1) Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg’s machiavelian offspring who has raised a mere 40$m in total, used to be a .edu e-mail addresses only networking platform. It is now opened to anyone.

And since good news never come alone, Yahoo! has just announced having bid for taking Facebook.com over. The amounts released are in the 1bn$ range. For your information, Facebook.com generated sales for 50m$ minus in 2005.

I should however remind my readers that Zuckerberg had not only turned down about 6 months ago a 750m$ offer by Viacom (asking for 2bn$), but he didn’t show up at an 8:00am meeting with Microsoft recently. Needless to say, MS is not interested anymore in the deal.

2) Such a perfect transition… Microsoft has taken a giant step in the social networking industry, although it’s been preparing it for 4 years. Microsoft had indeed backed a start-up named Wallop 4 years ago, alongside with VCs Norwest Venture Partners, Bay Partners & Consor Capital. Wallop empowers Internet citizens and bloggers with very cool personalized tools ensuring your web corner is tailored to your personality.

Microsoft et alii ’s underlying strategy seems to be pushing for Internet citizen being able to chose her/his service and focus on providing design features to make it more appealing to one’s community of interests. At least, technology barriers look much higher than in the ‘traditional’ social networking (business, dating, fun, etc.) industry.

I was almost forgetting: YouTube founders looks like willing to exit for 1.5bn$…

My call: it’s only the beginning of the social networking wars.