Facebook Talk

Hey, remember when Facebook used to be thefacebook.com? And every time you tried to load your friend’s profile page, you’d get a server error and be asked to refresh the page. Ah, those were the good ‘ole days. And by “good ‘ole days” I mean “days where I wanted to bash my head into a wall.” Man, Facebook used to suck back then. And it’s no wonder, as a three year old lawsuit claims Zuckerberg stole the initial source code used to start the site. Well, okay, Facebook used to suck because they were hosted on a single server run by hamsters, but whatever.

The rising Harvard College junior is being accused of stealing the Facebook idea while writing the code for a comparable site by Harvard Class of 2004 graduates Cameron Winklevoss, Divya Narendra and Tyler Winklevoss.

They claim that they asked Zuckerberg to develop part of their ConnectU.com Web site in November of last year. According to Tyler Winkelvoss, Zuckerberg then proceeded to develop his own site based on their ideas. Zuckerberg communicated with the ConnectU.com team through 52 e-mail messages and three personal meetings, which Winkelvoss has records of. Zuckerberg, on the other hand, claims that he voluntarily agreed to do six hours of coding for the ConnectU.com site, but he understood it to be a “personals” site to connect students with alumni and employers.

I think I’ve actually written about this already here on FacebookTalk, but I didn’t realize this lawsuit was still in the courts. I would have guessed Zuckerberg would have tried to settle this by now, but seeing as how he hasn’t, we can draw one of two reasonable conclusions. Either he knows without a doubt that the lawsuit is total BS or the people suing him don’t want his blood money . Personally, I’m going with the former. This sounds all too similar to situations where one party has an idea, a second party takes that idea and actually does something with it, and then the first party gets all angry since they were too lazy to do something with it first.

[via TechCrunch]

Facebook, lawsuit

At least that’s the latest argument being made, this time in an article by claiming Adage that Google is afraid of Facebook.

Just as Google has become what some people call the operating system for search, Facebook is turning itself into the operating system for social networking. While Google knows what millions of people are searching for, Facebook has something the search giant hasn’t been able to grow: a network of connections between people that creates a viral distribution platform unrivaled by any portal or search engine.

There’s some pretty good facts in this article, which mainly focuses on what makes Facebook such a prized target out there if anybody can manage to snatch it up.

For instance, think about when you go to Amazon.com. You are immediately greeted with a recommendation for a book or movie or CD that Amazon thinks you might enjoy. But what makes them think this? Well, from judging what you’ve bought in the past and what items you’ve reviewed, they can built a rough estimate of your taste. Yet this is only a rough estimate, for hardly anybody does ALL of their book and movie shopping through Amazon. I personally only buy old and used books through them and instead buy new ones that I want to read immediately at a nearby bookstore. Plus, if I see a used book cheaper on Half.com, I’ll easily buy it there. Thus Amazon only knows about maybe 20% of the books I purchase. Surely that other 80% should factor into Amazon’s recommendations, no?

Now imagine if Facebook were to sign a partnership deal with Amazon and give them access to everybody’s profile. Immediately, Amazon could scan your profile, see the movies and books you’ve listed as your favorites, and build a much stronger suggestion system. Heck, take it one step further. They could easily scan your wall comments and see what books or movies you and your friends have talked a lot about, thus giving Amazon a good idea of what items have strong buzz and thus should be pushed heavier.

There are many other scenarios where buying Facebook wouldn’t just make sense, it’d make the purchasing company boatloads of money. The only questions at this point are A) Will Facebook actually be sold? and B) For how much?

Facebook, Applications, Google, Amazon, Ebay, Half.com

Yet another one of the many competitors gunning for Facebook is a websites called MyYearBook. From first glance, it looks like a cheap kids site with pictures of teenagers on it, and when you break it down, that’s exactly what the site is. It’s not clean or precise like Facebook, nor is it pretty to look at with so much information crammed onto one page.

Techcrunch, however, reports that one of MyYearBook’s biggest claims is to have more highschool users than Facebook, which might be true. Those are the exact users they should be targeting. But given that the site feels and looks clunky, it’s hard to imagine that most of the current members won’t switch over to Facebook sooner rather than later.

Of course, the same could be said about MySpace, and look how that’s turned out.

Studivz, the German clone of Facebook, has been sold for a reported $100 million euros. That’s $100,000,000 euros, folks, which is absolutely crazy seeing as how euros are much more valuable than USD these days. The managing staff will remain on-board to run things with the only difference between yesterday and tomorrow being they’re now filthy rich.

If a German Facebook can get so much money, Facebook’s decision to hold out for $2 billion USD is looking better and better with each passing day.

Facebook’s worldwide popularity has started to grow, from Europe to Asia to even Australia. But one Aussie competitor, StudentFace, looks to hold off Facebook by matching each of their moves tit for tat and recently raising the bar even higher - by allowing users to not only upload videos to their profile, but to record them directly off their webcam.

Time will only tell if Facebook matches their efforts in stride.

Piczo.com

XuQa.com

Hi5.com

Those are just many of the numberous second-tier social networking sites out there that are poised to rival Facebook and Myspace in the coming years. In fact, I’ve never even heard of Piczo before, but statistics show that last month it “attracted 10.2 million unique visitors, compared with Facebook’s 15.5 million visitors…It’s also the No. 1 social-networking site in Canada” which goes to show that even though Facebook and Myspace are the big two these days, there are plenty of other alternatives out there.