Facebook: What's it REALLY worth?

Weather UP; VAT UP; value of Facebook UP; New Year UP.

2011 already feels a more exciting place than 2010. But I guess it depends a little upon which platform you happen to be observing events.

I’ve just made a rare sortie to my Facebook page to be greeted by someone’s feet. I’m afraid that may be why I don’t often bother to go to Facebook.

The feet are perfectly enticing, but as I set about my day, do I need them right now? Do I need to know that assorted people have written on my “wall”? Do I get excited that seven people have “poked” me in the last week and that three people have asked me to “be their friend” today?

Facebook is full of time-consuming diversions. Potentially hugely attractive and amusing, I have no doubt…but then I have no time for either.

Twitter, on the other hand, is focused, fast, informing, and the future. I am told in the newsroom that part of the $50 billion that Facebook is now worth is ME! I am told that I have a monetary value – I am so excited by this concept that I have practically fallen off my chair as I write this.

Then there is my blog. One of my New Year resolutions is to test the true value of blogging. Does blogging add much to the sum total of human understanding?

On Snowblog we have a developing community of respondents. But does the blogosphere have as much potential for interaction as the Twittersphere? Should I blog less and Tweet more? Is Iain Dale right to have hung up his blog? Where is our discourse taking us? Is there anything that we are doing that is making the world a better place?

And perhaps most particularly today, does Facebook make the world a better, happier place? Or is it adding to the communal disconnect as more and more people burrow into their key boards, head down, engaging with people they don’t know and will never meet?

Hang on a minute – isn’t that exactly what I do every night on the telly?

The Facebook bubble is down to QE2, says Faisal Islam

Facebook isn’t worth $50bn: it’s really worth a lot more, writes Benjamin Cohen