I was quite taken with Simon's Willison's vision of "decentralised social networking" via OpenID. I wonder if that's the long-term challenge to facebook, and not another centralised service that has to justify its value by making unfeasible amounts of money without betraying the trust of its users.

I think a…

New Zealand has three hundred and seventy thousand members

Maybe so. But if some of them are like me, they joined because they got invited and didn't want to hurt the inviter's feelings. After a brief flurry of activity, us has stopped.

If I was a Facebook shareholder, I'd take…

I don't see how bebo/myspace/facebook/xing et al can ever have as robust a model. They don't offer me anything, and I suspect they don't have much to give advertisers.

thirty-five million people (half the userbase) return daily.

I'm not buying advertising, but that many people, with facebook knowing that much…

thirty five million people (half of the total userbase) return daily

:Shocked-face:
That is quite mind-blowing.

And Facebook is really worth sixty times as much?

Yeah, but I think we're in that decade. It's the new dot.com revolution.

I mean, hands up who thinks trademe was worth $700 million NZ? That's $35/customer.

AOL has just bought Bebo for USD850M — about $20/customer.

And Facebook is really worth sixty times as much?

I'm not so sure.

I was quite taken with Simon's Willison's vision of "decentralised social networking" via OpenID. I wonder if that's the long-term challenge to facebook, and not another centralised…