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Microsoft may invest in Facebook
Author: Phil CogarPublished: 25th September 2007
Facebook may gain between £150 to £250 million if Microsoft purchases up to five percent of the company.
Facebook is already trying to attract developers to the website. The company hopes to turn it into a full-fledged web platform for gaming, news, and other applications. Our own forum members have even jumped into Facebook development with David Verhasselt (AKA Relix) developing a Facebook version of his webcam tool Seenly.
This move by Microsoft will help bring the software giant further into the realms of the internet. While already synonymous with operating systems and office productivity software, the company hasn't really taken off in areas that rival Google has exceeded in. Investing in Facebook will offer a jump-off platform to get new online software out to the public. There has already been cases of developers selling their applications after they've become popular on Facebook.
Microsoft already has an exclusive advertising agreement with Facebook until 2011.
Facebook currently has around 39 million members and is still growing compared to rival MySpace's 200 million userbase. The company hopes to sell shares on the stock market eventually.
If there is any fact to the rumours, one thing is for sure - Microsoft and Facebook are keeping quiet on any negotiations that are taking place.
Are you a member of Facebook? Join the bit-tech group and then head over to the forums and leave your thoughts on this move by Microsoft.
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I love it!
quoted for truth
I don't give a damm about it, but I wish someone could explain (with a cattle-prod) to mainstream journalists that second life, facebook and the rest arn't really that important. I guess they could also tell them that there are other audio players that don't require a black polo-neck, but that might be a step too far.
<A88>
Intel says second life is about as close to the future of the Internet as we're going to get today. Intel would like us to believe that virtual worlds are the way forwards. :p
Facebook is currently perfect on PHP
Ok so I lied, it was finicky, but meh.
Personally I like facebook, if only because there aren't any applications for it that are solely for the purpose of adding friends to your lists. (Thats how bad myspace is. There are actually applications developed for the sole purpose of whoring yourself onto everyones friend list.)
In terms of Microsoft's push so far in the social networking arena, as I said before they seem to have got it tied up quite well. I can take photos on my WM6 phone and upload them directly to my Live Space with 2 clicks- likewise Photo Gallery now has an upload function and their other Windows Live sites such as Soapbox allow you to blog or add content to your space quite quickly. The issue with all of these services is that although they work seamlessly together, they also have to be used together. Youtube is far more popular than Soapbox and sites like Flickr are much more popular for photosharing (although there is a rumour that MS are considering adding Flickr support to the Photo Gallery). If you ask me, it would be ideal if they managed to get support for more popular apps whilst retaining services such as Live Spaces as a central hub for all content- thus meaning uploaded content would go to a user-selected service as well as simultaneously being added to the account's Live Space. Just my way of seeing things anyway...
<A88>
Personally, I feel Facebook has the worst developer support ever. Incomplete or just plain wrong documentation, undocumented but mentioned features that will or will not disappear, every now and then major changes to its architecture, which are announced only 10 days in advance, after which you are forced to comply to the changes or your application breaks. You don't have a way of knowing if the changes you made actually work, either. You just have to wait for the deadline and hope for the best. No announcement on new features, so you're forced to check the documentation page (which, up until recently, was a poorly maintained wiki frontpage (now it's just an averagely maintained wiki frontpage)) every day.
Stuff like that has made porting Seenly over to Facebook (and maintaining it) a friggin' nightmare.
What's worse, they actually have a clause in their ToS which states that if your application is popular they can clone it feature-for-feature without owing you anything. Yes, this is understandable in a way, but it probably scares some people off of doing great things with the "platform". Imagine spending a year perfecting your application, only to see Facebook clone it and integrate it far better than you could ever do (see windows and office).
Well they would, I'm sure, given they're making the hardware. But whilst I though Snowcrash was great reading, nothing I've heard about Second Life makes it look vaguely appealing, let alone essential for anything I can think of. Forums like this probably have more meaningfull social impact than all the SL fuss.
Sounds like Microsoft territory