James Taylor reports on Facebook’s EMEA marketing office in London in the latest issue of Management Today.

On the 22^nd of Februrary 2011 there was an Egyptian baby named Facebook to celebrate its role in the revolution. There are 600 million Facebook users and the average user spends 23 minutes on each visit to Facebook. Can you imagine a world in which there are babies called Twitter, Google or Groupon?

James reports that Facebook is now building itself up as an online platform, as a ‘platform company that permeates the web.’ There have even been worries that Facebook now has the world’s largest list of matching names and faces.

Social networking is potentially a great opportunity for advertisers: recommendations from friends are taken far more seriously than traditional advertising. The question remains however: does this create enough value to justify Facebook’s $100 billion valuation?