The BBC has just put up a story with musings on why Microsoft paid $240m for a mere 1.6% stake in Facebook.

You can read that here

The only one I agree with is the last point. Facebook is worth that much because Microsoft says so. And they made this move purely to counter Google, who already have the lion's share of the web advertising market.

But here are some reasons Facebook isn't (or shouldn't be) worth $15bn

1. Pirates, Vampires and other really stupid applications

Actually the Beeb cited this as a good thing about Facebook. I hate these applications. They are stupid. And because of the way Facebook is set up to invite every friend you have to use the application when you install it, I get about twenty of these every day.

2. The massive growth in users may be short lived

I admit I am no economist, but those 50 zillion users who joined Facebook in the last year are not necessarily going be be 'loyal customers' in the future. Steve Balmer may be right, Facebook could be a fad, and people will move onto the next big thing in 2008.

3. Nobody clicks on adverts anyway

Any company is worth as much as its revenue, either current or projected. Facebook currently have zero forms of revenue other than advertising, either traditional banners or sponsored surveys, without the benefit of being able to easily tailor advertising for the content of the page. Oh and those stupid virtual gifts. It's hard to think how they could come up with additioal revenue streams.

4. The FriendsReunited problem

FriendsReunited was like Facebook v0.8 Alpha. When it first appeared, there was a rush of people joining, all desperate to find out what their old flame from school looked like now, etc. But once you have joined Facebook, added everyone you remember from the old days to your friends list, what is left to do? After not seeing someone for ten years or more, you most likely don't have a lot to talk about, you do the typical exchange of wall posts, comparing size of family and career success, but usually they may as well not be on your friends list, share little in common with you now and they definitely won't be interested in your daily status updates.

5. Privacy

It hit mainstream news headlines over the summer, but Facebook's default privacy options leave your photos and personal details open for the world to see. You have to turn on privacy rather than turn it off. It's made more complicated that you may have set your details as private, but those in your network can still view them. Why not just have security at maximum by default, so it's your decision to share your personal details rather than having to hide them?

So really, this $15B valuation says more about Microsoft's desire to prevent Google from capturing more of the advertising market than it does about the real value of Facebook.

Now we are nearing the end of 2007, my dual core, DDR2 PC is almost a year old. It's time to throw that ancient dinosaur (2006 - so long ago) into the nearest landfill and replace with an eighty core DDR3 beast, powered by plutonium alone.

But before I click the 'confirm order' button, is it really worth it? DDR3 is undoubtedly faster, but have a good look at current memory pricing. On Scan, the cheapest 1GB sticks of unbranded 800MHz DDR2 memory are 18.79 (including VAT). Absurdly cheap. Cheaper than any DDR1 sticks. You can now buy 4GB of ram for less than £80. This time last year, that would have set you back around £400. It seems manufacturers kept hold of last years price tags and just clipped them onto their new DDR3 sticks, for 4GB of the cheapest DDR3 is priced at £420.

One of the first rules in the computing world is that memory prices are volatile, but I have never seen such a rapid drop in price. Urban legend (which means probably a complete lie) is that whenever China wants to raise global memory prices, they simply aim a missile at Taiwan, and in the resulting chaos you pay more for a new PC. Well, they must have had a different agenda for their arsenal this year, because prices are 80% less than they were.

There are plenty of reasons for this flooded market. Vista requires approximately 10TB of RAM just to get past the login screen, but it hasn't sold as well as some had hoped. Then there is the problem of needing an entirely new platform for DDR2, which means most adopters will be those who buy a new PC.

But what if I had this choice one year ago, and I wanted to upgrade my single core computer that I replaced last year? Would I choose a superbly performing and future proofed DDR3 system or well performing and stupidly cheap DDR2 system? I'd probably go for the latter, and the remainder of my disposable income could instead be spent on something more healthy than computer equipment.

Of course I secretly want a new DDR3 system. So I am hoping that this by time in 2008, the story will repeat itself, with a stick of DDR3 costing next to nothing. Memory manufacturers probably aren't.

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This competition is now closed

I was late to jump on the Digg bandwagon. People raved about it being a great source of news, reflecting the collective consciousness of the Internet community, but I was only convinced a few months ago.

Bored of traditional news sites, I set Digg's top stories from the last 24hrs as my browser home page, so every morning a load of new stories were waiting for me to read while I sip my tea.

But I'm not so keen now. The Digg model has its problems. The first is technical. A story, picture or video is posted onto a small site, often a local newspaper, who won't have 100s of servers to dish out content. The story is posted to Digg, and proves hugely popular. It makes it to the front page, getting more traffic. But the server it is posted on can't keep up, and the story has to be taken down.

By the time I get to read it, it might be the top story on Digg, but all I get to see is a 404 page. If a video, the writer should have posted it to Youtube and embedded the clip in the page rater than host it themselves, of course. But this is seriously annoying. You can read the headline, the description and the comments, but can't find out what all the fuss is about.

