Recently, Mark Zuckerberg announced finances for the privately held company, projecting $300 – $350 million in revenue.  Facebook is currently breaking even, but Zuckerberg plans to spend $200 million on servers next year.  The large increase in server costs would give Facebook a negative cash flow. 

So how does Facebook make $300 million dollars in revenue?

• Advertising
• Facebook Gifts
• Selling information

Its somewhat obvious that a lot of money can be made by advertising, and with 150 million active users, gifts will add up.  I’m assuming these two items make up the majority of the revenue, but there is another source of income that most Facebook users are not aware occurs.

In Facebook’s privacy policy, they have the right to sell your information to other companies.  This means that Facebook has become one of the largest source of marketing information for the 30 and under demographic.

The first half of the following video does a great job at explaining how Facebook sells your private information.  Personally, I would ignore the second part of the video (supposedly Facebook is a government consipracy to spy on you!)

Blake’s Post about that bill against anonymous posting got me curious about things so I’ve been looking around, getting a feel for what folks reactions are online and checking out some of the legal issues. Anyway, in my curiosity I’ve stumbled across something that gives me pause and presents me with a bit of a problem. They’re a group self-dubbed “Anonymous” and I don’t quite know what to do with them.

From what I can gather, Anonymous is a rather decentralized group, there doesn’t seem to be any hierarchy or leaders or even qualifications for membership apart from deciding that you are one. My guess would be its a blanket term that covers a bunch of smaller individual group. Yet they still manage to act as a whole and have demonstrated on several occasions their ability to make an impact both on and off line.

On the one hand, they seem to be doing some good things. On December 7, 2007, Global News ran a story on the arrest of an alleged child predator by the name of Chris Forcand. The story said that the police investigation of Forcand began when detectives were contacted by a “self described internet teen vigilante group called anonymous,” who had already been tracking Forcand. Apparently Forcand had approached some members of the group and they began a campaign against him. Eventually Anonymous was able to dicover Forcand’s identity and location and contacted Toronto police, who set up a sting operation and arrested Forcand.

Global News Footage Story in Toronto Sun

At the other end of things, Amonymous hardly seems to be an entirely altruistic group. Anonymous has reportedly been behind less benevolent movements, including the Hacking of MySpace pages, “raids” on several forums, online gaming networks and other sites, and a massive campaign to spoil the ending to the Harry Potter books. (Okay… that one makes me laugh… but it’s still copyright infringement!)

Fox News Ran a story on Anonymous referring to them as an “Internet Hate Machine” and “Domestic Terrorists.” A writer for “Wired News” however calls the group nothing more than “Supremely bored 15 year olds.” And claims that the fox new story is the best prank the group has ever played.

In any case, these don’t always seem to be the nicest of guys. One of the groups slogans reads: “Anonymous: Because none of us are as cruel as all of us.”

The biggest notice Anonymous has gotten by far has been for it’s recent self proclaimed “war” against the church of Scientology dubbed “Project Chanology.” On January 12, 2008, a video produced by the Church of Scientology was leaked to the Internet and uploaded to YouTube. The Church of Scientology claimed copyright violation and requested that YouTube remove the video. Soon after, Anonymous released a YouTube video declaring their campaign against the church of Scientology. Anonymous attacked the church of Scientology with DOS attacks, prank calls and black faxes. In a subsequent YouTube video they called for protests outside of Scientology centers and on February 10, 2008 some 7,000 people world wide showed up to protest outside of Scientology centers in 93 cities worldwide. Cities in which 100 or more participated included Dublin, Ireland, Atlanta, Georgia, Dallas and Austin, Texas, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney, Australia, Toronto, Canada, Clearwater, Florida, St. Louis, Missouri, New York City and London, England. Another rally is scheduled for March 15. Beware the ides?

This gives a pretty astounding picture of what this underground group is capable of. So the question is, how do we react to this? Yeah, the group is certainly responsible for some good things, no one likes a pedophile, but from what I’ve seen they can be pretty volatile as well, and is it really a good idea to encourage online vigilantism? At the same time, I can’t help but think of that bill against online anonymity. I don’t want my full name showing up places online, and if a bill like that managed to actually gain some support… well I’m pretty sure these Anonymous guys would fight it and fight it hard. That’s good for me, so I kinda want these guys around. But maybe it’s groups like this that inspired the bill in the first place.

