Do you use Facebook? I thought so. If you don’t, you’re probably in the minority nowadays. I find it interesting that Facebook seems to have become so much more popular than its old rivals MySpace and Friendster. It’s great that they got users to help translate it into new languages, too.
This article on the Reuters website caught my eye over the weekend. It seems that Facebook has started earning money now and is keen to become as rich and powerful as Google.
There’s a lot of interesting business vocabulary in the article, too. The first interesting expression is in the second paragraph where it is mentioned that Facebook had turned ‘cash positive‘. This is an expression meaning that there is more money coming into the company than there is going out.
There is some great expressions in this paragraph slightly later in the article:
Sandberg, who has long fought the perception Facebook lacked a revenue model, laid out a gameplan to turn the company into a cash machine by describing how the company aimed to bring in revenues from novel ads aimed at its 300 million users.
To ‘lay out a gameplan‘ means to present a plan of action. In this case, the plan is related to how to alter the company so that it becomes a ‘cash machine‘ and starts making a lot of money.
There’s another interesting word later on when Sheryl Sandberg is quoted describing advertising as like a ‘funnel‘. A funnel is a shape which is wide at one end and narrow at the other, as in the picture below.
The last expression I would like to look at is in the last paragraph where it is mentioned that Starbucks ‘won kudos‘ from Facebook members. ‘Won kudos’ means that it gained their respect or they gave it credit.
I think Facebook are going to need to do all they can to go to stay ahead of newer rivals like Twitter and even some more specialist social-networking sites related to hobbies or education.
What’s your favourite social-networking website?
Today’s photos are by Ivan Prole and Antonio Jiménez Alonso.