If Yahoo really was close to a deal with Mark Zuckerberg for Facebook, the visitor numbers Facebook touted at a recent event probably made them a little regretful about not getting that done.

The insights into Facebook as discussed by Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz at their Facebook Testing & Tasting get-together included one that should make a lot of heads turn - more than half of their users login to the site daily.

Considering that the presentation pictures snapped by blogger and raconteur Dave McClure showed Facebook with over 18 million users, and adding 500,000 per week, maybe Yahoo's $1 billion offer was on the low side after all.

McClure also cited Zuckerberg's observation about page views. The Facebook man thinks the site could meet or beat MySpace's numbers by the end of 2007. The site had its first 1 billion page view day in February.

Those page views aren't just coming from sophomores blowing off Archaeology 101 at 8 a .m. either. After leaving college, graduates still come back to Facebook, and they're almost half as active on the site as they were while at the old alma mater.

It also looks like Facebook wants to keep pushing third-party development of applications drawing from their platform. Version 2 of their external REST-based API is on the way; no release date has been specified.

As McClure noted, Facebook board member Peter Thiel values the site in the $8 billion range. If Yahoo wants to come back to the negotiating table, they're going to have to hold a bunch of peanut butter cookie sales to raise that kind of cash. Or maybe creatively bill their search marketing advertisers a few more times.

Source: www.webpronews.com