Danilo Quinonez Dear Facebook, I don’t want to become a fan of anything, it’s stupid, and stop asking! I’m not going to play into your plan of serving me useless ads, by being a fan of useless stuff. — Oh and that’s pretty funny that all you display is dating ads because of my ‘single’ status…Please find a more creative way to monetize; C’mon I know you can do it.

Russian group mulls Facebook investment: report

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A Russian Internet group, Digital Sky Technologies, has offered to invest $200 million in Facebook in a deal that would value the social networking site at $10 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

“Facebook is a private company, so as a matter of policy, we don’t typically share details about our financial plans or comment on rumor and speculation,” the company said in a statement.

Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies was not immediately available to comment on the report.

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg told the Reuters Global Technology Summit this week that, “If there’s an investment to be done on very good terms, we will consider it if for no other reason than to have more buffer if we want to do something in the future.”

“Some of the rumblings that people are reporting on, are just different conversations that have happened, but there’s really nothing new to talk about there,” he added.

Digital Sky Technologies, which owns a stake in Russia’s Mail.ru Web site, offered an investment of $200 million in the company’s preferred stock, which would value it at $10 billion, and an additional $100 million to $150 million investment in the company’s common stock, which would value it at $6.5 billion, the report said.

Facebook last got funding from Microsoft Corp in 2007, when the software company paid $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in the company.

Facebook has more than 200 million active users, double the number it had last August. The company also ranks as one of the top photo-sharing websites, with more than 15 billion pictures uploaded onto its service.

Russian group mulls Facebook investment: report - Yahoo! Finance

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Facebook Raises $150 Million To Buy Employee Stock

Image via CrunchBase

Facebook is raising $150 million from new and current investors in order to buy employee stock, VentureBeat reports.

According to the report:

• Facebook will buy 15 million common shares at $10 each.
• Employees will be able to sell as much as 20% of their stock.
• Participating investors include “Accel, Greylock, Founders Fund and several others” as well as “new Asian investors.”
• VentureBeat doesn’t report where the funding sets Facebook’s valuation.
• Facebook sources says perceptions that the startup’s costs are “skyrocketing” are false.

In April,  Facebook COO Sheryl Sandbergy told Bloomberg TV in April. “We absolutely do not need to take money. We might take money, but it doesn’t mean we need to.”

At the end of the month, reports surfaced that Facebook and potential new investors at Providence Equity Partners, General Atlantic, Bain Capital, and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts were $3 billion apart on the startup’s valuation. Facebook was said to be holding out for a $6 billion price tag.

Early Facebook investor Ron Conway told Kara Swisher earlier this month that he hopes Facebook will IPO in the next 12 to 24 months. Before that can happen, Facebook needs to find a growing revenue stream to match its growing userbase. The startup says it will reach profitability before 2010, but skeptical sources say that’s an overly optimistic projection. Long-term money making plans at the social network include a payments system, and then, further out, an ad network.

Facebook Raises $150 Million To Buy Employee Stock

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Facebook Testing Virtual Currency

Facebook is finally testing a virtual currency system called “credits,” an expansion of its virtual gifts market. If the feature is broadly rolled out across Facebook, you will be able to purchase “credits” (100 for $1, the way it’s set up now) and send them to your friends. They can then send them to other people as virtual “kudos” or use them to buy virtual gifts on Facebook.

This is the closest Facebook has come to building an on-site PayPal, except there is no way (yet?) to turn credits back into cash.

A fine start, but Facebook will probably have to extend the feature beyond “kudos” and gifts to make it more useful — such as using it as a payment system for classified ads, new Facebook features, in-app purchases, or for Facebook Connect sites.

It’s also possible this feature is too late. This would have been much more useful a year and a half ago when Facebook was trying to establish itself as a platform for third-party developers. Now that that’s dead, and Facebook is trying to turn itself into a sort-of Twitter-plus-photos, there’s fewer uses for currency.

Facebook’s virtual gifts business — estimated last year at $35 million annual run rate — isn’t nearly enough to support the company by itself. But the company is smart to milk it for as much revenue as possible: It’s a good side business, and having a secure, in-Facebook currency should help.

Facebook Testing Virtual Currency

Facebook Modifies New Homepage After Complaints

Facebook Inc. is making some minor modifications to its new homepage design, addressing griping from users who complained the weeks-old design made it more difficult to find information they care about.

Facebook Modifies New Homepage After Complaints - WSJ.com

Banks and Credit Unions on Twitter

If you haven’t been following Twitter the last few months, you may not realize it now has almost eight million monthly unique visitors according to Compete. That’s almost double the traffic it had just two months ago and a nearly a nine-fold gain from a year ago.

To put that traffic in perspective, it’s more than half that of the NY Times and slightly more than banking giant Wachovia (see Compete chart below).

Banking activity
Financial institutions are pretty new to the micro-blogging platform. In a search today, we found 13 U.S. banks and 14 credit unions with active Twitter feeds (see note 1). There were also and eight international banks for a total of 35.

See the table below for the non-inclusive list ranked by number of Twitter users that follow the bank’s feed (note 2). Wachovia (now owned by Wells Fargo), the only major bank that has promoted Twitter on its main website, leads with 2,000 followers (see previous post on Wachovia’s foray on to Twitter).

Opportunity  
Participating in Twitter is a low-cost entry into social media that can actually help save a customer relationship or three. Compared to blogging, it is much less labor intensive. It’s also less of a marketing platform given the 140-character limit in posts. But in the current environment, perhaps less truly is more. By all means, find a gung-ho Facebook devotee in your bank and let him or her get you into the Tweeting game .

NameTwitter URL (4)UpdatesFollowers1. Wachovia (Wells Fargo)/wachovia2572,0582. Bank of America/bofa_help5571,4863. Wells Fargo/wellsfargo4 (note 3)

548

—Via http://www.netbanker.com/2009/03/banks_and_credit_unions_on_twitter.html

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Facebook Wins $873 Million Judgment Against Spammer

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Facebook on Friday won $873 million in damages from a spammer, the largest award to date under the 2003 Can-Spam Act.

The penalty for illegal spamming appears to be rising. Facebook’s award tops the $234 million judgment won by MySpace in May against Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines. It also exceeds the $177,500 fine and $1.1 million ill-gotten-gain forfeiture that Jeffrey Kilbride and James Schaffer were ordered to pay in October 2007 for the pair’s porn spam operation.

Facebook Wins $873 Million Judgment Against Spammer — Spam — InformationWeek