Move over, MySpace. Facebook is the new king of social media.
News Corp.'s
Facebook welcomed 132 million users in June, three times its gate count from June 2007. MySpace grew, too, but only by a paltry 3%, stopping at 117.6 million visitors. With growth deltas like that, it was only a matter of time before the cape and scepter passed to a new ruler.
And there are no serious usurpers in Facebook's rearview mirror, either. Privately held Friendster increased its traffic by 50%; Google's
So when will Facebook go public, so we can invest in this insane growth story? Probably not until the current financing crunch is over. But it will happen. Google might have been happier out of the public scrutiny that comes with a IPO, Sarbanes-Oxley, and all the rest -- but it really had no choice. Once the search giant grew big enough to hand out enough stock options to its employees, it knew it might as well shake the money tree and sell some stock, too. Think of Facebook as Google reincarnated, a year or two before the IPO.
That is, unless somebody buys Facebook wholesale first. Are you game, Microsoft
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