Thursday, May 31, 2007

Facebook dominates my Spring Quarter

I am one of Facebook's 24 million happy users. Having joined around 6 months ago, together with stumblevideo.com, facebook became my primary online destination. And as many ppl, reconnected me w/ ppl that were almost wiped from my memory.

But my interest wasn't just as a user. I spent some of my time this quarter working on a follow-up case on facebook for one of Prof. Barnett's classes. The main focus was to examine the actions they along the past year. This was nicely concluded with attending the session where the class discussed the case in the presence of Mark Zuckerberg. This is the third time i see Zuckerberg talk. Despite how young he is, 23 years old, he's an extremely smart grounded person that knows what he's doing.


I also attended the facebook f8 launch and hackathon a week earlier, of course i never knew what that was until i was there. That was a nice thing to see, developers from all over the place, coming in one place, to literly start coding their f8 applications.


That said, it's worth commenting on their platform launch. I think it's definitely the right move for an extremely ambitious company. It's the move that facebook needs to have its valuation rise to $8 billion as its owner said its worth. This said, it's not an easy move. The resemblance with Microsoft is initially dazzling, but a more careful analysis points out that it is a different situation. According to Zuckerberg, their value proposition is in an active social graph. I would modify that to say that their value proposition, at least to me, is an active social graph of a friendly nature. This might change with the opening of the platform.

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