Facebooked!

You’ve probably heard the phrase “are you on facebook” within the past couple of months. The friend-picture sharing website that has grown tremendously in popularity. With its routes in the college and university world, Facebook started as a way for students to share their class notes with each other. Although this is not specific to the BI and performance management world, I thought this was big enough news in the technology industry to deserve a post. The announcement yesterday of the $240 million price tag Microsoft paid for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook

This move is all about eyeballs and follows Microsofts acquisition of aQuantive ($6 billion, the largest in Microsoft history) to aggressively move into the advertising space and compete directly with Google. To try and bring this home, yes I know it’s a stretch, but this is somewhat relevant to BI as we see the overall category of communications and collaboration expand. Sites like Myspace and Facebook are using the technology as a platform to communicate information, search on information, allow users to post information about themselves, all of which is collected and organized and optimized to bring relevant, meaningful content to the users and create a greater sense of community. The massive amounts of data on all of these sites is also forming a kind of digital history, unlike that of any other generation. Just think, the future president of the United States likely has a Facebook page with him playing flip cups with his buddies somewhere out there right now!