Facebook worth $50 billion

They have the users, now it's time to see if social search is anything more than a buzzword.

If they tied in with twitter to include realtime search, rather than the adhoc way the conventional search engines are doing it, they i reckon they could be onto something.

Nothing worse than googling something and seeing old out of date info in your results.

Will be an interesting year me thinks, or could this be dot com bubble number 2...

It's only a figure. I guess you could say their value is somewhere between that and $1.

It's really worth whatever a business offers that gets accepted. Rightly or wrongly

Wouldn't it be great to find out how much actual revenue they were making if they are just breaking even! For an online business they seem to be saddled with some serious overheads.

Mind you took amazon a long time to find a working model and actually make money, but look at them now!

I always tell people that facebook can't be bigger than Google, simply because they are not the same thing, why would you compete with a search engine when you're a social networking site, it doesn't have the capacity to be a search engine.
Google tried Buzz & Wave, they failed badly so in that way Facebook does win but apart from that, there's no comparison

still 50billion, I would sell my soul to facebook for a bit of that

So you don't believe in any of this social search hype then?

I've finally come off the fence and no doubt will be ridiculed in years to come, but with the volume of data they hold, they could be at least be a very big business and people directory. From there, I think they would naturally morph into traditional search and with "like" buttons now spread over tens of millions of web pages, what better way to directly compete against the age old "link" algorithm.

I think they will start moving forward into search engine land, if nothing more than to get a return for the investors who will be riding them hard.

Lets face it, who would have thought an online bookshop would start selling groceries!

you make good points but as for now Facebook can't be 'Bigger' than Google, atleast not in the search engine field.
Google can't touch facebook as far as networking goes, that's true, even though Google does Try.
I don't believe facebook would want to move into the field of being a 'search engine'... sure you can search for people or even businesses there but it just doesn't do the same job.

I'm sure they would love to move into search engines just to pick up some of the revenue streams. Even if they develop a similar concept to Google, Bing etc they have a huge base of people signed up and if they incorporate it in to there website, the potential to pick up some of the revenue streams through advertising could be greater and then linking it in with the data they have on individuals and businesses I could see it changing.... ...I guess we'll see over the next year it two.

May battle commence!

Indeed we shall see, not that I don't want it to happen because I think it would be interesting for my line of work (by interesting I mean I'll probably be out of a job) lol..
ahh I'm so tired this morning, so... <closest thing to your lightsaber fight that I can think of

OMG! yea facebook will keep on growing as it is of great worth already. that is quite amazing and i wonder if ever any of the websites have ever gone that far?