Acidus wrote:

The owners of the privately held company have turned down a $750 million offer and hope to fetch as much as $2 billion in a sale, senior industry executives familiar with the matter say.

That may sound like a huge amount of money, especially when you consider that the company was launched just two years ago by a group of sophomores at Harvard University, led by Mark Zuckerberg (see BW Online, "Under 30, On the Cutting Edge"). But already, www.facebook.com has become the seventh-most heavily trafficked site on the Internet, according to market researcher comScore Media Metrix. It racked up 5.5 billion page views during the month of February, the latest month for which complete data are available. That's more page views than the Web sites of Amazon.com (AMZN), Ask.com, or Walt Disney (DIS).

I know several other Memestreamers are working on some cool web apps. Seems that there is a lot of interest in the area. How misguided it may be is a different story, but it looks like there's a crazy money pile at the end of the rainbow.

Hm. It's hard to say. Obviously there's a ton of cash in "web apps", but that's such a broad term anymore.

Facebook is a surprise to me. All the other social networking sites have come and peaked and are now in slow decline. Perhaps facebook is different because it serves a niche. And, on top of that, a particularly well-networked and socially active niche. Normal humans with Friendster and Orkut, etc, etc pretty soon decided that it was pointless since all they had was a list of their existing friends. Is it just that facebook is *really* good at establishing hookups among the perpetually erect college set? If so, why is it so much better?

Seems overhyped to me. Of course, to some extent, hype does make the service better, since social networks function better with a large population. Did facebook reach a critical mass?

Anyway, I think they're crazy, but I have different metrics for success. I'd probly have taken the deal and bounced, but hey, more power to them if they can get 2 billion dollars.

RE: $750 Million not enough for Facebook