Or am I way off base? Are these just supremely bored 15 year olds? Tell me what you think.

Kentucky Lawmaker Wants to Make Anonymous Internet Posting Illegal

“Kentucky Representative Tim Couch filed a bill this week to make anonymous posting online illegal.

The bill would require anyone who contributes to a website to register their real name, address and e-mail address with that site.

Their full name would be used anytime a comment is posted.

If the bill becomes law, the website operator would have to pay if someone was allowed to post anonymously on their site. The fine would be five-hundred dollars for a first offense and one-thousand dollars for each offense after that.” Full article… New article (last broke)

This is sad if this bill gains any traction. Agree? Why would this be a really bad thing?

Facebook is not what it was when I was a freshmen here at GCC. I remember that day we were first able to log on (yes, sadly it is still in my head). It was sunny, during finals, and instead of studying or baking in the sun as I so frequently do, I was sitting inside, in front of my computer trying to beat my roommate in seeing who could get the most friends for the day. It was innocent, it was fun and most of all I felt it was secure.

Unlike Myspace.com (I have an account there too) I liked that Facebook restricted its user base to college students, and furthermore to individual schools being able to freely view your profile, while still allowing people to be friends with “real friends” at other colleges. Not that Myspace does not have security controls, it just seems that there it is black and white, no shades of gray as with Facebook.

But as we all do, Facebook had to grow up too. The aging process happened every time they added a new school or feature. After reading an article in a magazine called Fast Company, which I subscribe to, I realized that Facebook was just under a year old when we first logged on here at GCC (Here is a Fast Company graphic to illustrate my point). The social-networking site was still in her infancy, still an ad-hoc group of people and servers, people willing to try out new things and take the site in new ways people never thought possible.

Taking the site to new heights to me has three milestones – allowing the general public to use it, the news feed feature, and its application platform – which have determined the course the site has taken. Allowing the general public to use the site was great from a business perspective because Facebook was reaching out to all the people it previously alienated with its college only policy (I remember being one of them as a freshmen before we had Facebook). Through allowing more people to use the site, Facebook boosted (and still is boosting) its membership numbers and attracting more and more investment money.

Secondly, the news feed feature was a huge trial for Facebook and its privacy policies. The feature if you have ever used the site, allows us to see instant updates that our friends have made to their pages, messages they have left for other friends of ours, new posted pictures and items, etc. However, this was a huge adjustment to have all this information condensed and located in one central location. Previously, some of it was just spread out and available on the updated friends page. Due to the outcry from its users, Facebook updated its privacy controls to allow its users more control over the flow of their information.

This very reason, the control Facebook has always allowed its users over who has access to their personal information, is what concerns me about the Facebook application platform. I use applications, I think some of them are great, I think a lot of them are pointless; but in true, entrepreneurial spirit, each application is filling a void their creator thought needed to be filled. We even agree to use them, agree to share our information with the applications we install.

But, did you know, that you are also agreeing to share your information with applications your friends have installed? According to Chris Soghoian’s Blog on Cnet.com, that is exactly what we are doing through a very deeply buried privacy control. I had never seen these privacy controls before, but after reading his blog I visited my own account and there they were. I was (and I mean was) agreeing to share my information with people (and companies) I never knew would see my information.

Facebook has their reasons for burying the applications privacy controls, not that they are sinister in any way, shape or form. This type of behavior towards privacy controls is just not Facebook as it once was, where the old Facebook tried to make it as simple as possible to stop the spread of our information beyond people we directly allowed to see it.

I believe that any information we put on the web is our own responsibility. If you don’t want people to know about it or have it come up in a job interview someday, don’t put it on a social-networking site, no matter how secure you may think it is. I have since changed my privacy controls towards the applications platform, and I am contemplating scaling back the superfluous applications I use. The lesson I learned is that I need to be more vigilant in watching my privacy controls, and maybe taking a gander at them more then when big changes happen.

Facebook is not what it was, and for that matter neither are we. We all grow up, we all do stupid things, we all change and go through phases. I still love Facebook and continue being as addicted to it as I am to food and coffee (that’s another blog or ten). Facebook is growing out of its age of innocence, and just as we did, are doing and will do, its not all that bad.