» Microsoft To Buy Facebook For $6 Billion? » InsideMicrosoft - part of the Blog News Channel

I think Nathan is spot on. MS Should buy Facebook. Then we can all desert it for the next greatest thing.

There's a truth here that MSN, Google, Yahoo, AOL should all wake up to. They've all built some amazing technology to customise the classic "My Pages". Portals monetizing sticky eyeballs by bringing the net to one place and then trying to keep people there. They should invert this and use the same technology to create "Me Pages". Monetising short term temporary visitors to read all about me and everything I do on the net. It's only a very short step from there to a FaceBook, MySpace competitor. And that's mainly about management of friends and followers. That is an N SQUARED problem (N Factorial?) so not trivial. But they all have the resources to solve it.

I guess that's the realisation that there's really *nothing in Facebook*. The one thing Facebook has is huge numbers of users. But so do the Portals. They should build it, not buy it. But that takes balls. And it takes imagination to see that they don't need a "Social Network System". They need to add "Social Network Function" into what they've already got.

I can accept FB being unfinished and in perpetual beta. I can't accept how closed it is. So I'm all for MS buying it, forcing us to use Passport to access it and then so screwing around with it that we all leave.


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[ 13-Jul-07 11:51am ] [ , ]