Well, the most anticipated IPO in seven or eight years is finally going down. Facebook has filed their S-1 prospectus and will attempt to raise $5 billion off their arrival on the stock market.
Personally, I think they’re a year or two late. In Silicon Valley, there’s already a backlash, both against the constant molestation of privacy that Facebook has become famous for and against the company’s devaluation of “friend”. And to be honest, part of it is just hipster-snob disdain for an entity that has, for all intents and purposes, become the Millenial-age version of AOL.
More importantly, though, social networking has not stood still. Google, the one entity with as much to gain from social-network data-mining, has not only launched a rival in G+ but has gone all-in on integrating it with every aspect of Google services. Meanwhile, picture-sharing has remained with Flickr first and foremost when it’s not being staffed out to app-based services like Instagram. Foursquare remains the prime mover of location-based check-in services. And above everything hovers Twitter, with its dumb-simple 140-text-character model as the basis for all manner of functions. I can go weeks without logging into Facebook or G+, and I have, but I have to forcibly shut off Internet access for the night to stay away from Twitter.
For those who have toiled in the vineyard in Palo Alto for the past eight years or however long, of course, this is the moment they’ve waited for, the chance to get liquid. Hell, the state of California is already banking on capital gains and tax revenue from Facebook stockholders in their budget plans going forward, and it could be a non-trivial windfall. Expect the price of homes to skyrocket in Silicon Valley as frustrated buyers run up against Facebook employees with fistfuls of cash.
But Om’s crew makes a good point too – Facebook is about as big as it can get. I can think of maybe six people I know in the world under the age of 80 that aren’t on it. Hell, if my mother is on Facebook (a huge part of the reason I’m not anymore), you’ve pretty much saturated the market. The only way to monetize any further is to either go whole-hog into data mining or start charging admission. Then again, I’m not sure how Twitter plans to make money either. At some point, web advertising only works if you have the kind of supermassive scale that Google does.
But I’m already splitting up my action. I have my own blog, hosted with a family member rather than a commercial provider, and he also handles my secure email. I run my own backups through Time Machine with multiple redundancies. My social networking is scattered among Twitter and Tumblr and Foursquare and the names are orthogonal but the accounts are never connected, for the most part. Can I be data-mined and my identity and content be stripped for parts? Probably, but you’re going to have to work for it.
By and large, I think the days of easy milking are done. So if the Facebook crowd wants to take the money and run, I can’t say I blame them. I’d want to grab a Tesla Roadster while I could, too.