Hacker News Reader

Comment by kirse | Hacker News Reader

I think Facebook should put up a puzzle on their website called "Make Facebook Profitable" and hire based on the solutions to that.

Somewhat a joke, but also somewhat serious... I wonder if that would net them a few good ideas. Maybe even give this puzzle a prize akin to the Netflix challenge. It would give them a ton of idea output for what amounts to a small award compared to the work performed.

View on HN

I don't think it should be a joke at all. It seems to me that a company that doesn't know what its business plan is should probably be hiring people who have a talent for making business plans.

Just because they don't talk about it, doesn't mean they don't have ideas and plans on how to proceed.

oh come on, in this economy, if anyone had a "make $$$ NOW" button under their desk, it would have been pushed long ago. their secret plan was to ride a bubble in the markets, but thats over. i feel bad for the rank and file, if zuck had done an ipo in mid-2007, the rank and file could have made some serious cash.

It would seem like good policy for a company built on the premise that everyone should share their information to actually share their information. I'm not saying that they don't have ideas and plans on how to proceed, I'm just saying that if they were really confident about the viability of those plans, they'd be more vocal about them.

As it is, my own guess is that facebook's business plan involves selling the personal information of its members. This would be the most obvious commodity and also the most obvious reason why facebook wouldn't want to talk about their business plans.

Remember Beacon? They do. They're careful.

Much more than personal information, what facebook can monetize is identity & relationships.

For example, with Facebook Connect, it's much harder to be an anonymous troll commenter on a blog. And maybe using Facebook Connect as a login for eCommerce sites would reduce the amount of fraud those sites have to deal with. That is definitely monetizeable.

1. Subscription Fee 2. Advertising Fee

Reply on news.ycombinator.com