Microsoft buys $240 million stake in Facebook
- October 25th, 2007
- Read 4163 times
- 4 Comments
We can all hate Facebook now. Microsoft and Facebook announced a deal yesterday where Microsoft would pay $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in the social networking Web site. Doing a little of that thing called math, we can now say that Facebook is worth approximately $15 billion. That’s a nice chunk of change.
Microsoft paid so much for the site because it felt it was in danger of losing the next generation of computer users. That, and it didn’t want Google, the other principal bidder for the Facebook stake, to gain yet another high profile advertising gig.
The reaction on Facebook to the sale has been somewhat tepid.
“Well microsoft got it, now we can watch as microsoft uses the info in our profile to sell to other companies and facebook slowly degrades it the quality of myspace yay,” said one user in the group “Don’t let microsoft buy facebook.” Others are comparing the sale to News Corp-MySpace deal from a few years ago, hinting that by “selling out,” MySpace lost a connection it had with its users.
These are exciting times for people who post their entire life online for all to see.
Microsoft Buys Stake in Facebook [New York Times]
Mark (Who am I?)
8 months ago
Facebook has gotten shittier and shittier over the past few months. Once they started adding those little stupid applications where there’s no limit to how many you can have at once…I stopped paying attention. Viewing a friend’s page on Facebook now is as worse as any Myspace page. It’s just filled with useless crap that takes even the fastest connection forever to load up.
“Really? Do you need all this shit? I don’t even know where your ‘wall’ is to post. I just wanted to say hey, but now I just want to kill you”
Sam Boutros (Who am I?)
8 months ago
Will Facebook still be relevant in 3 years? Or will it just be another social site to go through the revolving door? And as Mark has pointed out above - it’s looking more like MySpace by the day. Buying friends drinks for their web page? WTF???
Kevin Montgomery
8 months ago
You know what? People make their choices when you they are provided with them.
I’ve made my choice to limit my exposure to Facebook, removing any application that requires me to give constant attention to it, and limiting the junk on my profile page.
Not everyone makes that choice, and in that case I make the choice to close their page if it takes too long to load.
But there’s no denying that there is a lot of fun to be had on Facebook!
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Nicholas Deleon (Who am I?)
8 months ago
I’ve said many times that those little applications are very distracting and detract from the simplicity that I used to like.