The internets are buzzing as Mark Zuckerberg recently joined social sharing site The Fancy now everyone is buzzing asking the question, is he interested in the new upstart.
If a tree falls in the forest, and Mark Zuckerberg is nearby, does everyone write about it? Does he end up buying the entire forest?
Breaking news from Facebook land: Mark Zuckerberg has made an account on The Fancy, a social sharing site similar to Pinterest with one unique hitch – users can purchase items directly from the site instead of just watching everyone post pictures of items they’d like to own.
The marketplace-like functionality sets The Fancy apart from its Pinterest peer, but the latter still carries the population. Pinterest racked up third place in total visits for all social networks in an analysis run earlier this year, with 104 million visits to the site’s name (just trailing Twitter at 182 million visits, and far surpassing Google Plus’ 61 million visits during the measured time period).
So, now that Zuckerberg’s on The Fancy, what does that actually mean?
For starters, user “zuckd” might very well have a fancy method for organizing books in his future – pardon the pun. His first “fancied” item, a $160 “Extendo Library Shelving System,” is his only, though the verified Zuckerberg has ended up following around 16 users during his brief time on the site. Naturally, more than 100,000 different The Fancy users are now following Zuckerberg, although they might be in for a bit of a letdown given how infrequently he seems to use other social sites (at least, publicly).
While it’s a bit too early to start throwing out the “a” word – “acquisition” – that hasn’t stopped quite a few from speculating that Zuckerberg might be checking out The Fancy’s waters before ultimately looking to buy something a bit bigger than a bookshelf. Of course, absolutely nothing might come from Zuckerberg’s interest in the site save for that bookshelf. Such is the difficulty of speculating on major business decisions based on one person’s meager use of a social site.
The Fancy currently has approximately one million users and, according to Fast Company’s Austin Carr, a valuation of around $100 million – chump change, if Facebook and its war chest eventually end up going after the site. In total, The Fancy’s users spend around $50,000 a week on the site.
[pcmag]
