About six months ago I was working with two mates here in Australia to get an aussie version of the university social networking site, Facebook.com, set up in order to beat them to this market. Unfortunately due to various personal concerns the project was closed.
A short three months later and Facebook went and opened up doors in Australia. It was always going to be tough to beat them to the market down under since they had a proven system which just needed to be replicated for Australia. We had to build the system from scratch and well, I doubt we would have had a working site in three months anyway.
I’m not entirely sure how well Facebook is doing in Australia but I know they, err, face competition. A huge Australian highschool community site, Bored of Studies, recently opened up a fairly obvious clone of Facebook called The People Album and I expect with access to their substantially sized established community will have a healthy jump on Facebook.
Despite the potential issues down under things are looking pretty good for Facebook. In the last week there’s been a bit of buzz circulating about the site having recently turned down a $750 million dollar offer and instead looking for a buyer willing to spend $2 billion. That’s for a company started two years ago. Not bad growth, eh.
Wow there are some similarities between the sites…hmmm
They are mad to turn down that offer. Myspace cost murdoch less money than facebook got offered.
I agree with adam, $750 million is a huge offer and they would be foolish to turn it down. Unless they want to shop around for a while and can always come back to the offer???
Jason C, CEO of weblogs inc posted a nice interview style post when a friend asked if he should take an offer even though he thought it was low. He cited how Mark Cuban took the money and ran and is now able to invest his time and more importantly money in all other types of ventures and profit from those with what he learned.
Spend roughly 2 years running with your web site, and then turn down an offer to buy it for $750M!!!
I hope they get nothing. HA!
Cheers,
NORTH
http://www.yolksmoke.com
Don’t worry- The People Album is so poorly constructed and tested that Facebook has little to worry about. Still, if Facebook doesn’t get their act together in supporting Australia, etc, better, they might find themselves some better competition than the boys at Bored of Studies.
it was smart of them to turn it down, they got a 1 billion offer from google, and 1.6 billion from yahoo, and turned both down, they want 2!
how do i get in contact with michelle phearson?