius, and betrayal." The supposed "tell-all" supposedly goes into the nitty gritty of everything from Mark banging chicks in the bathroom stalls to how the market leading social network was born.

West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin has been busy writing the script for the movie, but apparently its been leaked. Carson Reeves who reviews Hollywood scripts on his blog, ScriptShadow, got a hold of it and wrote a review. Here's a piece of it:

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You might be an active Facebook user, but how much do you really know about how this Harvard-born company?

With the new book "The Accidental Billionaires," Ben Mezrich goes behind the headlines and hype around the founding of Facebook.

Over at Amazon.com, Kevin Spacey offers up his take on the book:

"Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg were two geeky, socially awkward Harvard undergrads who wanted nothing more than to be cool. While Eduardo chose the more straightforward path of trying to gain acceptance into one of the school's ultra-posh, semi-secret Final Clubs, Mark used his computer skills by hacking into Harvard's computers, pulling up all the pictures of every girl on campus to create a sort of 'hot-or-not' site exclusive to Harvard. Though the prank nearly got Mark kicked out of college, he and Eduardo realized that they were on to something big. Thus, the initial concept of Facebook was born; what happened next, however, was right out of a Hollywood thriller."

For Spacey's full review and for more on this book (available July 14), check out the "Accidental Billionaires" page on Amazon.

A quick heads up. Tonight is the deadline to apply for the fbFund, which supports developers and entrepreneurs building on the Facebook Platform. The fund totals $10 million and provides funding, mentoring, and marketing.

Here is some more info on the program:

This year our new fbFund 2009 Incubator program will enable a few lucky startups using Facebook and Facebook Connect to receive up to $100,000 in investment and a "golden ticket" to come to Palo Alto for the summer. Here in Silicon Valley, we'll work together with Facebook and other tech companies and experienced mentors to help build new apps, websites, and businesses that show off the best of social apps and platforms. Initially we'll name 50 finalists from those who apply for the program, who will receive $1,000 in Facebook advertising. From the 50 finalists, we'll then select a smaller group to receive funding and participate in the incubator program (mid June - late August). The program will feature regular weekly tech talks and education on Facebook platform, Facebook Connect, technical infrastructure, product design, startup metrics and optimization, SEO, internet marketing, startup funding and hiring, and a variety of other topics of interest.

For other similar opportunities, you should check out our Directory of Incubators and Seed Funding Venture Programs.

The number of mobile phone subscribers has increased by an astounding 25% annually for the past eight years.  With such tremendous growth, there are monetizing opportunities aplenty.

4,000,000,000

There are now over 4 billion mobile phone subscribers in the world according to the UN. Put another way, there are enough cell phones for over half of the world’s population! 

*Understand that this statistic reflects only the number of subscribers to mobile phone services; therefore double counting is an issue if a person has multiple cellular subscriptions.  This is an important detail because in a country with weak telecommunication infrastructure, such as India, business people oftentimes subscribe to 3 or 4 different mobile providers to combat inopportune service blackouts.  Is this sparking any ideas entrepreneurs?

Show me the money!

With such a large market, there are many venues to create revenue:

Social Media

Mobile social networking is expected to reach 730 million users in 2013, up from about 54 million in 2008.  With such a substantial amount of users, there are plenty of monetizing opportunities.  Peter Thiel, a director and the largest investor for facebook, explains that advertising is not a major concern for the company at this point, but describes how "there's no reason to think we couldn't do $1 billion a year in sales if we turned on all the dials… that's about what MySpace does." 

According to Juniper Report, a research company specializing in telecom and media, the total value of the market for user-generated content (UGC), consisting of social networking, dating and personal content delivery (PCD) services, will rise to more than $7.3 billion in 2013.

Advertising

An important segment of the market is mobile search advertising, which is predicted to grow to $2.9 billion by 2011, or nearly one third of UGC.

Location-based services (LBS)

LBS is an interesting development in the mobile phone market.  In essence, the mobile phone can be used to track where the user is, much like GPS.  However, the power of LBS will go far beyond getting the user from point A to point B.  As Leslie Presutti, the director of product management for Qualcomm, puts it:

“carriers and brands [will] get more ingrained into a user's personal life and determine what that user likes to do and what kind of information they like to receive when they are doing certain things. In these cases, location based services are no longer serving as differentiators, but as the foundation [of the mobile experience]."

Mobile websites/applications

Mobile applications, or apps, are one of the most popular features of smart phones.  Apps appeal to a wide range of users depending on what they are looking for; whether it is novelty, diversity, or convenience.  Some of the more popular/interesting apps include Pandora (a personal favorite), AroundMe (search for services, restaurants, etc. that are in your vicinity), Ocarina (you can play your iPhone like the sword-wielding Link), and FakeCall (“A secret weapon against boring meetings and bad dates,” haha!). 

To put things into perspective, Apple now offers a menu of 15,000 apps and claims 500 million downloads, with both numbers growing everyday.  The app itself is usually free to download, with the mobile provider charging a monthly or pay per use fee.

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Feel free to comment on any of my articles and post additional information you think the CM community would enjoy!  You can also tweet me @aarongerry.

It feels like Facebook has been around for ever now, but it's only been 5 years. Happy 5th Birthday Facebook!

