Facebook shares who is buying them?

[Ryoko]

So Facebook has floated itself with an estimated value of $100bn.

I just don't get this, Facebook started out a simple tool for people too keep in touch and talk to each other, with that success the company have started encroaching more and more on peoples lives. The site is nothing more then a data harvesting tool now, with adverts chucked at you, silly apps and pages for every company under the sun and now the dreaded Timeline forced on every account that everyone hates and wants rid of.

It's only a matter of time before everyone jumps ship and moves on, no one likes Facebook anymore it's not what it once was, people are just waiting for a good alternative to go to that gets back to the core values Facebook once had.

So I don't understand why 1: it's been valued so highly and 2: why anybody would buy shares in something thats nothing more then a meeting point that IMHO will be over/have significantly less users in five years time.

It's valued highly because of the billions of 14 - 30 year-olds that aren't using it yet. Maybe the 40+ generaton aren't as in love with it as younger people but it's reached a long way in eight years, shows no sign of slowing down, there are new potential users being born every minute and there's the rest of the world to go at.

But Chevolet who once advertised upon it have backed off and advised others not to bother as a FB presence has no impact on sales.

The 25-40 year olds are the ones fed up with it and just waiting for Google+ to improve or someone else to appear on the scene. seems odd to care what 14 year old do considering they have no money to spend.

I give facebook another couple of years, then the world will be bored of it and will have moved on to some other newfangled thing.

ditto

its just the latest tech bubble.

I agree. The bubble will burst soon. Which is why the founders got out now with their obscene amounts of cash.

Thank god I'm not the only one feeling this way. I mean well done MZ for running with the money - I mean, who wouldn't? But I'm seeing disengagement amongst my own peers - as you so rightly say, we're all just waiting for Google+ to get going - of course making it work on a variety of platforms would be a good fucking start!

It's some kind of dastardly plan/scam, first piss everyone off with Timeline then sell shares then........?

You say that re. Google+ Alpine but speaking as someone whose husband just spent a year working with Google on Cloud stuff he says they haven't got a fecking clue what they're doing. Nothing they've released apart from Google search has actually worked. Google Buzz anyone? He found it completely impossible to get their oh-so-PhD-brains around what business actually needs. Has anyone ever watched one of the Google in-house videos "explaining" what Buzz or Google+ is meant to do? It's always incomprehensible nonsense delivered by a "cool" bloke wearing thick-rimmed glasses...