FB paid 19B$ for some some 490M user's cellphone address books actually.

Exactly.

All they have to do is keep running it the same way and nobody will leave. They'll get to then steal all of the phone numbers, names, and "meta data," and then cross reference it with Facebook, and do more marketing.

If they can continue to collect $1/user/year, they'll also eventually add around $1 billion / year in revenue.

Say this to AOL. The valuation is nuts, the risks involved don't justify the price.

However. I don't buy the FB's valuation of 170 bil either, though the market doesn't ask my opinion & FB is worth 170 bil. I bought it ages ago for 23, and then got wiped due to a margin call for 19, so my judgement maybe influenced by emotions.

Meanwhile, I'm using AdBlock. Now who's exploiting who?

So what's the point of a social network if you can't interact with your friends or family?
What exactly do they gain by knowing who I'm friends with? They're not making money from knowledge- most of their revenue comes from advertising.

So?

Guess what, you're the product here too. By using a.cc, you are contributing to the exchange thereby providing reason for Matthew our supreme overlord to continue running the site.

It doesn't matter. It's one thing to not use a service like Facebook because you're uncomfortable with their ToS, but to declare these companies as evil is just hilarious.

Facebook is a business. You may as well stop grocery shopping and only grow your own food. The reason it's so easy for tinfoil hats to bash on Facebook, is because it's so easy to avoid using.

Again, grocery stores don't try to squeeze me to extract all my personal information, and they don't try to stalk me physically or on the internet. (Except possibly if I start using one of those supermarket-run credit cards.)

There's a local grocery store near my house which sells locally grown produce from local farmers, along with other staple food supplies. That store isn't an enormous multi-national business which manipulates customers to expand its business empire and pay truckloads of money to the top-end executives. It's just a local service run by local people. It provides goods to the local community, and allows the employees and local farmers to earn a living. It's completely different to facebook. Not all businesses are evil.

Nope. The users force other users. I don't like it, but I'm almost out of choice.

Kind of it doesn't. Yet on the other hand, the odds are they can trace me good enough even if I don't fill in the real info. The access pattern & contact list should do the job to link between an old account & a new one. Or the account, and some other tool I may be using one day they'll be having access to. Or just.. Some market with my data.

It is quite a philosophical question though, if the FB is a good thing or a bad thing. Generally should they've not made it, somebody else sooner or later would've, with no less functionality.

Well Zuckerberg is the first one, and so he's spying on me. I don't care as long as adblock works. I'll go nuts if I'll be forced to be seeing the ads though. If I happen to be depressed that day, I may just make a little Google research and suicide bomb one of top figures in FB.. Just why not, if they're annoying me, and the whitehouse is too well protected?

I agree & disagree. The Facebook actually did a pretty good job with the privacy settings, allowing removal of yourself from most of the lists. This stuff has stopped/almost stopped bothering me since I bothered to lookup FB's settings.

FB privacy is a totally new concept.

But those 19 BillionBucks were exagerately well spent, almost nobody (except those who can spell fuchsia ) did sync the address book of their mobile with FB, but damn everybody did with Wassup because...well you couldn't do otherwise.

That is a solid wealth of information for the uber-info-gathering company that is Facebook.

FB bought WA just beacuse Google didn't NEED to

Even thou this evening for all my gang Wassup stopped working altogether.