Fresh face for $15 billion Facebook on Blackberry

Stan Beer
Thursday, 25 October 2007 18:10

Opinion and Analysis

With both MySpace and YouTube off the market, the hottest property on the Web right now is social networking site Facebook, said to be valued at a massive US$15 billion by suitors such as Microsoft and Google. The latest liaison for the site with 50 million fresh faces on its books is with RIM, purveyor of the Blackberry, the smartphone of choice for business professionals.

The new alliance see a customized version of Facebook made available for Blackberry users, complete with the social networking features already used on computers such as exchanging messages and photos and inviting friends to join the network.

The Blackberry, already used extensively by professionals because of its operating systems'push email capabilities would seem to be an ideal device to make use Facebook's social connectivity features.

While some have tried to portray the pairing of RIM and Facebook as an odd couple alliance, in reality the university roots of Facebook make the demographic a very valuable one for a company like RIM which targets and is popular in the business professional market space. Co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, after all, was a Harvard student when he started Facebook as a networking sites for university students, ostensibly the professionals of the future.

While Facebook is now open to all-comers, its demographic is still widely viewed as being a generally more sophisticated and mature audience than the all-out consumer oriented MySpace.

With Microsoft already said to be lining up to spend US$240 million for small slice of Facebook putting a value of the company of US$15 billion, the question is whether Facebook has become to valuable for any one company to take it out. If so, will Facebook be the first social network to go to IPO?