Microsoft pay $240 million for 1.6%

Looks like Microsoft is finally anteing up and joining in on the social networking revolution by paying $240 million for a measly 1.6% of facebook, according to this wired news story.

This deal puts the value of Facebook at a whopping $15 Billion, not bad for a company only 3 1/2 years out of the gate and with not even $200 million in receipts!

It seems to me that if you have the next "big" social networking idea rolling around in your head it might be a good idea to start putting in some late nights and get the thing off the ground. Before, that is, the market is saturated (which in my humble opinion it already is) and the social networking "bubble" bursts.

Sometimes I have the feeling that we are just a little too connected to the internet (The Borg), We end up knowing a little too much about what people are doing right now (Twitter ,Plazes), what they have done since they graduated from high school (Xing,LinkedIn) and what they do in their private time (MySpace,Facebook).

All of this information floating around out there is a gold mine for all sorts of 'nefarious' people/entities. And yet we happily (I am guilty of this too) put more and more of ourselves out there for people to see, study, and catalog.

So in the end it really doesn't come as much of a surprise to find out that Microsoft is paying entirely too much for a piece of the information pie that Google is currently dominating.

We all know that information is power, and power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Google has a head start on information part, now the wait is on to see who gets to absolute corruption first.

Happy Coding...