We explored the benefits of a Face Phone well over a year ago, and we took a look at the “Nation of Google and Facebook” and “Your life as an Advertising Billboard” yesterday. That leaves the Face Page hacking to deal with.
That the Face Page of the CEO of Facebook can be hacked I don’t think comes of much of a surprise to anyone with any experience building secure systems on the web. Openness and Closed are mutually exclusive objectives. You either build a system so everyone can gain access or you build a system so only the invited can gain access. Trying to build a system that delivers both is always going to fall somewhere in between.
After all Facebook isn’t a bank. It’s more like a scrapbook.
So the primary thing of interest here isn’t the fact it was hacked but the message that was left behind. (i.e Why can’t Facebook’s 600+ Million users invest in Facebook today?)
It allows us to explore one last question. How much would it cost for Facebook’s 600+ Million users to buy their Faces back?
The answer to that question is course, based on the current valuation, about one cup of coffee a month for somewhere between 8 to 9 months. Or, put another way, it would cost about $100 per user to “nationalise” Facebook.
The next question is why would they bother?
Most people forget that MySpace was valued at $65 Billion in late 2007. Today they could probably pick it up for around what News Corp. paid for it back in 2005 ($580 Million). May be $1 Billion tops. That means Facebook’s 600+ users could have their very own MyFace site for much less than what it costs to buy a cup of coffee. The investment would probably pay for itself within 12 months from the switch in advertising revenues from Facebook.
Then there is AOL with Bebo. AOL would probably have given Facebook’s 600+ Million users a free cup of coffee to take BeBo off their hands before they sold it off for $10 Million in June last year.
Finally there is Google with Orkut and the one remaining question? Why hasn’t Google tried to disrupt Facebook yet? Surely if Google had taken a leaf out of Marketing 101 and offered Facebook users some kind of gift (e.g. A free coffee to share with friends at Starbucks) or financial incentive (e.g. this is how you, like any other blogger, can make money out putting adwords on your stories – after all isn’t Facebook updates just micro-blogging?) to move across to a rebranded and redesigned Orkut they could have significantly disrupted Facebook by now?
The same goes for MySpace, AOL, MSN and Yahoo!. Where is the creative energy within News Corp., AOL, MSN and Yahoo! that is required to disrupt Facebook?
In the end it is still hard not to think the reason that Facebook hasn’t been disrupted is because very few industry observers actually think its worth disrupting… at least not yet anyway.
After all many have tried before to profit from the Six Degrees of Separation and nobody has succeeded yet.
Maybe everyone is just waiting to see if Facebook can discover a way to monetize all that social traffic.
Only problem is if Facebook does manage to discover the “secret recipe of herbs and spices” or more likely “the 7 Deadly Sins” that turns all that online traffic into dollars it will probably be much too late to disrupt it.
Posted on January 27, 2011
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