Facebook went public

Last Friday, the largest social network site, Facebook, went public finally, which many people seemed to expect for long time. According to Wikipedia, active users are now over 900 million peoples. Is this really ? It is almost twice population of India ! This is amazing number.

For your information, I`m gonna list up top ten largest population countries and each population below.

1. China (1347 million)
2. India  (422 million)
3. United State (313 million)
4. Indonesia (237 million)
5. Brazil (192 million)
6. Pakistan (179 million)
7. Nigeria (162 million)
8. Russia (143 million)
9. Bangladesh (142 million)
10. Japan (127 million)
 
When I heard of Facebook on TV at first time, Facebook was still available only for university students. On the TV program, Facebook was web tool used for sharing information about classes, activities, and so on in universities. When I felt that Facebook was commonly accepted, Facebook was already open for anyone else to be connected with friends. Since I came to U.S., I came to feel strongly more because Facebook is used for business as useful alternative website other than original one to keep people. For example, when I searched picking of chestnut in Santa Cruz Mountain last year, I went to the website at first in Google, but when I opened it, I found the link to another site of Facebook. And peoples are urged to go the Facebook page to get latest information about condition of piking. That was really useful in order to check the condition before visiting it. I guess that people running that picking place would update the Facebook page timely via smart phone. This story would be already applied to a lot of situations like food trucks, sale of super markets, and so on. This is very win-win relationship between suppliers and customers. Customers can know exactly what is current situation timely, and suppliers can tell what they want to tell to customers for almost free.


Let me go back to the story about the IPO of Facebook. Since a few month ago, many people expected facebook to go public, its expectation has increased day by day. Additionally, its evaluation as a company also has increased simultaneously. However, according to news paper, its profit is depending on online advertisement, and it is lower that its expectation from the market. I would say that Facebook is evaluated more that it should be actually and bubble is coming to Facebook. Its business is not new, and something can replace them. If you look back the past, myspace was paid attention highly and myspace was believed to be most successful social networking site at that time but Facebook was able to replace it. So there is possibility that something could replace Facebook as well in the future.


In my opinion, the only way that Facebook can survive is to keep its web page attractive by adding new features to keep people stay there longer, otherwise customers easily move to other place once something useful comes out.