Yahoo! Should Buy Facebook Soon
Somebody needs to buy Facebook now, and that somebody is Yahoo!.
I know they’ve tried before. In fact, I do think that Zuckerberg was offered a ridiculous amount of money (too much, in my opinion) for his popular application by Yahoo! two months ago, but in the time since then, Facebook has made some significant changes that will definitely be of interest to large web properties, especially Yahoo!. Yahoo! has a history of acquiring really great web applications (Flickr, del.icio.us, Upcoming) so it only makes sense that they would attempt to acquire Facebook, one of the hottest sites on the web right now.
So here’s the context: Facebook has slowly become the go-to place for people to keep in touch with their offline friends in an online environment. Now that high school students and the general public can create Facebook profiles, there has been a deluge of interest and activity on Zuckerberg’s application, and with that, lots of acquisition speculation and rumors.
Yahoo!, in the past few years, has bought out the best photo-sharing application to ever exist, a particularly brilliant social bookmarking application, and a highly-functional and -social event organizing tool. Each of these applications carries the Yahoo! branding, but still functions as a stand-alone application with limited crossover between them and other Yahoo! properties. What Yahoo! lacks, however, is a truly powerful profile and friend management system which would be able to bridge all their other applications into one powerful web property that not even Google could imagine. Facebook is that system.
While most of my “online” friends use Upcoming and Flickr, the large majority of my “offline” friends use Facebook as their main tool for communication. Ever since I got a Facebook account, I’ve had fewer messages by email and less impetus to use instant messaging, but I get posts on my Facebook wall every day. By providing all the essential communication tools but maintaining a consistent design and look, Facebook has managed to harness the desire of people to connect without cluttering the web like MySpace.
The most recent features that have been introduced on Facebook are basically replicas of tools that already exist on the web, but they are being bundled into the Facebook application as proprietary systems. The news feeds are essentially standard RSS feeds, notes are basically blog posts, and shares is just a recycled take on social bookmarking. Each of these tools that Facebook offers is not new and exciting, but works seamlessly within Facebook’s existing system so their adoption and usage rates are huge.
Apart from the profile management part of it all, Yahoo! does everything Facebook does, but better. Yahoo! Mail is much superior to Facebook Messages, Upcoming blows Facebook Events away, Flickr still remains miles ahead of Facebook Photos, and del.icio.us, despite the clunky interface, is a much more powerful tool than the nascent Facebook Shares. While Yahoo! 360 is a better blogging tool than Facebook Notes, it is obvious that neither of these companies understands blogging the way that companies like Six Apart understand the personal-publishing phenomenon. The only reason the Facebook tools get such heavy usage is because the community is heavily invested in the application, and therefore will use the tools frequently and almost voraciously.
Yahoo! buying Facebook would be a great move for both parties: Facebook would acquire all the great functionality of tools like Upcoming, Flickr, del.icio.us, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail, and Yahoo! 360, and users of all those products will now have a consolidated place to interact with all those tools. Yahoo!, in turn, would acquire a heavily-vested and overly-enthusiastic community of users that will help propagate and actively use these tools, which in turn will help fuel Yahoo! ad revenue. It’s a win-win situation for everyone, especially for users of the various applications.
Of course, if Yahoo! does end up buying Facebook, my life will be effectively run by Yahoo! applications, so I might as well apply for a job there. So Yahoo! (or Facebook), if you’re reading this and looking for copywriters, I’m available. Really.