Crazy money

From Busi­ness­Week comes a long pro­file of the Face­book econ­omy. As I dis­cussed on 10 August 2007, Face­book has become very pop­u­lar as the ser­vice opened its APIs to third-party appli­ca­tions last 24 May. Slide recently received a US$50 mil­lion round of ven­ture cap­i­tal fund­ing, based on that company’s suite of Face­book wid­gets like Top Friends, Super­Poke and Fun­Wall. That seems like crazy money, con­sid­er­ing that these f8 appli­ca­tions are lit­tle more than fea­tures in a social net­work. Gigaom.com points out that the recent acqui­si­tions of MySQL, BEA and Skype don’t make much sense, either.

Secu­rity is another major risk. A cracker named DMaul recent posted a 17 giga­byte file of pho­tos that he down­loaded from thou­sands of pri­vate MySpace pro­files, accord­ing to this report in Wired. The mas­sive file was posted on Bit­Tor­rent, and includes pho­tos posted by 14– and 15-year old MySpace mem­bers. MySpace makes pro­files pri­vate by default for that age group.

Tagged as: API, BitTorrent, economy, facebook, key-success-factors, ksf, myspace, MySQL, network, oracle, security, Skype, social, sun, USA