Alexander Stuart

Despite today's falling stock price, I truly believe that many people - stock analysts among them - don't "get" Facebook. Facebook is in its infancy and too much is made of its "cool" factor. At almost 1 billion users, Facebook has far surpassed "cool" and is a worldwide utility, just as Mark Zuckerberg always envisaged it would be. LinkedIn, Google+ and others will never, to my mind, catch up (I exclude Twitter, because Twitter serves a different function), and the opportunities for monetizing Facebook haven't even begun. Advertising isn't necessarily the future source of FB's income - at least, not in even the traditional social media sense (and other car manufacturers last week were saying that General Motors pulling its paltry $10 million of advertising from FB and making so much noise about it, didn't "get" FB, either) - there are probably far more interactive and personal means for FB to influence people&#