FaceBook.com and Orkut.com need no introduction. Everyone who is anyone is on them. Social networking its called. It’s a place to meet new people, see what is happening with old friends etc etc… Purely based on technology they are nothing to write home about. It’s simple client server architecture. Ones built using PHP the other uses Asp.net. Though I will say facebook is a little more complex with its API’s. Anyways what’s good though is the “How to get people to keep coming back” model (don’t have a better word for it).
In 1999-2001 we saw the dotcom boom. Investors world over poured billions of dollars into these dotcom’s. The valuations were justified by the eyeballs factor, click factor, time spent on the site factor etc. The assumption was that if a website could get enough people to come back regularly, somehow in the future they will be able to generate revenue out of this user base. We all know how many of them actually did that.
Now looking at Facebook and Orkut purely from this perspective, I think they have enough going for them. People have enough reasons to register, come back again and log in a million times’s a day. No wonder they are valued in billions of dollars but….
Can someone please tell me how they will make money? Advertisements are one way to do it. With a persons likes and dislikes on the profile it will be easy to market products based on that. If I am Mr. Bill Gates and I just paid 15 billion dollars for one of them. How long will it take to break even on that investment? Given that the only way I earn is by advertising on it. Beats me… maybe the guys out there are much more innovative and hopefully they will find more ways to convert that user base into money.
Professionally speaking it is fun working for a dotcom. I have worked for one but like all dotcoms, the revenue source always looked dicey to me. Dotcoms barring a few like Google, EBay, Amazon are not a good place to start your business from. They work when there is an underlying business in the real world to support.
IT works best when it is used as a business enhancer. IT can do wonders for a business that has roots in the real world. It can bring more efficiency, better turn around time and coherence to the business processes. It can make business reach out to every nook and corner of the world. Tap customers who were previously impossible to reach.
IT in that mode is understandable, Dotcoms not so sure.
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