As we know Mr. Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004, it started as a private social networking site and now it is already open to the public. The company was founded after that Harvard University dropped out and Mr. Zuckerberg established the company.
Today, Facebook Inc. has bucked the Silicon Valley acquisition trend, remaining independent of larger technology companies. Now the social-networking start-up is seeking ways to reach the big leagues on its own. Yahoo was interested last year in buying Facebook for close to $1 billion, but people familiar with the matter say the talks cooled months ago partly because Mr. Zuckerberg and Facebook’s investors thought the company was worth more, and partly because Mr. Zuckerberg wanted to keep management control.
Facebook management is trying to be like other available web platforms such as You Tube, Google, Myspace and Web Boom … especially wit their new platform which will give access to third party people to develop new modules that can be integrated to their, and be used.
“How the company make money?”
The company makes profit from some little different sources, such as the advertisements that are made for Microsoft Corp. a deal for like $30 billion USD per year, till 2011. Also we know that they launched their $1 gifts system which gives access to its members to send gifts for other friends. Earlier this month they launched the marketplace service, which is a classifieds system for users to advertise their things, this is for free till now, but it could have been paid and be another income source for the company. Previously some companies have had pages within Facebook, but they didn’t interact with the Web site’s user networks. This move is significant because it could turn Facebook into a central hub for Web users, akin to an Internet portal like Yahoo Inc. Rather than using Facebook only to keep in touch with friends and going elsewhere for other content, users could now gain access to that content inside Facebook. That could keep people on Facebook for longer periods of time, which would also appeal to advertisers. For instance, an online retailer could build a service in Facebook to let people recommend music or books to their friends, based on the relationships they’ve already established on the site. Or a media company could let groups of users share news articles with each other on a page inside Facebook.
The 23-year-old Mr. Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in 2004, and Facebook’s venture-capital investors, which include Accel Partners and Greylock Partners, now believe it is unlikely they will sell the company, says one person familiar with the matter. Instead, they hope to keep Facebook private for as long as possible, eventually going public in about two years, this person says.
Facebook, which has raised more than $38 million in funding, is profitable and expects to generate close to $150 million in revenue this year, says one person familiar with the matter. Facebook says its user base has more than doubled to 23 million in the past six months, and it is adding 100,000 new users a day.
Mr. Zuckerberg in the past has acknowledged he has greater ambitions for Facebook. He has bristled at Facebook’s “social networking” tag, instead calling the site a “social utility” that helps people share information, with their personal connections with each other as a backdrop. If others build services to take advantage of those connections, Facebook can become more useful for its users, he said in the March interview.
But Facebook faces challenges in trying to stay independent. Mr. Zuckerberg has little management experience, for instance, and is now managing some lieutenants who are Silicon Valley veterans twice his age. His main focus is on building interesting technology, say people familiar with the matter. A Facebook spokeswoman declined to comment on those characterizations.
There’s also stiff competition. News Corp.’s MySpace is still the leader in social networking, with 57 million U.S. visitors in April, compared with Facebook’s 14.4 million, even though Facebook has grown three times as fast as MySpace in the past year, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. And a handful of other companies are also riffing off the idea of using social-networking technology to build a broader platform, such as Ning Inc., co-founded by Netscape Communications Corp. founder Marc Andreessen. Ning lets groups build their own social networks.
Some Silicon Valley cognoscenti have compared Facebook to Google. Google faced similar challenges in the late 1990s, when its young, scrappy founders dealt with skepticism over their lack of experience, lateness to the search arena, and focus on technology over revenue. So Mr. Zuckerberg’s moves are being closely watched as a barometer of whether a new generation of Web companies can remain independent yet grow very large.
Mr. Zuckerberg himself has compared Facebook to Google. Asked in March whether Facebook has an analog to Google’s motto of “don’t be evil,” Mr. Zuckerberg said, “I don’t know that we have a motto yet. Maybe it’s, ‘Make the world more open.’ “
