I've been facebook'd !

I had resisted the urge to register on those "Web 2.0" social networked sites such as linkedin, Facebook and the like as i was not a big believer in what they could offer.

I heard a lot of friends telling how great it was, how they reconnected with lost friends, neighbours, colleagues, even grandmas from outerspace ( mostly in the wee hours of the morning for the latter), and , i had a bit of "electrical" downtime the week before this one so i decided to give it a try . I must admit, i have mixed feelings about it :

• The redundancy :
  
  
• First of all , the whole point is to add people you already know from different networks ( close friends,friends of friends you met once or twice, your girlfriend's younger sister, colleagues , business relationships...) contrary to teenager oriented MySpace where the point seems to meet peeps you don't even know, but that also raises a lot of privacy / exposition issues which i'll probably get to later . But what i don't get is that YOU ALREADY KNOW THESE PEOPLE !! You go to restaurants , movies , parties, travels... You have
  pictures/videos of you with them , have their contact stored in your mobile phone etc...Why the need to store that online ?? I don't really get it.
  
  
• The asynchronicity :
  

• It's fun for a while, I add friends , compare movie taste , throw chickens (?!) at each other but i got bored pretty quick.I guess i prefer face to face contact, or at least instant messaging, which could be generically referred as synchronous communication between two living entities ( i think no one wants to talk to a dead cat, i think, and anyways i'm allergic but let's not move away from the point) . This ( meaning facebook) kind of asynchronous is clearly not what i prefer. I remember in high school struggling to read "Les confessions de Rousseau" in which he stated that he would rather dialog with people via regular mail (arrgh !! la poste again :). I didn't finish it and thank god for the "Profil". I couldn't disagree more with him ! Face to face is always more fun.
  

• The valuation :
  
  
• Pack your needles and sharp edges, the bubble is back ! From i am what i can remember , Yahoo's Terry Semel came up with an initial offer of $1 billion, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook 23 year old CEO refused. Yahoo went back to the drawing board and came up with a $2 billion, yet again refused. Micr$s$ft recently struck a deal with Facebook to become their exclusive ad provider for until 2011, for $240 million. I don't get it : i don't spend much time on Facebook and with the average thousand links to people, apps , notifications, quizzes and what not,i didn't even notice the ads, which i wouldn't click on anyways. Pretty expensive for ads.Worse , this only gets them a 1.5% stake in Facebook, valuing the whole corporation to OVER $15 billion !! Seems to me that someone has been given 20 grand just for making a handle, and he's keeping the rug !! I mean $15 billion for a "social" site ??? Are you fucking kidding me ?

• A ray of hope :)

• Even though i might not be "client" for such apps, it is yet again cool to see that if you've got an idea people are willing to respond, it WILL take off.This thing was originally accessible only to US college kids, and is now generating 1 billion pageviews a day, by its strong 40 million userbase. The power of a strong contributing community compared to a top down single content provider is yet again confirmed ! representz the new model ! Finally, Zuckerberg's estimated wealth is now over 2$ billion, and Facebook is not even on the stock market ! Maybe he'll drop us a fridge :)
  

Conclusion : fun for a while, but largely overvalued in my opinion.Comments welcome.