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Microsoft planning to buy Facebook

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Wall Street Journal has reported that Microsoft and Facebook are in talks with each other over possible merger.

A Microsoft source claimed that its financial team is in contact with Facebook’s team to see if they are willing to sell or not. The talk is in early stage and no time frame could be given for the deal.

Both companies have been previously working with each other. Microsoft has been brokering banner ads for Facebook since 2006 and acquired full advertising rights last year as part of a $240m investment package. The deal gained headlines when it was revealed that Microsoft would gain only 1.6 per cent ownership in the deal, placing Facebook’s value at upwards of $15bn.

Microsoft declined to comment on Facebook deal.

Just recently they walked away from Yahoo after placing a bid of $44.6 billion. Yahoo declined the offer after a series of negotiations.

Written on 08 May 2008 by YourFacebookStuff under News & Updates with No Comments
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Will Facebook Join OpenSocial?

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This morning, Yahoo announced that it is joining OpenSocial, and along with MySpace and Google, forming the OpenSocial Foundation to “ensure the neutrality and longevity of OpenSocial as an open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the web.”

Additionally, on the conference call executives indicated that Hi5 will be launching its developer platform with support for OpenSocial applications next Monday, meaning that the initiative will soon allow you to build apps that in theory work on MySpace, Orkut, and hi5 – a fairly significant base of users.

Meanwhile, Facebook announced its own set of standards back in December based on its platform, which, Bebo leveraged to allow developers to port their Facebook apps over to its network. In turn, there are now two standards with huge players behind them, with OpenSocial having the majority of partners, but Facebook having the majority of actual applications that people can use.

Will Facebook ultimately sign on to OpenSocial, or will we be living in a world with two (or more) major social networking platforms for the forseeable future?

Written on 25 March 2008 by YourFacebookStuff under News & Updates with No Comments
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Facebook’s collision course with the big portals

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Mark Zuckerberg describes Facebook as a service designed to help people communicate better, primarily through the social graph, which is the network of connections and relationships between people.

The social graph, he said, is the reason Facebook works. The popular social applications, such as Flirtable, FunWall and SuperPoke, built on the Facebook platform, are only a small part of Facebook’s bigger ambition to help people communicate better.

In fact, Facebook is on a collision course with the more mature Web colonies–AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

One of the key metrics of a major portal is stickiness–the number of applications used per member and time spent on the site. Communications services, such as e-mail, instant messaging, group chat, and forums, have proven to be very sticky.

Facebook is about to introduce a basic chat service and have some rudimentary e-mail capabilities. While Facebook executives have been cagey about specific plans to build more capable communications applications, they will evolve to be competitive with what AOL, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo offer. Continue Reading »

Written on 21 March 2008 by admin under News & Updates with No Comments
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