 |
The leading social network is going all guns blazing since their new beginning with their Initial Public Offering.
Before the IPO, to raise the hoopla around them, Facebook
bought Instagram at a staggering $1 biilion. This when Instagram only
had 13 employees in the company. But most importantly, the photo sharing
application was being used by over 30 million users worldwide. That's
what caught their eye. The reach that Instagram had gained with their
photo sharing app. And now with FB having integrated Instagram, the
count has got doubled.
But the start was not actually what they thought it would be. The share prices dropped. Regularly. With a massive floatation of stocks from FB, and with a starting price of $38 per share, recovery was always going to be difficult.
Such may be the pressure, that FB is actually planning to develop a smartphone now. The smartphone would have Text messaging, the FB photo sharing, Chat and other FB provided software features. I mean the people who always hook up on FB would simply love it, but what can people expect from a social networking website bringing a smartphone in the market. I mean FB does not deal with hardware. They do not have genuises around them like Apple, Google or Microsoft. So introducing a smartphone would not be the easiest and the most smart thing to do now.
Apple apart from it's smooth and sophisticated interface can recover their money from iTunes and then there's the ever so popular and amazing Apple App Store. Google has its Android. But FB does not have these things. People nowadays lookout for interesting apps, features, hardware competency, apps stores, basic features like Radio, Bluetooth etc etc and a whole lot of etc. Even if FB is trying to pull-in some hardcore techies from Apple, executing a smartphone will be a tough ask to meet people's expectations.
In a recent news, FB was trying to include E-Commerce features onto its website. People come on FB to make new friends, share their personal moments and stay in touch. So driving people onto shopping may get a thumbs down eventually. It was also in the news that FB was not generating enough moolah from mobile advertising citing which General Motors withdrawn their advertising deal with FB.This may have triggered their thoughts to developing a smartphone.
They are even trying to buy out the Opera browser. Instead of standing on one point and executing it till the finish, it seems they are trying to execute n number of things all at the same time which may get haphazard. The strategy it seems is to convince people to not to use FB, but to live FB.
FB started with a simple and a highly sophisticated web interface that
eventually persuaded people to leave Orkut. But with mounting pressure
to keep its IPO running high, FB is slowly and steadily killing itself.