[ This is my personal blog so all opinions expressed here are mine. I am a product, scalability, operations and monetization advisor and currently employed as Director of Business Operations & Technical Strategy for a top 50 website that delivers billions of page views per month. I was a keynote panelist for Scaling Up or Out keynote at MySQL Conference and speak regularly at conferences and user groups.
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Today, Facebook is holding a press conference about features expected to come in two weeks.
Here’s the latest insight I have been able to get.
via Robert Scoble: Mark Zuckerberg just announced that businesses and brands will have full access to the social graph. (Still looking for details as to what the "full access to the social graph" means.)
Facebook’s new home page is implementing more and more FriendFeed functionality. It seems the focus on FB’s side is more on aggregation now.
They are moving to a real-time friend feed rather than a 10-15 minute delay
Zuckerberg mentioned their move is in Twitter’s direction (via Chris)
Sitting now in Michael Lazerow's session, "Why Brand Advertisers Will Be the Biggest Beneficiaries of Social Media and How You Can Participate." Lazerow is a great speaker and this will be the third conference after Graphing Social Patterns and Social Ad Summit where he has been able to retain me as an audience member. I really need to make sure I get a Buddy Media (cool blue) t-shirt from him this time :)
He starts with the slide, "Social media is here." 37% of adult internet users are using social media sites. All major social networks have opened up their platform. Brands now have cost-effective access to more than 500MM engaged users. 250 million of these users are on Facebook and MySpace alone.
There is massive distribution but still less than 1% of digital ad budgets flow into this space. Social advertising right now sucks. All the techniques that used to work in the past, don't work anymore. Clearly, we're at a junction where we need to invent what's next and how we need to get to the users. One of the problems today is that there is too much noice. Another problem is that it is not scalable. Third problem is that social advertising is not tied to results. We need to know what are the results and how to tie them. Over 100 companies are selling Facebook alone.
Social is not just about advertising. It's not about displaying banners. It's about marketing! It's about CRM and engaging conversations. It's about people.
Impressions are worthless. They are like air. There are so many impressions available today. In the social media sites, impressions are basically worthless. The whole model of buying impressions is like shouting at users and yelling at them.
The new model is Buy Engagement, Earn Loyalty. How do you turn your consumers into intense advocates of your brand? The intense adoption of , commitment to and interaction with a brand in social networks.
We've gone from shouting to listening in the new model.
Next, he is going to talk about case studies that generated results.
The most forward-thinking clients are building applications to support their marketing activities. These are not just facebook or myspace applications. Ad units are tied to a database connected to social graph. In the end these are ads, but better ads.
So why apps? Because of :
Emotion,
Engagement,
Efficiency and
Social Intelligence.
There are two main buckets of apps:
1. Ad applications and the second one is sponsored gift section. You can send a free airborne gift to your friends. Another example he is showing of Tropic Thunder advertising campaign by Social Media.
2. Social branded applications which are cross-platform, tied to CRM, "socialize" existing sites. These apps allow for engaging creative, scalable technology and you pay only for results.
Now is the somehat famous example of campaign Buddy Media did for FedEx. It's a very simple application but simple is sometimes the best. Results of this apps:
100,000 installs in 72 hrs.
more than 300K active users in 6 days
less than 10% uninstall rate
global audience in more than 200 countries
Next is New Balance campaign which was recently covered by MIT Review. Results:
250K active users
86% of visitors came back at least once
57% came back 9 times or more.
1M+ AceBucks earned by consumers playing the game, which can be redeemed for actual shoes.
Facebook just launched age-gating allowing for applications to be limited to a certain age group.
Next example is the "Dude" campaign socialized by Bud Light. They worked with anthropologists to come out with the perfect photos for the application. Results from 5 week long campaign (it's still live):
200,000 installs in 5 weeks of marketing
first application to successfully implement an age-gate that prohibits minors from accessing the app
14% average daily active user growth
6,000+ daily active users during campaign
19% of users visited every day during campaign
Next is the InStyle.com campaign. Results:
185,000 installs in 6 weeks
78% of user base were InStyle's target demo of females 18-35
avg. time on application almost 7 minutes
Buddy Brain provides app results which are promising. Users spent 2:35 on average engaging with the last 10 branded apps. This is 75x greater than time spent with banners and 5x more than time spent watching tv ad. 85% of the users returned multiple times to Buddy Media's apps.
