Well everyone knows that the social networking site Myspace is owned by Rupert Murdoch and it seems that Myspaces biggest competitor, Facebook is now being courted by another media giant, Microsoft.
According to this New York Times Article Microsoft and Facebook began talking yesterday. This is an interesting development in Facebooks's history as almost half a year ago the site 23-year old founder Mark E. Zuckerberg turned down $900 Million dollars from Yahoo for an outright buyout.
Now it seems that Microsoft may be offering 300-500 million dollars for a percentage of the compnay, these figures would of course escalate as Microsoft's \competitor has already expressed interest as well.
This relationship isn't entirely new either, as for the past year Microsoft has put advertisements onto the site, and for the past 4 months Facebook has opened its programming allowing any company or person to make an application or company profile (Wal-Mart, target etc. )
I guess everyone has a price
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3 comments:
Cute Title! Do you know what differences would occur with Facebook if Microsoft took over? I mean there are already sooo many new applications on Facebook and now that it is open to everyone and not just college students anyone can find out anything about everyone. I wonder what Microsoft has to offer, or if it is just a popularity contest. . .
I wouldn't foresee too many major changes coming from Microsoft purchasing a share of Facebook's holdings, although I'm curious as to how users would respond. Many users of social networking sites enjoy the ease of use, which presumably would only be increased if Facebook were to have access to the Microsoft think-tank. On the other hand, many users (myself included), view Microsoft as overly controlling of its software use, and as a result may resent the changes.
I think that sites like Facebook should stay the way they are because that is what makes them so great. It is when big companies begin to buy out these sites that they start to go down hill. But Facebook did get a tempting offer. I know if I would have started Facebook, I think I would have said sold when I was offered the $900 million.
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