Eat The Press

The New Face Of Facebook: Yahoo?

WSJ |  via The Street |  Posted Thursday September 21, 2006 at 08:50 AM

Front-page on today's Wall Street Journal: Facebook.com is apparently in serious talks with Yahoo! to be acquired for up to $1 billion. The social-networking site, staple of college kids everywhere, has also spoken with Microsoft and Viacom (though it's a bit out of Viacom's current price range), says the WSJ, which notes that Yahoo! has been feeling the Google pinch in search advertising and in general global hegemony (well, except in Belgium). Yahoo's shares fell 1.5% yesterday in trade on the Nasdaq.

Facebook represents a giant prize in the big online social-networking properties right now, especially after the savvy pickup of MySpace by Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp last year, which apparently bugged Sumner Redstone enough to axe Tom Freston over it. It's also weathered its first massive misstep: Introducing privacy-eschewing "newsfeeds" for its members alerting their networks to changes in online status, which sent Facebook's constituents into a tizzy (the company hastily reversed their position).

UPDATE: The WSJ story has now been put up for free online here. HIlarious excerpt:

During one series of talks with Microsoft, Facebook executives told their Microsoft peers they couldn't do an 8 a.m. conference call because the company's 22-year-old founder and chief executive, Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg, wouldn't be awake, says a person familiar with the talks. Microsoft executives were incredulous... The young entrepreneur says he generally works late -- he recalls eating French fries recently in the parking lot of a local McDonald's restaurant at 3 a.m. -- and doesn't get to work early. "I'm in the office at 10:30 a.m. sometimes," he says.