Stuff about facebook just seems to be everywhere.

Firstly, a story about how Friendster could have brought Facebook (also from Valleyvag, its a great gossip site about the web industry).  Friendster was the kind of SNS just 4 years ago, everyone wanted to buy them, how the tables have turned now.  Kind of reminds me of Dell and Apple.

The next story is about a rumor that Facebook is shopping for sites in China and apparently got their supposedly $85-100 million offer turned down by Zhanzuo.com.  Zhanzuo is backed by Sequoia so I wouldn’t be surprised if they were approached by Facebook, however I’m gonna call this rumor BS as websites in China rarely get acquired for that much.  Xiaonei.com the chinese facebook clone was only acquired for $1-2M abit more than a year ago.   I’m sure if Zhanzuo was offered that kind of money they would have taken it and ran.

ValleyVag has an article about how a facebook gave an employer access to an employee’s private profile.  The employee was a legal gun owner and had pictures of himself with his gun on his profile and guess what happened next?  The employer saw the pics and fired the employee.  Your private profile isn’t as private as you think, check out facebook’s EULA.

This just strengthens the facebook conspiracy theory I saw online sometime ago about why facebook won’t get acquired.  In a nutshell its because the venture capitalists backing facebook are affiliated with the American government’s intelligence departments.  With the amount of money going into national security what is a few billion dollars to them?  Facebook gives them all the data they want: where you went to school, who you know, what your political views and religious views are.  Since Facebook is a social platform most of the data is real and reliable.

This years cnbloggercon was the best one to date. I’m not sure what the numbers are but the venue this year is significantly bigger than the previous ones. This year’s venue at Tsinghua’s tech park was the best yet. As i wrote in my previous post, cnbloggercon is my favorite tech conference in China and it is the only one i wouldn;t miss and would recommend to others as a must go. This year I brought along my friend/business partner Andy of New Digital Noise and Angus of 852Signal. The event has been fruitful for me as met some new people in web 2.0 space and got a lead on one of the founders of fanswo.com whom I have been trying to track down for a stealth project. Additionally I finally got to meet Joi Ito, one of the best known bloggers in the world and if not the most busiest. Joi just flew into Beijing on Sunday morning from New York and was scheduled to fly to LA later the same night.

The Orange event on the other hand was everything cnbloggercon was not. Since it was sort of a corporate event, it was alot more uptight. The venue was alot smaller and people weren’t suppose to mingle during the presentations. The presentations were good with speakers such as Isaac Mao and Tangos Chen, but it was just like any other English Web event (no loss if you missed it).

Not being much of a timely writer i’ll won’t be the one live blogging. For anyone that wants to follow the cnbloggercon07 in real time and wants to read it in english you can get it all with the following link

cnbloggercon07 live blog