Advertising

The Next Microsoft Product: Facebook Live?

The Wall Street journal is reporting that Microsoft may be in talks to buy a stake in facebook that would give the software giant a hold on up to 5% of the swiftly-growing social networking site. Such a purchase is rumored to be valued between $300-$500 million, which would value facebook at up to $10 billion!

If Microsoft buys in, it will be a major milestone for facebook and will allow it to build on existing Microsoft ad platforms to improve its advertising revenues (which would couple nicely with facebook’s recent deployment of pay-per-click and user-targeted advertising options). And such a buy-in would make life much easier for Microsoft because it will keep them from having to reinvent the wheel and attract new users to yet another social site, which is very important as many users are getting tired of signing up for new sites and reentering the same information over and over. (This is why the future of social networking online is in the OpenID project, if they could ever make it more consumer-friendly.) In fact, I would say that the online user infrastructure is about to hit a ceiling for the number of social-based sites it can support, but that is a topic for another time.

A possible complication to this Microsoft/facebook tango is that it is also rumored that Google has been circling the waters looking to buy a stake of facebook, as well. I have doubts about this, given the most recent rumors coming out of Mountain View (via TechCrunch) about a ‘facebook killer’ that Google is planning. Essentially, they are planning a rollout of 100% open APIs that can both push and pull data from a social network (aka Orkut). So, I’d take any Google/facebook rumors with a grain of salt…since it seems that everyday there is a new story about Google’s plans for world domination.

All-in-all, it is shaping up to be a very interesting couple for weeks for facebook and the social networking world as a whole…updates to follow.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

a Wordpress powered Site | Site info| contact cafourek [at] gmail.com