Facebook assert independence in face of Microsoft interest
Tuesday, 27 May 2008
It seems that following their recent failed $47.5 billion bid for Yahoo!, Microsoft are still in the market for some internet real estate, having reportedly approached Facebook in a takeover bid.
While Microsoft already has a $240 million stake in Facebook, it is believed that they are interested in a complete takeover following their failed attempt at reaching an agreement with Yahoo!. However, Facebook, which is valued at $15 billion, appear to be less interested in being snapped up, and more interested in staying independent. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook told Reuters:
“you can tell, from our history and what we’ve done, that we really wanted to keep the company independent, by focusing on building and focusing on the long-term”.
Latest figures from comScore show that Facebook is currently the most popular social networking site in the UK, with record user numbers in the last month. The site saw 14.35 million unique users in April, which is an incredible 262.4% increase on last year. Another social networking site currently riding high in the UK is teen favourite Bebo, with 12.03 million unique users in April which is a growth of 40% from last year. AOL has recently completed the acquisition of Bebo, and intends to make the social network the centrepiece of AOL’s newly created People Networks business unit.
While Facebook and Bebo both get gold stars for improvement, the report for MySpace is less shiny and in fact should read ‘could do better’. The site has seen traffic steadily drop in the past year with 8.5 million unique users in April, which is a 14.3% decrease on April 2007. With the recent growth in UK users, it’s little surprise that competitive search engines are keen to make friends with the darlings of the social networking scene.
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