Allison Fass reporting on Peter Thiel’s talk at SXSW this year where he recounted the time in 2006 that Mark Zuckerberg turned down Yahoo’s $1 billion offer to buy Facebook:
His only partial rationalization at the time was that in the history of Yahoo, it had made two $1 billion offers that were also turned down. And those were to eBay and Google. “At least I could actually make a pseudo-scientific argument that in every case Yahoo offered $1 billion and it was rejected, it was the correct thing to do,” said Thiel.
I should say that I know absolutely nothing about any sort of talks/deals between Tumblr and Yahoo. And I’m not sharing this to suggest that Tumblr should turn down such a supposed offer (my initial gut feeling is actually that such a partnership would make a lot of sense). I just found it fascinating given how closely the reported number is to the key number repeated in Thiel’s story.
Shaunacy Ferro on the making of Facebook’s stickers:
Yet Keltner thought that by incorporating some of the principles from Darwin’s seminal work on emotion, he could add a touch of the richness he felt existing emoticons lacked. “I’m naïve about emoticons because I’ve never sent one in my life, but I’ve looked at them—it’s just missing a lot of important things in our emotional lives,” Keltner says.
Sympathy, for example, can be hard to really get across in traditional emoticon form. “It’s an under-appreciated emotion in Western culture,” Keltner explains. “We now know what it looks like and sounds like because of science. They created this dynamic emoticon that when you see it, it’s really powerful.”
When I first heard about virtual stickers being a thing, I, like everyone else, scoffed. Now I’m utterly addicted. And I have no idea why.
I’m of coursed biased in saying Path’s are the best. But I do find the science behind Facebook’s interesting.
Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan for Fast Company’s Co.Design:
Gehry and Zuckerberg, in a way, are trying to engineer their own Low Road building that’s still a pleasant place to work, thanks to the expansive roof garden. Assuming that’s actually the thinking behind Facebook West, it’s refreshing to see an architect, known for championing form, focusing on function. It’ll be exciting to see how the building progreses—construction is expected to start immediately.
Like.
Matt Drance on Facebook Phone/Home:
Remember the Motorola ROKR? Remember what happened fifteen months later?
If you think the HTC First is the extent of Facebook’s mobile phone aspirations, you’re kidding yourself. It’s a toe dipped into the ocean.
Here we go again.
Frank Shaw, Microsoft’s head of communications, took to the company blog today to “congratulate” Facebook on the launch of Facebook Home. Except that he’s not really congratulating Facebook, he’s passive-aggressively signaling the old “WE DID THIS FIRST!!!” whiny bullshit that Microsoft loves to pull from time to time.
Microsoft, by way of Shaw, seems annoyed that Facebook is getting all this buzz for something they believe they did in 2011 with Windows Phone. They’re pissed off that such a fact which seems so obvious to them wasn’t brought up enough yesterday, so they’re bringing it up themselves.
Not mentioned is that it wasn’t brought up because Windows Phone, while a good product in many regards, is a complete after-thought in the smartphone market. You can yell “FIRST!!!” as loudly as you want to try to change that, but that never works.
Said another way: If you guys were the inventors of Facebook Home, you’d have invented Facebook Home.
What’s deliciously awkward here is that Microsoft is actually an investor in Facebook, and a close partner. It must be especially maddening that Facebook would choose to utilize (or “spoon”) a product by their chief rival — hence Shaw’s comments about Android in his post.
I’ll just repeat what I said a year ago on a similar matter:
If you have to tell people you won, you lost.
Mark Zuckerberg to Vanity Fair’s Kurt Eichenwald, when asked if mobile phones were the future of Facebook.
It should be absolutely no surprise that Zuck was interested in Google Glass…
An extensive look at the future of Facebook’s business by Kurt Eichenwald for Vanity Fair. As he notes:
Then came the miracle of television. And once again, advertisers were flummoxed. Photographs and drawings on signs and in newspapers—sure. Ad copy read over the radio airwaves—got it. But television, with moving pictures—what were they supposed to do with that?
The thought that advertising won’t work online in a variety of ways is and has always been a joke. It needs to be different depending on the format (mobile vs. desktop web, etc). But with so many eyeballs, it will be bigger than all of the other mediums. Probably combined. Soon.
