How much is a social network worth?

$15 billion, that’s how much. 23 year old Mark Zuckerberg must be a very happy man today, after Microsoft shelled out $240m for a 1.6 per cent stake in Facebook. The social networking hype machine has obviously been chugging away since Murdoch paid out $580m for MySpace and I wonder how much longer before the wheels fall off the bandwagon? eBay’s already admitted it got a bit over eager when bidding for Skype and all this crazy spending is starting to look a bit ’90’s…

Anyway, the point of this post was about BlackBerry finally jumping on the bandwagon and getting a Facebook app, which just goes to show how closed mobile operating systems trail the rest of the industry. Facebook’s probably seen as passe already and the new mobile social networking phenomenon is probably something like Twitter. After all, Jaiku’s gone all corporate now…