Facebook Phenomenon

The last few days have seen the broad sheets chattering over the growth of Facebook and its ability to become one of the most astounding of the web 2 offerings. This development has been driven by an extremely clever and one can argue, compelling publicity stunt.  All new web platforms face the problem of sustaining interest. At the moment there are hundreds of thousands of people of all ages placing their profiles on Facebook, but what’s popular today can soon become old news. The stunt is involving technical developers and inviting them to create applications that will work within Facebook, rather than Windows, the dominant operating system.  Venture capitalists Bay Partners has launched a fund to invest in start ups building these applications. More than 16,000 applications have already been launched.  The music sharing service, iLike, has been the most popular application already launched, adding about 1 million users each week since its launch in May.  There’s a great PR spin on the brand, suggesting that Facebook has already turned down a take over bid of over 1 billion dollars and there are rumours that they are likely to go public.  It’s a very clever PR Platform which emphasises the sophistication of the industry that has grown up with web 2.0