Trying To Justify That $2 Billion Pricetag, Facebook Expands Beyond Students

from the now-more-like-myspace dept

Here’s one you couldn’t see coming. Social-networking site Facebook is expanding beyond high school and college users. However, instead of just opening it up to anyone, which might rob it of its uniqueness, they’re opening it up to employees at select corporations. So now, instead of it just being a tool to allow a student to hook up with that person in their Gender in the Fin De Siecle class, someone in sales at Intuit can flirt with their cute colleague in HR. It’s no surprise that they want to expand their userbase. The company is open that they want to sell out for $2 billion, while at the same time there’s evidence that their traffic is flagging. They may have waited too long, however, to go after this market. Lots of me-too starupts want to be the MySpace of the enterprise.


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Comments on “Trying To Justify That $2 Billion Pricetag, Facebook Expands Beyond Students”

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19 Comments
Hairball says:

bad idea

IMO this is not a good move for facebook. Facebook is known for being the college and soon-to-be college student’s social networking site. I don’t see how expanding to ‘select corporations’ will help their cause. If i’m going to flirt with a colleague, i’ll walk to her cubicle (office if she’s really hot) and ask her to dinner or something. I can only imagine the sort of trouble someone will get in with their company by posting something stupid. Like that ever happens, right?

And another thing… who decides who these select corporations are?

Another baseless comment says:

Re: Select companies

If you had used Facebook then you would know that you must have a valid email address at the institution that you are supposed to be invloved with. I had to use my student id to regisiter (not my social)…so that leads me to believe that they have some type of agreement with the universities…and I’m sure that businesses would want an even larger level of assurance that someone is infact an employee.

Doug Sherrets (user link) says:

My analysis of facebook adding companies from Augu

Hi,

I wrote about this on August 31, 2005. Check out the article: http://www.minorityrapport.com/2005/08/facebook_for_al.html

I wrote a new post yesterday: http://www.minorityrapport.com/2006/04/fun_it_actually.html

It will be interesting to see the adoption curve at companies.

Doug

Judah Wilson, CEO Top20Network.com (user link) says:

Re: Doug, you were right, and here is why

One word: Branding. The reason it will not work in the corporate world is becuase the branding for the site was solidified when they chose to go for high school students rather than businesses. The first wave of seniors that graduated after Facebook became popular (May of last year) was the market Facebook had to get. Facebook was hot, and a large portion of their users were heading to the corporate world. Facebook missed it, and as soon as privacy issues surfaced, the students that sparked the original movement (students at top 20 schools) stopped using the site. I predict that from here on student usage will steadily decline.

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