The third and final section of David Kirkpatrick's "The Facebook Effect" begins just like the other two. Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook is now growing into a very important social network worldwide, and gathering the investments and interest of many large companies, including both Microsoft and Google. Microsoft already had a U.S-only banner advertising deal for Facebook's Photos application, and wanted to both renegotiate the terms of their current deal as well as take the advertising sponsorship worldwide, as over half of Facebook's quickly growing userbase was from outside the United States. They succeed with this deal, even though there were talks between Facebook and Google as well.
This was largely due to Facebook's incredibly quickly-growing API and application platform. As Kirkpatrick writes, "Facebook application companies are doing so well that their estimated aggregate revenue in 2009 was roughly the same amount as Facebook's itself — slightly over $500 million" (pg 232).
Today, Facebook is one of, if not the most important company on the Internet. A few other come to mind, such as Microsoft or Google — but it is likely Facebook with the most opportunity to usurp Google as the world’s Internet gatekeeper, the first place nearly every Web citizen goes when they first browse the Internet. It’s intelligent platform-growing deals also allow other websites to tap into Facebook’s revolutionary social graph – and while those sites may use Facebook to gain and keep users, but it is really Facebook’s future they are cementing.
-kth
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