Here are some interesting statistics about Facebook:

General Growth

More than 150 million active users

More than half of Facebook users are outside of college

The fastest growing demographic is those 30 years old and older

User Engagement

Average user has 120 friends on the site

More than 3 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)

More than 15 million users update their statuses at least once each day

More than 3.5 million users become fans of Pages each day

Applications

More than 850 million photos uploaded to the site each month

More than 5 million videos uploaded each month

More than 24 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each month

More than 2 million events created each month

More than 20 million active user groups exist on the site

International Growth

More than 35 translations available on the site, with more than 60 in development

More than 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States

Platform

More than 660,000 developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries

More than 52,000 applications currently available on Facebook Platform

140 new applications are added per day

More than 95% of Facebook members have used at least one application built on Facebook Platform

Mark Zuckerberg hogs all the air time, but did you Facebook actually has 4 Founders?

Taken from Facebook's Press Page, here are their brief bios:

Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg is the CEO of Facebook, which he founded in 2004. Mark is responsible for setting the overall direction and product strategy for the company. He leads the design of Facebook's service and development of its core technology and infrastructure. Mark attended Harvard University and studied computer science before moving the company to Palo Alto, California.

Chris Hughes

Chris Hughes is a co-founder of Facebook. Chris first worked as the Facebook spokesperson from his dorm room with Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, and later moved to Palo Alto work on the product team. Most recently, Chris served as the Director of Online Organizing for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. He holds a bachelors degree in history and literature from Harvard University, where he graduated magna cum laude.

Dustin Hughes

Dustin Moskovitz is a co-founder of Facebook and was a key leader within the technical staff. He most recently worked on the company’s internal tools strategy and development. Dustin attended Harvard University as an Economics major for two years before moving to Palo Alto, California to work full-time at Facebook.

Eduardo Saverin

Eduardo Saverin is a co-founder of Facebook. Eduardo managed the business development and sales aspects during Facebook's early years. Eduardo graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College with a degree in Economics.

Facebook just announced its application winners for their fbFund, which will receive $225,00 each to develop their products. There has been a question to whether the overall popularity of applications has declined. Facebook's new design has likely contributed to this trend since it helped declutter profiles and hid application boxes. I wonder if part of the initiative is to spur more interest in the developer platform as a counter. Although, the platform will likely continue to play an important role in shaping Facebook, I think Facebook Connect has been their smartest move.

ResearchLabs questions whether the $200 million that has been invested in Facebook applications as of July 2008 has been a good investment:

According to Mark Zuckerberg, more than two hundred million dollars have been invested in Facebook applications as of July 2008.  But is it a good investment if the number of unique monthly users visiting Facebook applications is decreasing?  I found that the average change in an application’s unique monthly users from September to October was a decrease of 87,997.

...Facebook applications are losing popularity, which could mean a huge loss of money for those people who have invested in the applications, as well as businesses which depend on people using these applications. Continue Reading...

"Through the golden heart of every world-changing startup pulses an avaricious get-rich-quick scheme." Valleywag's statement is certainly true to some degree; by nature, entrepreneurs have the risk-reward dichotomy hard wired into their souls. Their employees do too, and are also along for the ride with high hopes of bloated returns in exchange for their long days, hard work, and life in an uncertain environment.

Mark Zuckerberg originally announced a reward program that would let his employees sell $900,000 or 10% of their shares, which ever is less, due to no immediate plan for an IPO or buyout. The plan suggested a new way for a start-up to reward and appease (without going through an IPO) its 800 employees who are slowly growing restless and eager to make some money off of their shares. Unfortunately, they'll have to sit a bit longer as Mark just announced yesterday afternoon that their will be no sale. (Or, at least there is no plan for one.) A certain blow to morale, especially since employees were probably in the process of finding potential buyers. Now, they'll be growing even more nervous with the economy, Facebook's ludicrously high burnrate, and Google's stock spiraling downward indicating that Facebook will likely have trouble in the ad marketplace, too.

Facebook gave VentureBeat (1 of our recommended startup blogs) a note explaining why:Continue Reading...

Engineers at a recent Facebook Hackathon event created a pretty cool visualization of how people use Facebook to connect with each other around the world. The model, named Palantir,  utilitizes information from the "social graph" to show the frequency of different types of interactions on the social network by plotting 3-D dots of light that stream outward from the globe. The application is built in Java and actually shows the Facebook activity in real time. Click on the video to the left to see how it works.

Facebook's developer blog describes the Hackathon event the best:

"There are so many great ideas floating around Facebook, but there is never enough time to implement them all. In order to attempt to solve this problem, we engineers throw a Hackathon at Facebook every few months. Hackathon is an all-night-long hack session that gives every Facebook engineer a chance to work on that awesome feature they've been meaning to build for so long. Many of the cool features that you see on the site today were either built during or were started during a Facebook Hackathon."

Imagine if your startup had a burn rate of over $1 million dollars alone on electricity each month...and that's just the start of it.

Facebook's growth hasn't slowed as they continue to expand rapidly across the globe offering their platform in different languages and taking other social networks head on. Even in the past year, Facebook has grown around 118% with 161 million unique visitors and 61 billion page views per month up from 74 million unique visitors and 35 billion page views according to comscore. Only 1 in 4 users actually come from the United States.

But, with roughly $500 million dollars raised, they should be fine right? TechCrunch seem's to think otherwise and reports that their CFO has started looking for new cash sooner than they had expected since there is no IPO in sight and a questionable amount of money left to take them beyond the next year. According to the same article, here is a list of their expenditures broken down by item:

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