Facebook Going Public, IPO Coming Soon

Zuckerberg creates new class of stock in preparation for selling to institutions and the public.

Insiders have been talking about the possibly of an IPO for months, but today the dual stock class decision is a clear indication that your chance to own some powerless B class shares is coming soon ;-)

I think I’ll try to backup the truck on FB stock when I can. Even after the institutional investors load up early and machine gun shares as the sheep, I think there will be enough juice left to make some serious gains before the 2.0 meltdown is initiated.

Twitter Traffic Plunges

Twitter’s traffic has dropped by about 25% in 90 days, reversing course on it’s giant exponential ramp up during spring and early summer.

Perhaps once people got intrigued by simple social networking, they moved on to interfaces that allowed more than 2 sentences.

Here is the image that must be keeping the twitter exec’s and $100 million investors really nervous:

Just over the past month traffic has declined an estimated 15%. Twitter did an enormous amount to help bring new people into social networking, but I think their hay day is coming to and end (and I’m sure plenty of people will be cheering as the old fail whale begins years of decline).

Facebook and Mafia Wars Face Lawsuit

Facebook and Mafia Wars creator Zynga ready for court as a class action lawsuit was filed today over “offer-based” ads that automatically rebilled users each month.

The “offers” consisted ads that asked users to complete surveys in return for prizes, but neglected to tell these users they were also being signed up to paid subscription services at the same time. This $5 million class action suit is the first of what is expected to be many rounds of court battles over Facebook’s ad practices.

It won’t be long until the lawsuits work their way down the chain to your favorite affiliate network.

Recent activity at Zynga and Facebook: Mafia War’s Zynga put out a statement last week announcing they had raised an additional $15.1mil of financing and have over 3 million people per day playing their games online. Facebooks traffic has nearly doubled over the past 6 months.

Bebo Traffic Drops 50% in 6 Months

Bebo, the once popular social network geared around member updates and media uploads, continues it’s death spiral towards nothingness as traffic drops another 50% over the past 6 months.

The Bebo Traffic graph from Quantcast would only be good if you could sled down it. Here is the data:

Bebo has been a mecca for spammers, bullies, and copyright abusers over the past year. Although the company is taking steps to address the abuse issues (such as instant panic button to report content violations), they are about a year too late.

The super fascinations with social media early on that propelled some of these earlier networks to the moon also sucked in plenty of internet slime and marketeers hoping to take advantage of said users. Bebo left the door open too long and is paying for it.

So far, networks that are able to scale their abuse departments and detection capabilities are sucking in all the traffic the lesser quality networks have given up.

Want to see an inverse of the Bebo Graph above? Check out Facebook:

Comparing the two graphs above make it clear that user experience wins wars in Social Media. Will most of these 2nd tier networks (such as Bebo, Hi5, etc) simply dry up and disappear while Facebook doubles up on traffic again over the next year? I’d put my money on it, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Kanye West Is Dead Hoax

Kanye West isn’t dead, yet after 48 hours the rumor will not die. I saw a new rumor last night Kanye’s mom had died, it could even be true, I’m so confused by all this nonsense flying around on Twitter.

I think Balloon Boy got everyone excited to fake the Kanye West funk. Now getting a lie re-tweeted 200 times is almost an art form. I’ve noticed recently, around 30% of the trending topics on Twitter at 3am are hoaxes or half truths (maybe this % is lower than real life, lol).

While it’s funny and interesting to watch, over the long run this type of activity could devalue twitter.

Do you find the hoaxes entertaining? Do you think they improve or decrease your Twitter experience? Is the trending topics list an open door for spammers? Does anyone gain from this type of exposure? Post your feedback in the comment box below.