Facebook IPO details strategy and its vision of itself

Social network eyes expansion into China, hopes to boost mobile experience (see video below

By Sharon Gaudin

Facebook’s IPO filing lays out a pretty good image of where CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to take the company: He sees the social network as having significant historical value to the economy, governments and — he hopes — to every person connected to the Internet around the world.

“There are more than 2 billion global Internet users, according to an industry source, and we aim to connect all of them,” the company said in its S-1 filing with the SEC on Wednesday.

And, it seems that Facebook executives – Zuckerberg in particular – not only have some very specific plans on how it will string its influence around the globe. The company’s co-founder also has some thoughts on Facebook’s importance right now.

“At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information,” Zuckerberg wrote in a letter included the company’s IPO filing. “We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society…. Today, our society has reached another tipping point.” Continue reading →

Image via Wikipedia

By Dennis Howlett

Summary: This is not about ‘Google going social.’ The company has the potential to become something that is at the heart of enterprise. Everything else is just happy talk.

Google Plus, Google’s idea of a social network is in highly controlled beta (aka ‘Field Test’) at the moment. Very few people have had their paws on it but Marshall Kirkpatrick over at ReadRightWeb invested a whole night trawling through the features. He emerges impressed:

This is a really big deal, a super ambitious effort involving scores of engineers over months of near total secrecy. (Though some helpful sources and I scooped the core Circles part of all this three months ago.) The service is really, really well done. Will it be good enough? I have no idea, but I have felt drawn to keep using it all night long. Continue reading →