The single biggest mistake brands make is that they launch and expect it to be the top app.
How do you get started?
Make goals. Track results
Think big. Start small
Go fast. Iterate. Iterate
Socialize everything
The days of viral growth are over. The app is the new ad unit. Facebook is not the choice of platform for everyone. Trailer views are directly related to ticket sales.
Dave McClure's painstaking hard work in organizing Startup2Startup dinner paid off very well where Chad Hurley, co-founder and CEO of YouTube, was speaking. The star-studded event was one of the best I ever attended.
After spending the day hanging out with Dave, I arrived at Startup2Startup a little early so we can check on arrangements. Once at Sheraton in Palo Alto, we found that right next door, Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook) was speaking at a Facebook corporate event.
As the Startup2Startup attendees started showing up, discussions started flowing. Facebook's staff wanted participants of Startup2Startup event to quietly socialize :) Dave decided to move the bar to the pool area.
I started hanging out at the bar, talking with the stars of Silicon Valley. Moments after the Facebook event ended, I spotted Zuckerberg talking with Chad Hurley near the pool side entrance. There, a desire lit up in my heart to meet Zuckerberg.
Before I knew it, my wish came true. There was a 2 minute window where Zuckerberg was free and I decided that I am not going to waste this opportunity. So I approached him and we started talking.
Zuckerberg is a very bright guy with deep insight. He was very easy to socialize with, a sign of a great CEO. We briefly discussed Facebook's growth in international markets such as Brazil among other things.
As we were parting, I asked Zuckerberg if I could have his card. He didn't have one but he generously gave me his personal email address.
I am thankful to Dave for inviting me to the event otherwise I'd not have met Mark Zuckerberg.
The session I am now waiting for is Harnessing Explosive Growth: Infrastructure Strategies and Tactics. The official description of the session is:
What worked in the garage can rarely be scaled effectively for the boardroom. This panel will bring together some of the biggest names in web infrastructure to share their thoughts, insights and tactics for harnessing explosive growth, with a focus that goes beyond simply which technologies are available but how to best deploy them. This panel is not to be missed
How much of scalability is architecture, and how much is throwing servers at the problem?
SJ: 99% architecture JH: Product is what drives architecture. We have more than 10,000 servers. For chat, they built a separate network. www.facebook.com/eblog.
JR: The biggest consideration is how their servers work with Facebook.
When's it broken? When did you know your first architecture was broken? AG: First million users. Then they started focusing on caching and sharding.
JB: eBay had a few catastrophic issues near 2000. People were very forgiving of availability issues. They give refunds when there is downtime.
JR: They moved a lot of their technology to EDGE.
SJ: Since Meebo is just one page, javascript delivery is a major issue for them. They are not generating pages. Dynamic loading and background computation is really important.
RP: Application and infrastructure is going to break. If you look hard enough you can find where are the scalability issues.
JR: They are very metric driven. It's not often they see outages. They have number of Facebook's ops folks on their IM lists and they talk continously.
JH: We work through problems together.
JH: They have had to turn off some applications because other applications were being affected.
JB: At eBay they have created a central application login system. They can flag and identify problems really quickly. If you don't have it, you're shooting in the dark.
Rolling your own stuff? Off-the-shelf vs. custom: Did you roll your own? Do you regret it?
SJ: For cash restraint startup, off-the-shelf can work. But for scale, you'd want to build yourself. Open Source is awesome. No one can scale your system as well as you can. Off-the-Shelf can be bulky. You have to get your hands dirty.
JR: We built our own caching backend. Invest time in core stuff, anything that's not core, don't focus there.
What also needs to scale as you grow? What non-technology things you had to scale?
JB: Need to scale out your business as well as technology.
AG: Building anti-spam features into the product that are scalable.
JH: Make community part of the process in translations as you grow.
JR; They introduced user moderation for photos. Hard to find what's porn and what's not. It's about a dozen people looking at photos full-time to hunt down porn.
How should we handle the fallout? If you were Twitter what would you have done last month? JB: You have to be transparent. Tell them what's going on. Setup message boards for communication. You've got to communicate.
AG: Setting realistic timelines is very important
JH: We do it often. We roll in small chunk and if things don't look right, we roll back.
