I am still a bit choked up on the unbelievable speculation by the business community ever since it was Tweeted last week: Facebook’s $10 billion fundraising round and eventual $100 billion IPO (projected). There is a large difference between valuation and true value a product or service delivers to users.
And for a company with no real product in sight—and users (still) signing up to offer for free (sigh) a database of their personal wants, activities and whereabouts even—the difference is buried in serving up this database to the highest bidder in the advertising world. Zuck & Co. have even surpassed the inventors of this exploitation model and become the #1 online ad revenue-generating platform by a factor of 6x. Sorry Larry & Sergey. This is not just “Over-The-Top,” it is out of control if one reflects on the real issues that exist in the world.
Makes you wonder just what the heck is the real value being delivered. Something just does not add up when you think of some of the proceeds in the recent past: Visa’s 19.7 billion in 2008 or GM ‘s $23.1 billion in 2010. With Facebook, something is just not right; actually, it is just completely missing. And it’s missing in megabytes…of data.
Yours.
By the numbers, the Facebook IPO means $25 billion for Zuck, payback on Goldman Sachs temporary loan of $450 million and a number of others lucky enough to cash out in 2012 on your social graph patterns.
If you are one of the 50% of the 800 million people logging-in to Facebook, I would ask yourself what the value of your time, personal data and location or mood is really worth? 700 billion minutes per month from everyone’s personal and professional productivity is a pretty sweet business model.
In the interest of keeping your data safe—if you must log-on everyday and share with the advertising world your data—here is some tips on how to avoid the 600,000 times per day your data is being targeted on Facebook by hackers.
So be safe out there and keep in mind who owns your data. When you post to Facebook, the owner becomes Facebook. No worries Open-Xchange users, your data remains in your ownership.
