Facebook has reported it is delaying its IPO till the next year, so its staff could focus on improvements to the social networking site.
The IPO, which was widely rumoured to be in the first quarter of 2012, has been forecast to be one of the biggest in history, with the company now valued at $66.5bn, says the Financial Times.
Facebook was considering going public in January this year, after it received a $500m investment led by Goldman Sachs, valuing the company at $50bn. Facebook is said to have doubled its revenues over the first half of this year, to $1.6bn, with net income for the first half of the year almost $500m. The company refuses to comment on this.
In addition, Facebook has launched a so called ‘hacking culture’ in order to make brands and agencies more understanding of its ongoing development of the site. The idea behind the initiative is to rapidly create new features. According to Andrew Bosworth, director of product engineering at Facebook, the social network’s mantra is ‘move fast and break things’.
The products that Facebook has launched over the past year include the email messaging service, mobile messaging app and video calling with Skype. It is also going to start a music platform soon.
According to Scribbal, Facebook users are interacting with brands more than users of any other social network are, according to the results of a study by Constant Contact and Chadwick Martin Bailey. They found that most fans of a brand on Facebook are more likely to recommend a brand to a friend after becoming a fan themselves. The data included in the study, which was carried out, was collected from 1,491 American consumers aged 18 and over in January. Facebook will also track brands during the Olympics to evaluate its influence.
Facebook’s regular ‘Hackathons’, where employees are given the freedom to come up with any concept they want to improve the site is a part of the hacking culture. Bosworth said that Facebook Chat and the Like button were just two of a number of innovations to come out of this process.
Facebook is attempting to put this hacking culture into action today as the delegates of. The delegates Facebook Studio Live have already received a live brief from TFL that tasked them with coming up with a social solution to encourage consumers to be positive about and experiment with different forms of public transport during the Olympics. The winning brief will go live on Facebook and the delegates have a chance to implement the hacking culture on practice.