What if Facebook is really worth $100 billion?

Now, what news on the Rialto?
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Enki
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Re: What if Facebook is really worth $100 billion?

Post by Enki »

Facebook will probably not be replaced by a newer prettier Facebook.

Computer use is following a trend of a move toward apps and plugins. Right now it is possible to create a blogsite that can have all of the features of Facebook. You can use OpenID authorization to log into your friends websites and create a webring style friends network. It can be completely decentralized and off of Facebook. Right now that requires a certain level of technical savvy that simply doesn't exist. It will within ten to fifteen years. I think ultimately the idea of having all of your data centralized in a third party corporation will seem barbaric. But right now its not possible to do that sort of thing. I know that BitTorrent has some stuff coming down the pike that is going to be mindblowing and may be paradigm changing. IMV the BT IPO is the one I am really waiting for.
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Re: What if Facebook is really worth $100 billion?

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Reuters | Morgan Stanley cut Facebook estimates just before IPO
(Reuters) - In the run-up to Facebook's $16 billion IPO, Morgan Stanley, the lead underwriter on the deal, unexpectedly delivered some negative news to major clients: The bank's consumer Internet analyst, Scott Devitt, was reducing his revenue forecasts for the company.

The sudden caution very close to the huge initial public offering, and while an investor roadshow was underway, was a big shock to some, said two investors who were advised of the revised forecast.

They say it may have contributed to the weak performance of Facebook shares, which sank on Monday - their second day of trading - to end 10 percent below the IPO price. The $38 per share IPO price valued Facebook at $104 billion.

The change in Morgan Stanley's estimates came on the heels of Facebook's filing of an amended prospectus with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), in which the company expressed caution about revenue growth due to a rapid shift by users to mobile devices. Mobile advertising to date is less lucrative than advertising on a desktop.

"This was done during the roadshow - I've never seen that before in 10 years," said a source at a mutual fund firm who was among those called by Morgan Stanley.

JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, which were also major underwriters on the IPO but had lesser roles than Morgan Stanley, also revised their estimates in response to Facebook's May 9 SEC filing, according to sources familiar with the situation.
Caveat emptor.
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Typhoon
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Re: What if Facebook is really worth $100 billion?

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rxzitFq_eSI
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Hoosiernorm
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Re: What if Facebook is really worth $100 billion?

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So can you create actual value out of what really isn't valuable. Can your facebook friends compel you to like what they like and follow them to a retailer. I know that it's popular with teenagers who excel at following herd mentality but they don't have enough disposable income to maintain an advertising campaign past the initial kick off. GM figured out that the kind of folks who were watching the television shows that they advertised on weren't capable of purchasing their cars and facebook addicts usually don't have as much disposable income as their counterparts who are too busy working to bother with it. So besides being able to share news stories and other trivialities what else is facebook actually good for? How do you acquire value from what isn't really valuable?
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Facebook IPO Screwup Could Be Curtains For NASDAQ

Post by Nonc Hilaire »

Facebook's IPO, priced at $38, only managed to pop to $45 and then sank back to $38.

This was surprising.

What happened?

A theory from a source close to FB's IPO bankers: The volume that caused NASDAQ to delay the IPO for more than a half hour, also prevented Nasdaq from informing big bank trading desks whether or not their trades on Facebook had gone through.

This left trading desks in a position where "you don't know whether you bought it, and you think you did at $42 but you're not sure," says our source.

That "uncertainty" combined with a huge amount of stock supply led to a "wave" that brought the stock back down to $38.
http://www.businessinsider.com/why-face ... ock-2012-5
http://www.businessinsider.com/by-the-w ... daq-2012-5
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Enki
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Re: What if Facebook is really worth $100 billion?

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Hoosiernorm wrote:So can you create actual value out of what really isn't valuable. Can your facebook friends compel you to like what they like and follow them to a retailer. I know that it's popular with teenagers who excel at following herd mentality but they don't have enough disposable income to maintain an advertising campaign past the initial kick off. GM figured out that the kind of folks who were watching the television shows that they advertised on weren't capable of purchasing their cars and facebook addicts usually don't have as much disposable income as their counterparts who are too busy working to bother with it. So besides being able to share news stories and other trivialities what else is facebook actually good for? How do you acquire value from what isn't really valuable?
I've organized actual stuff on Facebook and so has everyone I know. Facebook IS valuable, it's just not valuable for making people spend money on useless things.
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Typhoon
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Re: What if Facebook is really worth $100 billion?

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Enki wrote:
Hoosiernorm wrote:So can you create actual value out of what really isn't valuable. Can your facebook friends compel you to like what they like and follow them to a retailer. I know that it's popular with teenagers who excel at following herd mentality but they don't have enough disposable income to maintain an advertising campaign past the initial kick off. GM figured out that the kind of folks who were watching the television shows that they advertised on weren't capable of purchasing their cars and facebook addicts usually don't have as much disposable income as their counterparts who are too busy working to bother with it. So besides being able to share news stories and other trivialities what else is facebook actually good for? How do you acquire value from what isn't really valuable?
I've organized actual stuff on Facebook and so has everyone I know.
How does Facebook make money from you and everyone you know organizing actual stuff on their site?
Enki wrote:Facebook IS valuable, it's just not valuable for making people spend money on useless things.
Okay, but again how will FB make money providing this service?
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Enki
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Re: What if Facebook is really worth $100 billion?

