Today all the news organizations are announcing some fictional amount of 50 billion dollars for the value of facebook.com but where are these values coming from?
Its also been released that Goldman Sacks is dumping cash as fast as they can into the social network site.. but to date Facebook is not public and it is still under the few hundred stock holders that can keep its ownership private.
Keeping investor / owner info private is something that is extending the time before the company goes fully public but who knows there is no real reason it should go public if it is making money for everyone involved.
Keeping user information private seems to be the antithesis of how facebook makes money. Although there has been much talk about privacy concerns the actual use of this information by outside organizations and linking to user accounts is insanely impressive.
The FBI has less information on the hundreds of millions of users and with the details that are either publicly available or shared for the price of a advertisement data mining seems to be the primary business offering from this so called online community.
The truth is the once free wild west of the internet is now getting more and more personal and businesses like Facebook are collecting huge amount of information from their users … like a bad episode of law and order if the cop just sits there while you pour out your whole life’s story and then they compile it into a database that you agree to release then no 4th amendment rights have been violated.
And with connectoids that allow you to login to outside sites to make comments with your facebook credentials any political or private statements or porn sites you visit and don’t even login to all get compiled into a huge database of your online use.
Don’t worry though they are not the only player in the market … Google now links your accounts to your personal phone number and they have the ability to follow you across most of the internet whether it is through ads they serve or the analytics service they offer for free to website owners.
Yes it is rather difficult to believe that the valuation of Facebook is based solely on its ability to push adds to its users but I guess none of that really matters as long as people are dumb enough to tell the world the most intimate details of their lives and allow others to profit from it.
