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Comment by 1010100101 | Hacker News Reader

It's all about the short term, as the article makes clear.

The biggest winners will be those who can cash out quickly. Goldman and some overseas investors.

Long term I think the Facebook _data_ will be sold and resold (licensed) many, many times. It may end up with a company (or companies) that today does not exist. The legacy of Facebook will be the data. We told some antisocial nerd who our friends are. And he sold us out.

Facebook the entity will probably fade away, probably by being acquired. The value is the data. They just managed to get an enormous amount of personal private information for free.

It's an amazing thing to have 800 million people give you their email address, a list of their friends and possibly additional personal info. Certainly there is potential value there. But that itself does not a business make. In my opinion. We'll see what happens.

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Honestly, I don't think there's that much value in the data. Most of the big social gaming companies probably have most of that data anyway from scraping the social graph -- if money is in the data, they haven't been mining their data properly.

Agreed. But whatever value there is, it's in that data. And those gaming companies needed to scrape Facebook to get it.

There's more value to create for whoever manages to monetise the data. But will it be Facebook? Or will it be someone else? Doesn't seem like that will matter for an IPO. An IPO will benefit certain large investors regardless of what happens to the company long term. And they will cash out quick.

There is a ton of data that advertisers would pay a lot to get Facebook data to their display campaigns. For brand media buyers, hitting their target demographics just got much easier. For performance advertisers, imagine the possibilities if you could hit the female population of ESPN easily instead of being forced to buy all of ESPN inventory. Well there's probably better examples, but my tired mind can't fathom the upcoming advertising battles with Facebook data in hand.

It will be interesting to see how stricter data protection laws play out. The EU will make a new data protection directive in 2012/2013, and other new laws like in Singapore or HongKong are more influenced by the EU standard than by US standards - because otherwise they may not get outsourcing work from EU. But I still agree that the facebook data is likely to be very valuable...

One of the EU ideas is to give the user a right to "export" their personal data. If there was a functionality where it took you 1 click to recreate all your facebook-data on "SocialNetwork2.0" the switching costs would seem to be very low. I sometimes feel that network advantages are overestimated. Here in Germany we had the facebook clone "StudiVZ" a few years ago, and practically all students were members. Nowadays Facebook dominates here too and many new students don't bother joining "StudiVZ" anymore.

Agree.

I can remember the issue of the EC's database directive from as far back as the early 1990's. It was one of the issues we studied.

At that time it seemed somewhat tenuous to apply it to what was happening on the nascent www.

For the most part it seemed no one was ostensibly collecting personal data and building sensitive databases of personal info. It was just a possibility we discussed.

Needless to say things have changed.

Zuck has talked about this publicly: He foresees Facebook.com fading, and Facebook's social graph to the be the thing that powers every quasi-social activity on the internet.

I think the time is ripe for someone to do to facebook what google did to yahoo.

The technology is out there, believe me. Making it super user-friendly is another matter.

There is a better way to do social networks, I believe. But at present I can only demonstrate it with the command line. The user interface is just not there.

We all know Zuckerberg put a lot of effort into user interface. And he did a very good job with that. That is no coincidence.

We should talk offline.

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