I met with Mark Zuckerberg last week. One thing he told me was this: dealing with financing and corporate development strategy was not anywhere near the top of his list.
Well, it’s at the top of someone’s list, as the news out yesterday was all about Facebook taking an investment from either Microsoft or Google. Money is very, very cheap to Facebook right now, and it’ll be very, very interesting to see if Microsoft ends up winning this round. Mark may not be that focused on corporate strategy, but if Google does not come out on top, I doubt it’ll be due to a lack of attention on his part….
Interesting next stage of the game – all good for FB if you can raise $500M at several $B pre. Not sure that it gets either MS or GOOG what they want/need.
Remember your local library? Paper? Do you recall how there was a neat dichotomy between fiction and non-fiction? I don’t remember where the mythology went, but I don’t really care, either.
It’s the same way with these bogus statistics that carve out “territories” of online space. Live.COM and Google.COM get the label “search” stuck onto them, but not Hotels.COM or Pizza.DE — why / why not? All of these rubricized statistics are a joke — I can (and do) search battellemedia.com — so does that make it a search engine or not? How about ebay.com or amazon.com? Yes? No? Maybe so?
Will somebody please clarify why cellreception.com should NOT be considered to be a search engine?
On what basis should any site be considered to “qualify” as a search engine (or not)? Does the lack of a search box disqualify a site as a search engine? Remember catalogs? Is http://www.nytimes.com/gst/mostpopular.html a search engine? Why or why not?
I’m still trying to wrap my brain around the idea of Microsoft buying a 5% stake. The only decent rationale I can come up with is that they want to solidify the idea of the $10B price tag, in order to keep someone else from buying up Facebook outright.
I find this a very risky strategy of Microsoft. The possible over the top investment of Microsoft will increase ad pressure in the personal space of Facebook users. They won’t like it a bit. If you are searching for something advertisement is fine (that’s the power of Google). if you are pimping up your profile to make it look better than yourself advertisement is, well, a harrasment I think. Wrote a post about it yesterday if you’re interested:
http://vanelsas.wordpress.com/2007/09/25/high-risk-investment-microsoft-wants-a-piece-of-facebook/
Danny Sullivan asked in his “Daily Searchcast” for Tuesday (comparing other sites such as Facebook and MySpace with Google):
“What prevents you from going out and doing what Google is doing?”
And then he answered it with:
“Probably because search is a lot harder than social networking”.
(He didn’t appear to blog that on SearchEngineLand.COM — he just said it in the podcast).
That got me thinking: Why didn’t Albert Einstein ride his bicycle backwards? (I think that’s pretty hard, too 😉
Perhaps I just don’t get Danny’s point — if Facebook is doing something that (in Danny’s words): “is more managable, that is less spamable,…” then perhaps Facebook has concluded that riding a bicycle forwards is simply easier than riding it backwards. So what if Google has thousand of people with Ph.D.’s? Is that a good reason to stop using another technology that actually works just as well — or maybe even better, insofar as it perhaps provides better (e.g. more consistently relevant and/or more consistently reliable) answers to questions that people are actually asking?