Somini Sengupta at The New York Times: "The challenge for Facebook, which is worth just over half of what it was three months ago, is to convince Wall Street that it has a real plan for making money."

  • Dave X

    I heard that they’re going to inject some open-source viruses directly into the mainframe, but that’s a classic rookie mistake.

  • fuzzyfuzzyfungus

    They do have a real plan for making money.

    It’s just that everybody who sold their shares to suckers and GTFO has already executed the plan…

  • atimoshenko

    Facebook’s problem is not to convince Wall Street that it has a plan for making money, Facebook’s problem is to come up with a viable plan for sustainably making money over the long term. The latter is much harder.

    When it comes to Wall Street, have a couple of stellar-looking quarters and you’ll be golden, regardless of anything else. Enron was Wall Street’s darling for quite a while before its implosion.

  • http://twitter.com/fossilfuels Funk Daddy

    “The challenge for Facebook, which is worth just over half of what it was three months ago, is to trick Wall Street into believing it has a real plan for faking money.”

    IFTFY

    • http://twitter.com/incarnedine_v Dan Hibiki

       Just ask some banks about the ‘how to’s

      • EH

        I’m sure FB is hiring some of them.

  • http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul

    So the Stalker Renaissance starts to fade. Perhaps they could start selling pet products.

    What’s the next social hub, now that Facebook is becoming Myspace? I’d guess G+, but it’s not useless enough.

  • http://twitter.com/adamlcox Adam L. Cox

    Strikes me that their plan, as vaguely described in the article, is untenable. First, I think the era of people “liking” particular things is beginning to fade in favor of people “liking” posts, which provides substantially less data for Facebook to sell to advertisers. “Liking” Dr. Pepper’s FB page is gold–”liking” baby pictures isn’t fungible. Second, I think people don’t want to have their searches pre-searched for them. Much as J.C. Penney bargain hunters enjoy the hunt, people who search for things on the internet enjoy reaching digging down to their own results.

    In conclusion, Facebook is, at best, the new Yahoo.

    • http://www.zazzle.com/InfinitudeTortoises* An Infinitude of Tortoises

      Only be careful not to Like too much (i.e., be an interesting person, unlike Zuck) or you’ll find yourself exiled!

      – One that Like’d not wisely but too well

  • Max

    It will be interesting to see who buys them up and what Facebook gets turned into then. Or has all the smart money realised that you can’t make thing A into thing B without all the people that used to like using A thinking “F that” and going to an alternative. 
    I’m thinking it’s time to start randomising all the personally identifiable information that the buyer will be hoping to get their grubby mitts on.

  • scatterfingers

    The problem being that if they listen to the stock market, their service will suck. They might be able to extract a few quarters of hightened profits and satisfy Wall St, but at the very real risk of gutting their business.

    Zuck knows this, though. 

  • gastronaut

    They should have made people pay for the timeline. Then the feature would look cutting-edge and exclusive, and there would be a lot less whining from people who felt like they had it foisted upon them.
    Hell, FB might’ve even made some money off it…

  • ganman

    I would appreciate the option to pay a nominal annual fee to not have all the ads, and if they agreed to not share my info with _anyone_.  Of course, trust is a huge issue there.

  • adent1066

    The next FB is Pinterest, it’s all I hear my kids talking about