Facebook Inc. is the cinderella story of Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg who started out with an idea of digitizing the Harvard student yearbook in 2004 but ended up with disrupting the way people all over the world interact, communicate and share their life stories by 2008.
Today (April 2009), about a quarter of the Norwegian population are members of facebook, about 15% of the Canadians as well. Demographics show that the age group of 35-54 is the largest growing group on Facebook with 276% growth. More than 50% of Facebook members are visiting the website once a day or more. About 60% of the users are females. Members find long-lost friends, invites to parties or concerts, or simply share events from their real-life with their FB friends. Further, Facebook has become a platform for 3rd party developers to create social applications where members dig into music, share their favorite actors or food, or use dating services.*
Facebook is also the story about the kid (Zuckerberg) who turned down a 10 million dollars for the company 6 month after launch from (now defunct?) Friendster but kept developing the company. However, Zuckerberg got famous for turning down another offer, this one from Yahoo for one Billion dollars(yes, $1.000.000.000, or 6.500.000.000 Norwegian Kroner), in 2007! Microsoft speculated a price of $15 Billion mid 2008 but most experts thought this to be ridiculously high. Nevertheless, a remarkable story considering the company was worth nothing only 5 years ago.*
What has Facebook done? What will they do? And how will members react???