Then of course there is the subject matter. The "collective Internet consciousness" is actually a subset of all Internet users: mostly young, male, American, with a liberal bias. And of course this is a webpage on the Internet, which is a big network of computer things. So technical stories are big. No surprise really.

It gets annoying after a while though. The iPhone hype was ridiculous. "Steve Jobs has caught a cold", "iPhone bills are huge", etc, nothing really newsworthy. And the US election hype is driving me mad. Hilary says X, Guilianni says Y. But who is Ron Paul? In the UK he gets zero airtime, nobody has heard of him. According to Digg stories though, he is gonna be the next US president. Right.

Digg could do well to introduce localised pages, where say, French users could post on French stories, for example, and avoid the gross Americanisation of the site. Perhaps criticising Digg for not being of the same quality as traditional news sources is missing the point; it's an alternative source of news, a collection of cool links, chosen by its users.

But if Digg is a model for citizen journalism, where the vote of the user replaces the traditional editor, the tabloids don't need to worry. Yet.

I sat through every single keynote speech at this year’s IDF in San Francisco. They ranged in quality and content, from Paul Otellini’s well structured and fast paced discussion of the inevitable progress of high-end technology into the mainstream, to Gordon Moore’s interesting and humorous interview, to Renee James’ forced, dying comedy presented to an exhausted audience. Nothing deflates a fledgling software line better.

But by far the most insipid keynote was the final one. Justin Rattner, normally a perfectly pleasant individual who we have no problem listening to, began his keynote from within Second Life. If this wasn’t cheesy enough, he then emerged onto the San Francisco stage wearing – gasp – the same eye-bleedingly hideous shirt his Second Life avatar had donned, and proceeded to spout reams of unmitigated nonsense about the future of the ‘3D web’.

First up was a biased graph, showing that Second Life (in particular) is officially better than sites like MySpace and YouTube because, well, it’s in 3D! And it’s completely user created! Isn’t that great? NO! I’m not sure what sort of exposure Mr Rattner has actually had to the world of Second Life, but it seems the majority of those Terabytes of user created content are particularly phallic.

Moving on, we were shown undeniable proof of Second Life’s ability for free expression; Italian IBM employees, facing a pay cut of over $1000 per month, staked out IBM’s own SL-installation with anti-establishment placards. Well, I use the plural, but perhaps the singular is more appropriate: what we were actually show was a screen shot of one chap, standing on his own in the deserted IBM virtual office, with a virtual placard being seen by approximately nobody. Would this protest have been quite as effective if someone hadn’t posted a screenshot to the apparently archaic 2D web? No!

Rattner also had words for World of Warcraft and its ilk: “Massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Who came up with that? It sounds like it came from the Intel marketing department, doesn't it? It's just what Intel would call it, you know, and everybody would go, ‘What the heck? Can't you just call it an online game?’” Well no, Justin. There’s a perfectly good reason there are so many words there, and one is the avoidance of ambiguity that Intel does indeed seem fond of. Does ‘online game’ say ‘multiplayer’ to you? Does ‘multiplayer’ say 2 players or 100,000? It’s OK, you can just say ‘MMO’.

And then – as if it couldn’t get any more insipid – the presentation fell off a cliff. First up a representative of Qwak was brought to the stage. If you haven’t heard of it, Qwak is an SL-esque virtual world, apparently built to satisfy the enormous demand for jerky 3D avatars and awkward movement that exists in the business sector. A demo chugged away, showing how Qwak could switch to different 2D enterprise apps with ease, and incorporate recursive links so that a user could, for instance, burrow down to solve particular problems. What was really proven was that the 3D element was utterly and indisputably pointless, merely adding a layer of complexity and processor drain on top of what might otherwise be a fairly efficient business flow.

Then Rattner did a comparison of hardware requirements and cynically proved beyond a doubt why Intel is particularly interested in Second Life; server load. SL servers, thanks to the completely user-creatable nature of the game, can each house perhaps a couple of hundred users at a time, compared to a few thousand for WOW’s pre-defined world, and hundreds of thousands for a traditional web page. To us, that says that SL in inefficient, clumsy, and simply wasteful; if we wanted to work, we would do it in the unbroken world of 2D applications, not the broken land of Second Life. To Intel, the more users make it into Second Life, the more processors it sells – simple.

I don’t mean to be mean to Mr Rattner. He did his best, and I’m sure his enthusiasm for the evolution of the web isn’t quite as narrow as an interest in selling processors. But SL and Qwak clearly are not the way forward. Maybe when we have unlimited processor power and shiny lenticular monitors the 3D web will have a real place. For now, it’s the home of certain games, the home of a tiny little geek community, and something for people who are interested in efficiency to avoid at all costs.

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