大象传媒

How much was Facebook supposed to be valued at again? I lost count. It would be nice to think that some of the people making decisions about this actually knew their stuff, but then the problems were obvious long before the last dot.com bubble burst and they're even more obvious now.

Unfortunately history has always shown that having a lot of money and knowing how best to use it don't always go hand in hand. I wouldn't mind so much but wealthy people can often afford to lose a lot of money, the problem is that markets are three dimensional beasts and those worst affected often end up being the poorest in society.

Common sense, where art thou?

Mark
Editor-in Chief
ISPreview.co.uk

I can see how this might be useful, you're at Glastonbury 150ft from the front. You want to see the band so you use the app to view other's photos.

No doubt it will be taken up with dodgy people sharing photos of themselves or worse, you.

I wonder if there will be an English version :)

PS, the layout of the app makes no sense.

More toys for people with nothing better to do, who want to stay like children forever.

Yes, you can write an app in your bedroom, but for social networking you also need servers to link the app users together. You also need to write the server-side code, which is often a lot more complex than the code running on the users' phones and PCs. My guess is that this where at least some of the startup capital is going.

Here's my burning question: will it be renamed Colour for the UK/Commonwealth market?

I have to agree with Rory that this kind of level of investment at such an early stage in the company has bubble written all over it, although with anything that deals with media content the company certainly needs seed money for servers and storage.

I see little to no value in seeing photos of an area I'm geographically close to, after all I may as well just view it with my own eyes - however, where I think this will have value would be overlaid onto Google Maps or similar, to provide context rich, visual information about various locations that perhaps Streetview just can't capture. If you consider a Google buyout of the company within 12 - 24 months, suddenly $41 million could look like a cheap price and a worthy investment.

Some of that money will be spent on employees and infrastructure but the majority of that investment will be burned away as marketing expenses. Yes, you can write an app in your bedroom and upload it to an app-store, but it takes much more to get it noticed and tell the whole world about it.

Don't Apple already have a piece of their own software called "Color"?

Well, I'm one of those people who thought Facebook would never catch on, and that Twitter is pointless, so it's probably best not to invest on my advice! But I share the sentiment of your friend: this is rather creepy. This looks like a great app for perverts: assuming one was so inclined, one could take pics of one's own self naked, and share them with the neighbourhood, without leaving one's home. Is "virtual flashing" a crime?

But regardless of a minority abusing the technology (which is inevitable), frankly, the idea that every time I'd want to use the app, I'd be bombarded with the pics of other users, just looks like another form of spam to me: 'Photo-spam'. Expect to see millions of carefully styled photos of various products being enjoyed by beautiful people having fun... and then you'll wonder why you suddenly feel hungry, or thirsty, or fancy buying a new thingamajig... we're all doomed, I tell you...

I can see why and how facebook is worth so much. They have zillions of subscribers, what else do they need to monitise the platform?

On the other hand, $41 million for a mob app??? I'm not so sure. As a start, mobile applications are limited by the screen size, ie limited features and less ways of displaying ads. I usually turn off the internet connectivity on my android device so that the ads aren't displayed on the free applications I use, I wouldn't pay for an application.

The ads are just annoying on such small screen and they slow down my mobile, so I just turn them off.

In a way, I both agree and disagree with this blog. There is lots of potential in the social networking, but that doesn't necessarily mean all social networking websites/applications are going to make lots of money.

No. 9. Facebook is pointless and its value will not last in the medium to longterm unless it keeps changing and developinig. Myspace anyone? Twitter is really pointless. Do "we" really think our every utterance is worth noting and posting. O god but that's what I'm doing here! Bugger.

But on a serious note what a load of Bks!

I can just imagine the shared photos from couple's tents at glastonbury... cyberdogging anyone? Obviously you'd only use this app for photos you are happy sharing with anyone nearby and due to aforementioned possibilities it would have to be suitably policed. Policing it would require every single uploaded photo to be vetted by a human being before being put on the network. Costly...

Thanks Rory.

I think Mark Howe hit the nail, with the reference to server costs (all those photos need to be stored somewhere, as well as back-up solutions - just as an example Facebook has 30,000+ servers per first search hits when googling this).

I'd be very surprised if Sequoia would be careless enough to burn it all on marketing costs.

Where Color gets interesting (and hence potentially worthy of investment) is that they have managed to do something new - 'automagic' social graphing (on Facebook you determine who your social graph / friends are; on Twitter you decide who to follow). On Color your social graph is taken care of for you based on your location, and who you are regularly nearby (this will develop further, spending some of the 41m ...). No-one else is really doing this yet, and it could potentially lead to a Facebook killer. I'm not saying it will, but the probability times the potential upside could possibly explain some of the investment rationale, and I'm sure the investment is phased, and somehow protected also ...

Lots of great discussion over on Quora on this also.