There has been social media news around if Mark Zuckerberg should sell Facebook or not with an offer of $200million  of preferred stock at $10 billion valuation.  Though TechCrunch has announced that he will not sell Facebook at $8 billion valuation (seems like a discrepency here, or it’s another offer?), I believe they are still thinking about it as they are forecasting to make $550million this financial year.

If Facebook should continue to be better, here’s my recommendations:

About Facebook website

Facebook is a unique platform where it provides almost everybody in  different parts of the world a place to gather together.  Because it allows communications amongst the users, it virtually takes over some of the traditional ways of email communications.

Continue to innovate!

What Facebook really needs to do is to continue  innovating on their own platform for internal applications as well as third party applications.  There are always new competitors trying to create another “Facebook” website.  We will always be bombarded with the new competitors.  I can still remember how I was “poached” by my friend in Friendster to join Facebook.  I refused to join for a while, until I see many more people joining Facebook.  Seriously, I was left with no choice but to join Facebook.   I can still remember leaving my friendster-style testimonial on the Facebook wall while my friend teased me that I don’t have to do that anymore!

Today, I have not logged into my Friendster for several months.  I have no idea what Friendster has become.

What can Facebook do to continue retaining visitors in the next 5 years and so?

Looking from the history, it looks really common for one website to be taken over by the other.  And surprisingly, Internet should be only about 10 years old.  On the Internet, time flies really fast… One application can be famous for a few months or years, and immediately get out of the game!

From what I can see,

• ICQ has been taken over by MSN
• Friendster/MySpace is slowly taken over by Facebook
• Hotmail/Yahoo email users are slowly moving over to Gmail

And the upcoming webware are as follows:

• Google Chrome browser (taking over Internet Explorer and Firefox?)
• Google Doc (taking over Microsoft Office?)
• Google Reader
• WordPress (taking over BlogSpot?)

Something which can keep the website alive are probably as follows:

• No strong competition
• New things to keep users happy

The Number One thing I don’t like about Facebook

There are a few advertorial links in every webpage that Facebook tried to “trick” me to click.  They actually placed it beside the Facebook application I was using! And I thought it was the same application!  I can still remember one of the links actually charge me money without my permission!  Why?  Because the clause to pay money is really small!

I would say that Facebook has done a really good job of ad placement because I really thought they are associated.  But the part where they charge me money, is only to do with that scheming advertiser.

Should Mark sell?

Ok, here’s my thought.  If Mark should sell Facebook, it should be during the good times.  That’s when we can make the most out of our business.  Buy low, sell high… Isn’t that obvious?  But again, I would want to continue expanding my passion if I were Mark…