To be blunt, it doesn’t. Facebook’s $104 billion estimated worth is far beyond the likes of Google and Apple. Of course, Apple went public in the 1980s, so it’s no surprise their IPO was valued much less than the current tech giants. I’m sure the fact that Apple’s stock currently costs over $500 a share helps them rest easy.

As for Facebook’s initial value, the New York Times has an interactive chart that compares Facebook’s speculated IPO value to other tech companies, with Google’s serving as something of a benchmark. As you’ll soon see, Facebook’s IPO is much, much larger than any of the tech companies before it.

The first screencap shows where Google stands in relation to the tech IPOs that came before theirs:

But then, Facebook goes public, setting a new standard:

The next slide expands the chart on a logarithmic scale:

First-day pop is factored in:

The final slide is a little sobering if, for nothing else, the realization that over half of the tech IPOs don’t massively succeed like Google and Facebook. In fact, a great many of them have negative returns:

The post responsible for the chart, hat-tip to ThisIsMyNext.com, takes an incredibly thorough look at the Android’s Galaxy Nexus and the recently-launched iPhone 4s, among other devices. If performance is your thing, the Galaxy Nexus wins. Of course, people don’t just by devices for performance, they buy them because of trends, and as long as that remains apart of the consumer conscience, the iPhone will remain a beast.

Here’s a look at the chart. Be sure to click for a larger version of it, because there is a great deal of specification information contained within:

Hitwise mentions other factors that have helped FB: the new layout, mobile apps, especially for the iPhone and BlackBerry.

Another is certainly the Facebook Connect program, which allows users to share stories in their news feed and make comments on websites and blogs. The program launched in beta during July of last year, then officially launched to developers in early December. The number of websites participating in Facebook Connect has grown quickly to over 15,000 websites (globally) including CNN.com, NBC.com, ABCNews.com, Hulu, WashingtonPost.com, The Huffington Post, and others.

Most convincing, of course, is the cold, hard data:

While it’s obvious that the members of Facebook Connect have helped FB gain some visibility and perhaps even legitimacy, personally, I’m still a little skeptical that Connect did all that. What else was going on then?

On the other hand, it seems unlikely that such a sudden, steep climb came from a snowball effect alone.

What do you think? Is it just a coincidence, or was Connect really the tipping point (for the US, anyway—Facebook had already beat MySpace worldwide at that point)? Do you use Facebook Connect?

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Good. How about with your employees?

No, I’m not talking about the importance of abstinence/protection, I’m talking about the importance of ruining your company’s reputation via social media!

New data suggests you should sit down with them right this minute!

Yep, you read that chart correctly. A whopping 74% of your employees agree that their social media antics could damage your company’s reputation. With that in mind, you absolutely need to have the talk with your employees and let them know what they can and cannot do in social media.

If you need some reading material, might I suggest the rather good Radically Transparent.

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Everyone loves the visual appeal of charts. It’s hard to imagine Microsoft’s PowerPoint or the latest issue of USA Today without a chart or two. They get attention, and when crafted properly convey information rapidly to the viewer.

Google thinks web publishers should be able to do this easily for their visitors. At the Google Code blog, Steve Crossan announced the debut of the Google Chart API.

"No state, no calls, just send your data in an http request and get a png image graph back. Embed the request in an img tag and you’re done. We currently support line charts, bar charts, pie charts, scatter plots, and sparklines," said Crossnan.

The API stemmed from Google’s internal development of it to use in their other services, like Finance and Video. Crossnan said the project started as one of those fabled 20-percent-time projects in Google’s Zurich operations.

Garett Rogers at Googling Google applauded the Chart API, but questioned its long-term value to Google.

"It’s hard to imagine what the business model for this one is. Google’s basically just offering up free CPU power and bandwidth for charts without any chance of recovering their costs," he wrote.

The prudent site publisher will likely do a chart call and simply store the resulting image locally, which would remove the ongoing demand for Google to keep regenerating it on request.

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http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=t:90,49&chs=350x150&chl=Foo|Bar

… and Google returns a PNG graphic containing the chart. For instance, above URL results in the following image:

Splitting up the image URL parameters, you can see what it’s made up of:

cht=p3

chd=t:90,49

chs=350x150

chl=Foo|Bar

I’m not linking live to Google but caching this image on my server instead, just in case, as Google limits your requests to this API to 50,000 per day. Even with that limit, you can grab the image and do the caching on your own server automatically (by copying the binary), which would mean 50,000 requests will be good enough for many use cases.

This service is really neat all in all. The last time I wanted to do a dynamic 3D pie chart as above, I used some PHP scripts (accessing the GD image library) which were ugly to configure, and not just because the code was obfuscated to make it hard to remove "created by" messages in the image. Then again I’m not sure the Google Charts API does everything other services can do, and we also don’t know how long they will keep up support for it – think of other half-cancelled APIs like the Google SOAP API (and there doesn’t seem to be a quick way for Google to make money from the Google Chart API yet… adding ads would be too noisy for users for this purpose, and there’s no way to make the ad clickable anyway).

