Yesterday Facebook announced its long awaited search offering which they are calling graph search. It is the logical way to make the graph data that Facebook has been accumulating on its own and through its open graph accessible to users. Graph search is launching in beta with the obvious types of searches: people based on interests, places, movies, books, music, etc based on people. This is of course what Google has been fearing and why Google has been doubling down on Google+ at every turn ...

Yesterday Facebook announced its long awaited search offering which they are calling graph search. It is the logical way to make the graph data that Facebook has been accumulating on its own and through its open graph accessible to users. Graph search is launching in beta with the obvious types of searches: people based on interests, places, movies, books, music, etc based on people. This is of course what Google has been fearing and why Google has been doubling down on Google+ at every turn ...

The shift of usage away from the web and to mobile is going on in full force. About half of the US population now has a smartphone and that penetration is rapidly growing. That shift has been widely cited as a problem for Facebook. But generally the problem is stated in terms of a smaller advertising opportunity on mobile devices as a result of screen size. That goes back to Facebook’s own amendments to their IPO filings, in which they stated:“Although the substantial majority of our mobile u...

The shift of usage away from the web and to mobile is going on in full force. About half of the US population now has a smartphone and that penetration is rapidly growing. That shift has been widely cited as a problem for Facebook. But generally the problem is stated in terms of a smaller advertising opportunity on mobile devices as a result of screen size. That goes back to Facebook’s own amendments to their IPO filings, in which they stated:“Although the substantial majority of our mobile u...

Andy Baio provided an excellent perspective on Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram by analyzing the price per active user. This analysis shows that at about $30 per user this deal is far below many previous acquisitions. It also indicates that Yahoo’s acquisition of Broadcast.com continues to stand as the most outlandish deal at more than $10,000 per active user. At USV we have tracked a meaningful number of investment rounds across our portfolio and the data from this suggests that $30 per u...

Andy Baio provided an excellent perspective on Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram by analyzing the price per active user. This analysis shows that at about $30 per user this deal is far below many previous acquisitions. It also indicates that Yahoo’s acquisition of Broadcast.com continues to stand as the most outlandish deal at more than $10,000 per active user. At USV we have tracked a meaningful number of investment rounds across our portfolio and the data from this suggests that $30 per u...

So Facebook settled with the FTC over privacy and Mark Zuckerberg wrote another apologetic blog post (as pointed out by Liz Gannes this is his tenth). Part of the need for these apologies comes from Facebook’s aggressive approach to releasing features which at some level is admirable in a company of their scale. But what is really driving the problems is a fundamental conundrum about privacy in the digital age. Anything that was private a second ago can be made public by someone else with oft...

So Facebook settled with the FTC over privacy and Mark Zuckerberg wrote another apologetic blog post (as pointed out by Liz Gannes this is his tenth). Part of the need for these apologies comes from Facebook’s aggressive approach to releasing features which at some level is admirable in a company of their scale. But what is really driving the problems is a fundamental conundrum about privacy in the digital age. Anything that was private a second ago can be made public by someone else with oft...

Yesterday Facebook announced “Home,” a homescreen takeover application for Android that makes Facebook your phones primary interaction surface. Here are my initial reactions. First, this is a smart move by Facebook as an attempt to counter the threat of unbundling that is posed by apps. Competing apps unbundle different pieces of functionality (Twitter for status, Instagram for photos, Foursquare for location, Kik for messaging, etc). Facebook has rightly recognized that whenever you have unb...

Yesterday Facebook announced “Home,” a homescreen takeover application for Android that makes Facebook your phones primary interaction surface. Here are my initial reactions. First, this is a smart move by Facebook as an attempt to counter the threat of unbundling that is posed by apps. Competing apps unbundle different pieces of functionality (Twitter for status, Instagram for photos, Foursquare for location, Kik for messaging, etc). Facebook has rightly recognized that whenever you have unb...

