Put your coffee down, you’ll spit it. Facebook cheerleaders, from within what must be a social networking tunnel (or cave?), have transformed themselves into prostrate worshipers, transubstantiating reason to whatever the digital equivalent is of 72 virgins.
Facebook Bubble Cult Pushes Value To $100 Billion
Well, Jason Calacanis calls it “full-blown madness,” but I like the drama of cultish mass delirium better – it brings up imagery of frothy mouths, rolled back eyes, and bacon-frying twitchiness.
Reporting from the Graphing Social Patterns conference, for developers and marketers looking to better utilize the Facebook open platform, Calacanis says a panel of fans and investors valued Facebook at $100 billion and predicted the annihilation of Google and MySpace at the hands of Mark Zuckerberg.
And some of us thought $8 billion and $15 billion were steep valuations. Under the same math, Calacanis says that makes Google worth about $14 trillion. Is there even that much money in the world?
There were other claims made, but these are enough to make you dizzy, or go mad. “[T]his is the kind of madness that got us in trouble the last time around (i.e. 1999),” says Calacanis.
If you believe all that, I’ve got a novel I haven’t finished writing yet that’s guaranteed to sell 3 billion copies – yes, half the world will read it and I’ll never have to work again.
If Facebook, with half the traffic and a third of the pageviews of rival MySpace, has reached such heights by opening up its platform to developers, what happens when MySpace does the same?
Or maybe, if Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer was erroneous in his “faddish” assessment of Facebook, then Rupert Murdoch must be stupid? News flash: Murdoch has proved, whether you like him or not, that he is the best at playing this game.
And as for the annihilation of Google…well, we’ve heard that before from more than a few much larger and more successful online properties than Facebook.
For charts and graphs and more madness, check out Calacanis’s lengthy post.
