Social networking from Bebo to Facebook

The third session today at the Financial Times Digital Media & Broadcasting conference in London had Joanna Shields (EU COO, ex Bebo) of Facebook up, again subtly pressed by the FT's Richard Waters on the basics of the Facebook business model, here are my notes:

- Facebook's value to the user is "Unique"

- As a platform it drove far higher demand for Al Jazeera English than otherwise would have happened

- Facebook shares data with companies but they can only see what you want thenm to see (Facebook sees all)

- Facebook's proposition is to "help people feel more engaged", i.e. stay on the site, and is thus is trying to bring as much content / functions / diversions onto the site so you don't need to leave - ever (and when you do, the Facebook tentacles follow you with Likes etc)

On Zynga - It is a great business because it "puts people at the centre of its business". Joanna was more demure when pressed about the gerfuffle about how much loot Facebook gets from Zynga for sitting on the platform.

On Facebook Credits - yes it is the only way people will buy anything on Facebook (aka why would you let anyone else in..)

On why Facebook has stopped publically reporting new users since last summer - Joanna dodged that one, instead saying that Facebook was:

- "Going Deeper" (aka trying to get more minutes onsite per user

- Now have 200m users on Mobile

- Has 30m UK users (c 60% of adult population - I wonder how many "users" are duplicate or corporate names) and 50% come back every day.

- Is growing in new markets

On $50bn valuation - based on:

- very tight knowledge of users

- increasing relevance to usesr based on this knowledge

- can target friends / friends of friends

My take - nothing new except that interesting dodge of "Growth" - that explains the huge activity to increase time on site, as if you do the maths, when growth starts to slow down, engagement on the site starts to drop off radically, which Joanna should know all about from Bebo days (new users spend more time on site and usage decays over time). I wanted to ask about why Facebook would last whereas Bebo didn't, but there wasn't time

Update - Facebook co-founder is selling 10 million shares - c $300m - hmmm, as they say.