If Yahoo had any shred of credibility left with developers then it has succeeded in destroying that with its misguided patent lawsuit against Facebook. But the suit isn’t all bad. It has the potential to become a catalytic event for broader social awareness of the perils of software patents, similar to how the SOPA/PIPA battle moved copyright and its enforcement into more of a mainstream issue. That was sort of the gist of Mark Cuban’s post. The first group of people who should really start t...

If Yahoo had any shred of credibility left with developers then it has succeeded in destroying that with its misguided patent lawsuit against Facebook. But the suit isn’t all bad. It has the potential to become a catalytic event for broader social awareness of the perils of software patents, similar to how the SOPA/PIPA battle moved copyright and its enforcement into more of a mainstream issue. That was sort of the gist of Mark Cuban’s post. The first group of people who should really start t...

Earlier today I participated in an Oxford-style debate in London of the motion “Facebook Is Not Your Friend.” I argued for the motion together with Baroness Susan Greenfield. Taking the opposing view were Ben Hammersley and Lewis Iwu. This was a lot of fun as the Baroness and I have very different takes on this subject. She came at it from a neuroscience and cultural perspective with a concern over what a shift away from time spent in person to time spent online will do to how people think of...

Earlier today I participated in an Oxford-style debate in London of the motion “Facebook Is Not Your Friend.” I argued for the motion together with Baroness Susan Greenfield. Taking the opposing view were Ben Hammersley and Lewis Iwu. This was a lot of fun as the Baroness and I have very different takes on this subject. She came at it from a neuroscience and cultural perspective with a concern over what a shift away from time spent in person to time spent online will do to how people think of...

I was going to write a post about Facebook’s valuation, but Bill Gurley has done such an excellent job, that the better idea is to point at his post explaining “Why Facebook Clearly Belongs in the 10x Revenue Club.” There is one other important point to consider in thinking about Internet company valuations in the current economic environment: low interest rates. Companies that are still growing and have a lot of room for future growth have a fair bit of their value sitting in the future – th...

I was going to write a post about Facebook’s valuation, but Bill Gurley has done such an excellent job, that the better idea is to point at his post explaining “Why Facebook Clearly Belongs in the 10x Revenue Club.” There is one other important point to consider in thinking about Internet company valuations in the current economic environment: low interest rates. Companies that are still growing and have a lot of room for future growth have a fair bit of their value sitting in the future – th...

Yesterday, Techmeme was ablaze with posts about sharing on Facebook’s Open Graph. A CNet post by Molly Wood with the title “How Facebook is ruining sharing” appears to have kicked it all off. In it she argues that the automated (“frictionless”) sharing via Open Graph apps results in a lot more noise rather than signal. Marshall Kirkpartrick at RWW holds the same view in a piece titled “Why Facebook’s Seamless Sharing is Wrong”. Robert Scoble – not that surprisingly – is more optimistic about ...

Yesterday, Techmeme was ablaze with posts about sharing on Facebook’s Open Graph. A CNet post by Molly Wood with the title “How Facebook is ruining sharing” appears to have kicked it all off. In it she argues that the automated (“frictionless”) sharing via Open Graph apps results in a lot more noise rather than signal. Marshall Kirkpartrick at RWW holds the same view in a piece titled “Why Facebook’s Seamless Sharing is Wrong”. Robert Scoble – not that surprisingly – is more optimistic about ...

One of the rumors from last week was that Snapchat turned down an acquisition offer from Facebook valued at $3 billion. As always in these situations (cf Groupon) one doesn’t know whether such an offer really existed or how firm it was (and there is also the question of how quickly and easily it would have closed). But this story is clearly related to another story which Jenna Wortham reported on in the New York Times on the weekend: the decline of Facebook usage among teenagers. Clearly one ...

One of the rumors from last week was that Snapchat turned down an acquisition offer from Facebook valued at $3 billion. As always in these situations (cf Groupon) one doesn’t know whether such an offer really existed or how firm it was (and there is also the question of how quickly and easily it would have closed). But this story is clearly related to another story which Jenna Wortham reported on in the New York Times on the weekend: the decline of Facebook usage among teenagers. Clearly one ...