Update: Facebook chooses Microsoft over Google
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Facebook will sell a $240 million minority stake to Microsoft, which as part of the deal will also expand the advertising services it provides to the social networking phenom, the companies said Wednesday in a statement.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft has approached Facebook&#160;in recent weeks proposing an investment that would give Microsoft a stake of up to 5 percent in the popular social-networking company, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
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Rich Zygler asks in one of his recent blog posts, if Microsoft purchasing a 240 million dollar chunk of Facebook is a good thing for the language it's written in - PHP.   Microsoft is buying a piece of Facebook. What do we all think this means for PHP since Facebook is one of the "web 2.0" leaders built on PHP? The way I see it, [there] are [six] options.   Among the possible outcomes he lists are things like Microsoft rewriting the site, Facebook continues as it is or (next to impossible) Microsoft sees the error of its ways and fully embraces open source.
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Facebook will sell Microsoft a $240 million minority stake.
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The new search-engine technology is meant to rival Google. Also: Reebok unveils a new version of the Pump & hellip;.  PeopleSoft still won't settle for Oracle's bid & hellip;. and more.
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Some companies can battle Google head-on and survive. Facebook can't.
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Microsoft Corp is talking to Facebook about an investment in the company that could value the fast-growing social network at $10 billion or more, the Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site on Monday.
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Microsoft will take a 240-million-dollar stake in the wildly popular social networking website Facebook as part of an expansion of the two firms' strategic alliance, the companies said Wednesday.
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Microsoft yesterday announced a $240 million deal with Facebook, giving the technology giant a minority stake in the popular social networking site and the exclusive rights to sell worldwide advertisements that target Facebook's 50 million members.
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Online social network Facebook is  close to reaching a deal with Google Inc  or Microsoft  Corp  for an investment that would value the company as  high as $15 billion, according to media reports on Wednesday.
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Microsoft Corp said on Wednesday it would pay $240 million for a minority equity stake in Facebook in a deal that values the social networking Web site at $15 billion.
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TechMeme really likes Friday evening's Monkey piece, it's been #1 for almost 24 hours. Even if people still use the Social Graph term, it may have done some good by asking the question -- what's the difference between a network and a graph? In math there is no difference, a network is a graph and vice versa.  I got one thing wrong, apparently the term came from Facebook, presumably as a way of separating what they do from their predecessors.  Dan Farber reported in May. "Zuckerberg describes the Facebook core function that the new third-party applications can tap into as a 'social graph,' the network of connections and relationships between people on the service." Google Trends comparison of "social network" vs "social graph." Fred Wilson posted a comment pointing to a post where he wondered what the graph thing was all about. His post was one that inspired me to write my piece. Buzzwords and phrases are useful if they describe something new. For example, I remember when platform was new, but I didn&#185;t object to it, because it explained a concept that we needed a word for. Today it's still much in use, and there's little or no confusion about what it means. I was doing audio blog posts before we had the term podcast, and I totally got behind it because we needed a word for what we were doing. But social graph is not needed, it makes something simple sound complicated, and we totally need it to sound simple if the problems are going to get solved. They&#185;re not trivial problems, they&#185;ve been there since the Internet outgrew academia and started being used for commercial purposes. Another problem with new names for old things is that it tends to push aside the pioneers and makes it sound like newcomers are not also-rans. Fred had a reasonable gripe as a backer of Wasabe when Mint started getting credit for being a first mover. At least they didn&#185;t have the chutzpah to try to make it a trend and give it a buzzword.  Someone is being pushed aside with the term &#179;social graph&#178; likely some competitors of Facebook like MySpace and LinkedIn, and some pioneers are going to lose credit for their innovation if it takes root. It may still take root, but I felt I had to say something. BTW, the title of the post contains a grammatic error because I changed the title to monkey from something else and didn't look carefully at the resulting title.
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Facebook will sell a $240 million minority stake to Microsoft, which as part of the deal will also expand the advertising services it provides to the social networking phenom, the companies said Wednesday in a statement.The size of the ownership stake Microsoft will take during Facebook&#39;s next round of financing puts Facebook&#39;s valuation at a whopping $15 billion.&#160;Google had reportedly been courting Facebook as well.In addition to the ownership piece, Microsoft will also extend its existing agreement to provide banner ads to Facebook in the U.S. With this deal, Microsoft will become Facebook&#39;s exclusive third-party ad platform as well as provide Facebook ads internationally.Facebook will likely devote the cash influx from its next financing round to bankroll the torrid growth it is expecting in the coming 12 months in usage and headcount.With about 300 employees now, Facebook expects to have about 700 a year from now, its CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg said last week at the&#160;Web 2.0 Summit.Meanwhile, the site is growing its usage at breakneck speed with about 250,000 new users registering every day.Founded in 2004, it currently has about 49 million active users today, up from 12 million in December. More than half of its active members return to the site daily. Some 59 percent of its users are outside the U.S.Earlier Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post reported that Facebook was in the final stages of making a decision on whether to do this deal with Microsoft or Google.For Microsoft, which hasn&#39;t attained as strong a position in online advertising as it had hoped and lags behind Google, landing this deal could be a major win, as long as Facebook proves to be as attractive an advertising vehicle as expected.The Journal reported later on Wednesday that Facebook expects a profit of about $30 million this year, on revenue of $150 million.Google and Yahoo provide ads for Facebook rival MySpace.Still, questions remain about social networking sites&#39; full potential for advertising, since most of their content is largely unregulated and created by millions of individuals, resulting often in material that is vulgar and objectionable.Facebook plans to share more ideas for revving up its advertising business on Nov. 6, at an event in New York to which it has invited what it calls &quot;its closest advertisers.&quot;&quot;As part of [the event], Facebook executives will discuss new approaches for advertising online,&quot; a Facebook spokeswoman said. &quot;We are not sharing any further details.&quot;Facebook, MySpace, and others are also under close scrutiny from law enforcement agencies in the U.S. and abroad because sexual predators use social-networking sites to stalk and victimize people, in particular minors.The Journal first reported Google&#39;s and Microsoft&#39;s pursuit of the Facebook investment a month ago.
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Catching up to Google and Yahoo, Microsoft joins the search-engine business. Also: Hewlett-Packard creates a replacement for semiconductors & hellip;.  Dell makes safer, cleaner PC for the EU & hellip;. and more.
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Vista tops list of tech disappointments...NYT and Henry Blodget weigh in on Google's threat to Microsoft...More people are "Googling" themselves and more...
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It's hard to determine what's more surprising about Microsoft Corp.'s investment in Facebook Inc.  -  the appraisal that valued a 3 1/2-year-old Internet hangout at $15 billion or the rare snub of online search leader Google Inc
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Microsoft's $240 million investment is much smaller than the rumored $750 million that Facebook sought. Why the difference? Epicenter's Terrence Russell analyzes the deal.