Facebook profits - $2.27 per active user

From The Independent:

Facebook profits soared 63 per cent to $5bn (£3.6bn) in the first three months of the year despite the company being engulfed in a data privacy scandal that has angered millions of users.

from Statista:

As of the fourth quarter of 2017, Facebook had 2.2 billion monthly active users.

Housewives' choice

I looked at Mrs W's Facebook page today, as I do occasionally, and got down as far as this...

"$1 billion country trashed after US troop withdrawal advertised on Facebook"

From The Metro and the BBC:

The withdrawal of US troops from Iraq ended in tears after it was advertised on Facebook and Al Qaeda militants stormed the $1 billion country, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage.

President Barak Obama, 52, withdrew 112,000 uninvited US troops from Iraq between 2009 and 2011 – but after a friend posted the event online, as many as 6,000 religious maniacs descended on the newly liberated country.

Iraqi police and army desperately tried to run away and hide from the armed insurgents, who were chanting and fighting to take control of Mosul and Tikrit, according to neighbours in the Middle East.

As the country filled to capacity, suicide bombings spilled out into the street, with terrorists urinating and vomiting in the roads and one girl being taken away and stoned to death in an ambulance.

Turkey said: “It started to get out of hand quite quickly. They were fighting to get across the border. Iraq couldn’t fit them all in.”

Iran added “I’m pretty sure Iraq didn’t know what it had let itself in for.”

Facebook Buys WhatsApp

From Sky News

Facebook has agreed to buy the mobile messaging company WhatsApp for $19bn (£11.4bn), the social network has announced.

The company said in a statement that it would pay $4bn (£2.4bn) in cash and $15bn (£9bn) in Facebook shares as part of the deal.

The app's founders and employees will get $3bn (£1.8bn) of the shares as restricted stock that will vest over four years after the deal closes.

The purchase marks the largest single acquisition in Facebook's 10-year history.

WhatsApp is a real-time mobile messaging service with more than 450 million monthly users. The app has more than one million new registered users each day.

The thing with online social networks is that the value isn't so much in the site but in the network of users.

So, what Facebook are always nervous about is any new competitor that gains a bit of ground because it might be that everyone switches from Facebook to that new network. When a new network gets to the sort of "hundreds of millions of users" level, they have to get in there and buy them up so they don't threaten Facebook.

There are two downsides to this.

1. It's very expensive. You can't keep on giving away 5% of the company and a couple of year's profits to buy companies with little revenue stream.

2. It just incentivises more competitors to create build-to-flip social networking companies that Facebook is going to have to buy, making things worse. And the thing is, social networking really isn't a very hard problem for software developers.

Fundamentally, I think social networking is just not a sound business. It's built on venture capitalist money, and what those venture capitalists do is to get a great site developed that bleeds money while raising the customer base in the hope that a bigger company or mug shareholders will come along and buy it. Then the investors are stuck with a site that's not making money, so they start sticking ads on the site to try and make some, but the result is that this then annoys users (who won't pay the full value of their site) who go and find the next non-annoying social networking site. Rinse. Repeat.

"Facebook 'praise' for term-time discounts sparks campaign"

From the BBC:

With about 250 friends on Facebook, childless Paul Cookson did not expect "praise" he posted to have much impact. He wrote that he was "delighted" to be offered "discounts" by tour operators who reduced their prices outside school holidays and other peak times.

A few friends agreed, and followed his request to "share this post if you have also taken advantage of term-time discounts". It soon went viral, and more than 143,000 people have shared it so far.

"It's more fun behaving like a big kid when there are no actual kids watching!"

Supporters also began signing an online petition calling for the government to recognise the industry's achievements in the New Year Honours List and this has now gone far beyond the 100,000 signatures needed for a possible debate in Parliament.

Mr Cookson's initial post, entitled "In praise of term-time discounts", noted that non-parents were "rewarded" for doing the right thing and not taking their holidays during the busy school holidays. It came about after he got a great deal on a holiday for him and his long term girlfriend, with whom he has no children.

"Term-time discounts and no screaming kids? What's not to like?"

He told the BBC he was stunned by the response on Facebook, with many people encouraging him to "carry it on and fight". So the 41-year-old set up a Facebook group called Term Time Discounts, in which many other childless people - young and old alike - have shared examples of great value getaways.

One of the group's members posted a link to the e-petition, which is entitled: "Thank holiday companies for giving us cheap breaks during off-season!"

Whatever is the world coming to..?

From The Mirror, February 2013: Mum, 22, arrested on child trafficking charges after 'trying to sell her kids on Facebook for $5,000'

From The Mirror, January 2014: Pregnant teenager 'sells unborn baby on Facebook for just £68'

Facebook is a social networking site! If you want to sell stuff you use eBay or Gumtree.

Social Networks

From The Guardian:

Facebook made a startling admission in its earnings announcement this month: it was seeing a "decrease in daily users, specifically among teens". In other words, teenagers are still on Facebook; they're just not using it as much as they did. It was a landmark statement, since teens are the demographic who often point the rest of us towards the next big thing.

Their gradual exodus to messaging apps such as WhatsApp, WeChat and KakaoTalk boils down to Facebook becoming a victim of its own success. The road to gaining nearly 1.2 billion monthly active users has seen the mums, dads, aunts and uncles of the generation who pioneered Facebook join it too, spamming their walls with inspirational quotes and images of cute animals, and (shock, horror) commenting on their kids' photos. No surprise, then, that Facebook is no longer a place for uninhibited status updates about pub antics, but an obligatory communication tool that younger people maintain because everyone else does.

All the fun stuff is happening elsewhere. On their mobiles.

It's interesting because the thing with personal social networks is that it's about people meeting the people they want to meet, without wasting time with people they don't.

The success of Facebook isn't technological, it's about who joined first. They got Harvard students, people we could best describe as "alphas" in some ways, people that other people would like to hang out with. So then, people in other top universities could join. And because Harvard is above them in social networking, they joined, then other colleges and finally, the public.

But what people don't want is to be bothered. You don't want you mum's crazy 2nd cousin asking why you don't bother commenting on her updates. Or your mum finding out that you got drunk. Or to be bothered by lots of people way down the social scale.

The people who do worst out of this are the people that everyone wants to talk to. So, they move to other networks to get away from people, and with this, others start to follow, until eventually the network has moved elsewhere.

I give it a couple of years and Facebook will be where MySpace is today. And we'll start getting news reports in the Daily Mail about various things people have been getting up to on WhatsApp.

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