Just read on ESPN.com that an employee of the Philadelphia Eagles was fired for a post he put up on Facebook. Basically, this employee was upset that one of his favorite players, Brian Dawkins, signed with the Denver Broncos. His post was:

"Dan is [expletive] devastated about Dawkins signing with Denver ... Dam Eagles R Retarted!!"

Seems pretty harmless by sports forum chatter standards. The employee later deleted the post but was still fired a few days later. I've heard of similar things happening in other non-sports related companies where employees have been terminated for making detrimental statements on social networking or blog sites. I'm sure the threshold is different for each company and I can't speak to what I'd do if faced with a similar situation. Most likely, my take would be that unless an employee is leaking private company information or committing deliberate libel towards the company or another employee, it's really not a big deal. Employees shouldn't be afraid to voice their opinions about their employers. If nothing else, I'd view it as a valuable communication tool for employers to improve the way they do things. However, incidents like the above are just another reminder that in the new age of Facebook/MySpace/Twitter/Blogs/etc. we have far less privacy than we'd like to think (a lot of which is our own fault). My rule of thumb is I expect every post/update/comment/etc. that I make will be read by every single person in the world from my business partners to my mother. If I wouldn't want any of them reading it, I shouldn't even put it up.

I'm reading the Techcrunch post re: Twitter and it's Series C round of $35M. Congrats to them. In reading the comments, I noticed there was a fair amount of hate re: why anyone would continue to fund a company that doesn't have a revenue generating strategy in place. That's a legit stance. Still, I don't have as much pessimism about Twitter than I do about say, Facebook. For one, Twitter hasn't unveiled its revenue generating products yet. For all we know, it could hit a monster homerun. Facebook on the other hand has made several attempts at generating revenue with some success (and some failures - Beacon anyone?). Still, I'll reserve judgement until after they roll out those proposed revenue generating products.
 
One comment in particular was from a guy named Nathan:

Useless is a bit much. The service is useful to millions of people who use it multiple times every day. The issue isn't the usefulness of the service, it's the fact that it doesn't generate revenue. A big difference. Also, it seems that Nathan is a little bitter that his revenue generating start-up can't get funding. On that point, I feel for him. Fundraising is not easy. You'd be lucky to get one second meeting out of ten first meetings with investors. We've been fundraising for about a month and had to hear a lot of no's before we got to the handful of promising second/third meetings we are entering into now. Our business, like Nathan's, is not that sexy though we do generate revenue and have very strong growth projections.
 
The analogy I like to use is this. Someone comes up to you and asks for a million dollars to open a couple of Denny's franchises. The person provides solid sales numbers, tons of historical data, etc. and tells you that you'll most likely make back your money in 3-5 years and then receive a nice 10% dividend each year. Then another person comes and tells you they need a million dollars to open a new concept high-end restaurant with a new chef who has worked under the best chefs in the country. Who would you fund? My answer would be the Denny's franchise, but that's because I'm not rich and like the stability of a safe investment. For investors who already have money, the idea of a nice solid investment throwing off 10% just doesn't excite them. They need the next billion dollar payout - the next YouTube, Yahoo, or Google. Otherwise, they'd just go buy bonds and commodities.

I've tried a few different times to peg Facebook's valuation. Looks like they did it for me, according to the settlement the ConnectU guys got. Also, I'm testing out Posterous' tagging via email system. Hope it works!

UPDATE: Looks like I haven't quite figured out the tagging via email for Posterous just yet...

I've posted before about Facebook and its valuation ... not always in the most optimistic light. I'm reading a post today about rumors that Bebo is being actively shopped by AOL. Now I'm doing some very very rough calculations based on some very very vague assumptions, but I think I might have undervalued Facebook.
 
My take has always been that Facebook should be valued at about 5 times revenue. I still hold to that value and have said I would revise my numbers should I get more detail into Facebook's real revenues. Well based on the TechCrunch post, Bebo is rumored to be valued at about $200 million which supposedly is two times its current annual revenues (or $100 million). I pulled some traffic numbers from QuantCast for both these guys:

Making a very simple assumption of traffic = revenue, I'll assume that Facebook has 11.47 times the revenue of Bebo or $1.147 billion. Based on that, my new valuation for them is about $5.735 billion. Still a far cry from the $15 billion valuation they raised their last round with but not too shabby. Again, this is a very rough estimate and who knows whether I'm still above or below their true revenue number. My hope is that Facebook is doing well and that they can still grow. We all know the Bay Area could use a big employer nowadays.