OK, I may be a bit over the top with the description. But recent report on a certain software company who has money to burn wants to throw an incredible amount of money (reported at US$300 – 500 million) to a 23 years old kiddo for him to continue to build a website that allows people to ‘bite’ at each others, ‘throw bombs’ at someone, and ‘poke’ at each others just seems mind boggling to me.
The kiddo is of course Mark Elliot Zuckerburg, a Harvard University dropout who is an accomplished computer programmer. The website: Facebook.com which he created in 2004 and the software company is non other than Microsoft. Rumors have it that Microsoft is willing to invest $300 – $500 million in Facebook in return for a 5% stake in the company. This puts the value of Facebook at a whopping $10 billion or more. A far cry from what Yahoo had wanted to pay sometime back for the entire company ($1 billion).
Is Facebook really worth that much? Nobody really knows, and I decided to give Facebook a test drive myself. Having received invitation by 2 friends to join Facebook, I finally decided to join in, some 3.5 years after Facebook is launch. In it, you can edit your own profiles so that your friends can find you easily, and there are some 4000 applications that you can add to interact with your friends. A major increase of applications as a result of Facebook opening up for 3rd party developers to create and interface the applications into Facebook.
On my first day, I was poke, bitten, attack, and offered a drink, all at the same time (virtually of course). I was able to give gifts, flowers, cakes, t-shirts and scribble on my friend’s wall (again, it’s all virtual) without been charged for vandalism. I spent the next 2 days searching through the thousands of applications and choose some which I find might be useful and fits into my profile, eliminating many totally useless ones.
I was also able to search for some of my long lost friends and surprised to see some of them already part of the Facebook community. My verdict, an interesting looking social networking site that is definitely in a different mode with say Friendster or MySpace. The 3rd party apps really make the site stands out from other sites (both in the good and bad ways) and what I really don’t understand is how little advertisement I see in this few days of surfing through Facebook. Which makes me wonder how Facebook generates its revenue, which this year till date is reported to be at least $150 – $300 millions.
But the real value of Facebook, despite all the privacy policy promised, could be the valuable personal data of some 40 million users, and is expected to grow to 200 million users. Imagine what they can do with 200 million user data.
While you are at it, do visit my Facebook profile @ http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=655884894 and invite me as your friend. Together, we can make Mr Mark very rich. 
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