billso.com

Bill Sodeman writes about management, mobile computing and information systems

billso.com header image 2

Crazy money

Posted Monday, 28 January 2008, 03:31 HST @521

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.

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

 

Trackbacks

(Trackback URL)

close Reblog this comment
blog comments powered by Disqus