Here are couple of more examples of what can be done with the Chart API (cached again, but click them to see a live parametrized version):

Also see how you can kidnap Google Page Creator’s image generator.

[Via Google Code blog. Thanks Reto!]

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The financial sector might be the most important when it comes to breaking news. A beta release of AOL Money & Finance shows AOL wants to ride on that keen edge of coverage, and take on Internet financial news leader Yahoo Finance.

AOL has placed a lot more information within easy on-screen reach of the financial news visitor. In the beta site, real-time headlines from news, trade publications, blogs, and other sources may be accessed from a tabbed interface within a stock’s page.

Like Yahoo does, AOL’s beta has a left sidebar of links to stock related details like business profiles, earnings analysis, and various financials. An interactive chart allows the viewer to see ranges of a stock’s ups and downs over a given period of time.

As a beta product, AOL Money & Finance still has some little kinks to work out. A section under the stock price that allows people to set alerts based on a stock doing something like hitting a high or low refused to recognize a valid AOL login, despite repeated tries and a password change.

In the coming months, AOL expects to launch richer datasets for public and private companies, and for mutual funds, in AOL Money & Finance. Technical charting and a new platform for portfolios should be in the mix too.

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3-D looks at the Big Apple and street views of Miami were two of the big announcements at Where 2.0 in San Jose.

Microsoft and Google each attempted to out-splash the other with these impressive additions to their existing mapping products.

On the Google Maps side, the new feature called Street View provides 360-degree views of city streets.

They launched with imagery from San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Miami, and Denver.

Google also announced the launch of Mapplets, which enable third party developers to create mini applications that can be displayed on Google Maps, much like Google Gadgets are displayed on iGoogle.

Mapplets contain a trove of third-party information about cities, like housing listings and crime data, for use in mashups.

Google’s Thai Tran blogged more about them at the Google Lat Long Blog:

(E)ssentially, these are embeddable mashups. You can then choose which of these Mapplets you want to see overlaid on the same map and combine them with the built-in features of Google Maps, like driving directions and business search.

This lets you create your own mashups from the content that’s most relevant to you. It also gives publishers a new channel to reach the millions of Google Maps users who are looking for their content.

Microsoft debuted its 3-D cityscapes on Live Search Maps at the conference.

New York and several other cities in the US, Canada, and the UK received the expansive treatment.

The views Microsoft provided for New York show landmarks and notable locations in the city.

Business listings feature Yellow Pages information and other details about local businesses.

People will be able to create custom maps and lists of places on Live Search Maps to share with others.

Microsoft expects to have cityscapes available for a number of cities worldwide by the end of Summer 2007.

They even have a histogram with the relationships as they have changed since November 2000. It outlines the suppliers and receivers of primary and secondary search results (raw index) and paid results (ads).

What is so important about the relationships between search engines?

Believe it or not, Google does not own the internet. The internet is a community, yes, I will have to say that Google does command a big stake in this community, but they do not own it all!

Based upon the demographics of the people you are trying to reach, they may not think so either. Knowing you users is an important aspect of any marketing plan and you shouldn’t discount other sources of potential traffic, namely, everyone else.

Ranking high in one engine does not guarantee great rankings in all of the engines, if you need proof, search for your top keyword in each of the big four and look at the top ten, are they all the same? Typically not.

So, what’s my point?

Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. You may be missing out on valuable traffic if your focus is only on Google or any other engine alone. It is this reason that a balanced, holistic SEO campaign is necessary.

If a website ranks #1 for a search term and no one uses it (the search term) does it even matter?

Building a website for ranking will do only one thing, bring more traffic. Great, but are you providing what these users are looking for? Bridging the gap between getting them into your website and them actually doing what you want are two very different things. Traffic does not mean sales, just the opportunity.

Build your website for the users you are trying to reach.

Oh, and the chart, I would reccomend that you print it and keep a copy on your wall (or cubicle wall) that you can reference easily.

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However, some versions will have to perform a clean install, while other can just pop in the new disk and upgrade. The confuzzling chart:

To summarize: If you have Windows 2000 or a 64-bit version of XP, you’ll be installing from scratch. If you have XP Home, you can buy any version of Vista and perform an upgrade. If you have Professional or Tablet, you can only perform an upgrade to Business or Ultimate, otherwise you’ll need to install from scratch. If you have Media Center, you can only perform an upgrade to Premium or Ultimate, otherwise you’ll need to install from scratch.

Got it?

Got a headache?

Here’s the good news: Even if you can’t perform an upgrade, you can still buy and use the upgrade edition, which is usually a lot cheaper. You may need to install Windows from scratch, but, trust me, that isn’t the worst idea in the world.

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

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