Facebook Offers $85 Million to Aquire Zhanzuo.com

On November 18, Facebook offered $85 million to aquire Zhanzuo.com, a Ciniese social networking site with 7 million users. According to The Times, Jack Zhang and Mark Zuckerberg have been planning the deal but have not accepted it yet, but will be decided at the end of the month. Facebook would get a base from which it can grow so it can soon be the largest online marketplace by user numbers. Zhanzuo ranks in the top 250 sites in China. Alexa and Compete, two major websites, show a big drop in traffic for the site over July and August. But Zhanzuo will find that it has more problems in the future if it is owned by Facebook because the massive drop for the site at once might suggest issues with governmental blocking, the site operates on a .com as opposed to a .cn and there is no explination for the massive and imediate drop in traffic. But the traffic dip might be related to users heading back to school. Certainly other Chinese companies operate on .com's without problems. Zhanzuo would also have to deal with censorship, especially with 7 million users. Given the previous debate over Yahoo in China, it will be even more interesting to see how Facebook deals with it if the takeover is successful.

Facebook Everywhere

The most important bit of news at Facebook’s press conference yesterday was what they didn’t say out loud: Once the company gets the bugs out of its system for social ads on its own site, it will likely create a network to use its data to display advertising on other sites. This could help social dilemmas of social networking. Two Facebook executives said yesterday that Facebook is indeed planning an ad network. They didn’t give details, and said the timing depends on how the first phase of the Social Ad system works. Facebook could offer two different sorts of ads. First, it could simply use its data about what users put on their profiles as part of a network that serves ads on other sites. Facebook claims that users have an incentive to tell the truth in their profiles because they are used mainly to communicate with their friends, not strangers. And so that data about age, location, education, work and interests can be quite reliable for advertisers. There is some difficulties to get through this but Google is helping. This could be a big step foward for advertising Facebook rather than verbal communication.

Apple

Dongmei Li of Queens, New York, is sueing Apple for taking $200 off the price of the iPhone that she's filed a lawsuit seeking $1 million in damages. She bought the 8gb phone in June when it was $499. But on September 5 , Apple decide to drop the prices to atract more customers into buying the product. Apple was nice enought to give $200 back to the people who bought the phone 14 days prior the reduction price. But that didnt satisfy Dongmei Li who wants to sue them for 1 millions dollars. The U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York, the price reduction injured early purchasers like herself because they cannot resell the product for the same profit as those who bought the cell phone following the price cut. Apple spokeswoman Susan Lundgren declined to comment, citing the company's policy to not discuss pending litigation. Then AT&T required a two-year service contract for the iPhone constituted unfair business practices. Hopefully this is the last complaint for the Apple company over the iPhone. Prices go up, and prices come down... what can you do???