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So facebook is now valued at $15 Billion. How real is that valuation? I’m not 100% sure. It’s probably part hype and marketing to fuel Microsoft’s advertising services, but it does go to show that user activity is a good and valuable thing.

This was one of the reasons behind our mantra that users should be paid for their participation. If a company can play people’s participation online into a valuation of that amount, we felt those same people should get at least a piece. In fact, half of everything we earn with our future model.

It appears College.com does. I was going to login to my facebook account today to checkup on the SharedReviews group, and fat-fingered the address by mistake. Looky where I ended up: http://www.college.com/?xref=faceboook.com&a=4

Considering College.com is a direct competitor to Facebook, it’s pretty smart of them (minus opening the door to a lawsuit) to try and bleed away some of the traffic by taking advantage of the fact Facebook doesn’t get it when it comes to typo protection of their domain. This is why we registered a whole bunch of typo’s of our domain before we even got off the ground floor

IMHO unethical and nothing I would ever do, but if your biggest competitor leaves the door wide open like that…

Considering we’re combining social networking with product reviews here at SharedReviews, I’ve been following the progress of companies like Judy’s Book for a while that focused on the local service space. I thought the move that Judy’s Book made last year to re-focus their business model on local deals versus local service reviews based on mounting competitive pressure was a good one. I noticed on Andy’s blog, and Techcrunch this morning that they’ve announced they’re scaling operations, letting go of most of their staff, and re-focusing efforts to find a strategic acquirer for the assets of the company.

If you’ve ever doubted Andy’s abilities at communication, read his post on the subject here. If I ever have to face such a hard decision and announcement that affects so many, I hope I’ll be able to do so with similar style and grace as he did in his post. Good luck Andy, and we’ll miss Judy’s Book. You were all doing some very cool stuff we’re going to lament not seeing come to fruition.