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Can anything stop Facebook?
By David | June 24, 2007
This week I registered to Facebook and for the first time while trying out social networks online, I had a ah-ha moment. The virality of the platform is truly amazing, you can feel that not one little detail was left behind. The news feed feature is the first thing you see when you log-in, it shows what your friends are doing and displays a list of friends being added to your own friends’ network. This really pushes users to add more friends and to be part of the show. Facebook is really Egocasting at its best!
Now comes the developer network. Facebook has created an open-API standard that enables thousands of developers and companies alike to develop new applications that can be added to your profile. These range from mood indicators to maps that display the countries you’ve visited. This amazing ecosystem is fueling the fast viral adoption of the platform. Over 150,000 new subscribers are added every day! At this pace, Facebook will count over 50 million subscribers by the end of the year…
For the time being, the engineering team has done wonders with scaling up the back-end infrastructure. Since Facebook, originally only open to US students, opened up to everyone, the traffic quickly tripled from all over the world and unlike Twitter, users didn’t experience massive downtime and usability problems.
Facebook is now generating annualized revenues of over $150 million from advertising. Was the company’s founder, 23-years old Mark Zuckerberg crazy to turn down Yahoo’s offer to buy Facebook for a rumored $1.6 billion a few months ago? Not so sure… This might certainly be the next startup to go for several billion dollars.
Sphere: Related ContentTopics: Facebook, Social Networks |