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Typhoon wrote:
Enki wrote:
Hoosiernorm wrote:So can you create actual value out of what really isn't valuable. Can your facebook friends compel you to like what they like and follow them to a retailer. I know that it's popular with teenagers who excel at following herd mentality but they don't have enough disposable income to maintain an advertising campaign past the initial kick off. GM figured out that the kind of folks who were watching the television shows that they advertised on weren't capable of purchasing their cars and facebook addicts usually don't have as much disposable income as their counterparts who are too busy working to bother with it. So besides being able to share news stories and other trivialities what else is facebook actually good for? How do you acquire value from what isn't really valuable?
I've organized actual stuff on Facebook and so has everyone I know.
How does Facebook make money from you and everyone you know organizing actual stuff on their site?
Enki wrote:Facebook IS valuable, it's just not valuable for making people spend money on useless things.
Okay, but again how will FB make money providing this service?
They sell the market data to other companies I would assume.

But yeah, the advertising revenue model of websites was already proven moribund ten years ago. There has to be something more. Facebook was talking about issuing its own currency and allowing people to trade that currency on the site. That seems like a good way to make money for them, by taxing those transactions.
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Privacy Fix for Facebook & Google and more.....

Post by monster_gardener »

Thank You Very Much for the Thread, Typhoon.

Recommended by Consumer Expert/Advocate Clark Howard on his radio show for anyone worried about privacy and using either Face Book or Google..... :shock:

https://privacyfix.com/start
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Zack Morris
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Re: What if Facebook is really worth $100 billion?

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I used to use Facebook as a photo sharing site but become annoyed by frequent changes to the privacy controls that left my profile exposed. So in recent years, I deleted everything but 3 profile photos.

I had an interesting idea a few weeks ago: a browser plug-in that would encrypt photos, making them either look like garbled junk or some other image altogether to those without access credentials, and automatically decrypt those for which a public key was available (received directly from your friends). This could even be extended to text. The plugin would automatically detect garbled strings of encrypted text and decrypt them.

It's a nerdy idea and could prove to be a bit unwieldy but I wonder if there's a way to turn it into something people concerned with their privacy would be willing to use. You could store your photos on Facebook and be assured that nobody but those friends with access to your public key could see them.
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Enki
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Re: What if Facebook is really worth $100 billion?

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Zack Morris wrote:I used to use Facebook as a photo sharing site but become annoyed by frequent changes to the privacy controls that left my profile exposed. So in recent years, I deleted everything but 3 profile photos.

I had an interesting idea a few weeks ago: a browser plug-in that would encrypt photos, making them either look like garbled junk or some other image altogether to those without access credentials, and automatically decrypt those for which a public key was available (received directly from your friends). This could even be extended to text. The plugin would automatically detect garbled strings of encrypted text and decrypt them.

It's a nerdy idea and could prove to be a bit unwieldy but I wonder if there's a way to turn it into something people concerned with their privacy would be willing to use. You could store your photos on Facebook and be assured that nobody but those friends with access to your public key could see them.
If you are going that far you might as well go straight for the Facebook killer app. You can easily setup a blog site with OpenID access that has public key encryption to allow friends access to information on a permissions basis. You can use Dwolla to transfer money a la Facebook credits. There really is NOTHING that Facebook does that cannot be accessed other than its massive network effect.
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Zack Morris
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Re: What if Facebook is really worth $100 billion?

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Enki wrote: If you are going that far you might as well go straight for the Facebook killer app. You can easily setup a blog site with OpenID access that has public key encryption to allow friends access to information on a permissions basis. You can use Dwolla to transfer money a la Facebook credits. There really is NOTHING that Facebook does that cannot be accessed other than its massive network effect.
I wasn't aware of OpenID. I imagine this is something most of the big blog sites support? But rather than having a blog, the idea would be to integrate this into Facebook and Twitter, allowing you to continue using their platform while uploading secret content. The downside is that it would require a browser plugin and on mobile browsers, plugins don't exist. This sort of solution would only be available for users browsing on conventional PCs. Another wrinkle in all of this is that sites like Facebook will automatically resize your image, which would destroy any hidden payload in the image file. A workaround would be to store the images on some simple file sharing service or an image hosting platform that does not tamper with the image data. The image uploaded to Facebook would then encode the true file location, which is much easier to do.
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Re: What if Facebook is really worth $100 billion?

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May the gods preserve and defend me from self-righteous altruists; I can defend myself from my enemies and my friends.
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Re: What if Facebook is really worth $100 billion?

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Typhoon wrote:Facebook. I want my friends back.

Is this accurate?
I can't say because I don't maintain any fan pages or use Facebook as an advertising platform. However, here are three observations about my experience in the last year:

1. Facebook advertising is said by many to be fairly effective. I think this refers to actual paid advertisements, not just brand/fan pages whose efficacy is harder to quantify.

2. More ads have been appearing in my feeds, particularly when browsing on a mobile device. As you know, mobile has been something of an Achilles' heel for Facebook but they appear to be fixing that. The funny thing is, the strategy is very simple: just shove ads in people's faces. It took thousands of some of the brightest and most highly paid engineers in Silicon Valley to come up with that? In case you are wondering: no, none of the ads are relevant to me and I have yet to click a single one. But I'm not a big gadfly on Facebook so their algorithms have precious little material to work with when assessing my tastes.

3. There is definitely logic behind what appears in one's news feed but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Friends that I have marked specifically or with whom I routinely communicate tend to show up -- as they should -- but so do acquaintances with whom I have no contact and share little to no mutual connections.
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