JB: You cannot operate a large system without the ability to turn things on and off.
JR: If you have an aggressive competitor, you don't have the luxury of downtime.
RP: You can't roll out something that can't be rolled back.
I am now sitting in the session ,Facebook Business and Marketing Solutions, by Kent Schoen. The session starts out with the video by Rhettandlink.com.
How do you take advantage of the social graph? Let your customers market for you.
Tools Facebook offers to drive engagement
Share
Events: Facebook sends 66 million invites monthly compared to 16 million sent by Evite. Invite product not the best invite product in the world but utilizes the social graph.
Pages: There are 150,000 pages and more than 85,000,000 fan connections. Hotels, brands and local businesses are creating pages on Facebook.
Applications: e.g. Open Table and Fedex applications. There are more than 24,000 applications on Facebook. Some applications are created to bring rich content to users, others are using it to promote a product or service. There are 400,000 developers and over a billion installs.
If you put things out there that are useful to people, they will use them.
When someone adds an application, an item gets posted to news feed which helps in generating an automatic referral. There is a single digit percentage of your friends that are going to see an action you perform.
Facebook ads show up in either news feed or on left hand corner and allow marketers to accelerate activity by using precise targeting.
What is a social ad? Social actions combined with content. Example provided was of iThink application.
There are plenty of applications that primarily exist to drive traffic off of Facebook to their own site.
Is there a revenue driver for pages? People buy advertising to promotes pages. Also, the more exposure / traffic a page generates, the more possibilities to monetize exist.
I am sitting in the session "Intro to Social Networks for Business and Marketing Managers" by Ro Choy of Rock You! Folowing are my notes from the session.
Five years ago, people considered Google to be the entry point for the Internet. Now you are talking about social media and social network being the absolute entry point. Where does a teenager go first on the Internet?
What's most relevant for a teenager? Everything related to their social network.
Gone are days of SEO to position your business. Today the question is, what do I do to position my presence online within social networks.
There is an attendee from the State Department interested in reaching globally through social networks.
Another attendee from Microsoft wants to understand how to incorporate feedback mechanisms.
What are social networks used for? Content posted on social network: "What do you do with your social networking profile?" - Active Internet Universe
55.1% upload photos
21.9% upload videos
74.0% message friends and communicate
30.8% write a blog
18.3% dating
23.3% install applications
9.8% promote a band
33.6% favorite/currently listened to music
3.2% do other activities
What are the differences between services?
Facebook is a communication/collaboration tool which is highly structured and highly functional. Facebook is known for its primarily college-age, well educated high-income demographic although currently Facebook has many diverse demographics today. Historically it was known as an "elite" network for universities.
MySpace is more famous for self expression. It is less structured and more customizable. You'll see millions and millions of different looking pages. MySpace has a younger, more diverse demographic. The younger you are the more time you have and therefore you can spend time on customizing your page. You can keep scrolling down for hours on some pages. Try 50 cent's page. Historically MySpace was famous for being a haven for music artists.
LinkedIn is like a proxy for business cards. LinkedIn is used to keep business contacts in touch with each other.
How is Facebook used? Four most important areas of Facebook:
Profiles:
used to create a profile
communicate with friends
share media
install applications
browse
other!
Pages
Groups
Events
Each of the above revolve around trying to communicate.
New Media today is about communication and about finding interests. Information collected by social networks like Facebook is a gold mine for advertisers.
There are 45 million people using RockYou's tools on Facebook today.
Among younger generation, email is old medium. 90% mail in his Yahoo! mail is spam whereas 0% of messages on his wall are spam. I find this hard to believe as Wall's on Facebook do generate quite a bit of spam, even though that spam is sometimes being created by your friends :).
You can make a lot of money at Facebook. Anything that works on the Internet, works on Facebook within applications.
Facebook email is probably used more by Facebook users than their own personal email account.
No one likes to read in social environments. Reading is 'death of viral.'
MySpace overtime has adopted a lot of Facebook's features. Background is really important on myspace. It took Ro a week to 'make his profile look really bad.'
Career-oriented and older demographic are the primary users of LinkedIn, which has now adopted Open Social. LinkedIn offers a somewhat different experience and allows you to make business connections, get recommended by associates and to post one's resume.
Viral marketing is key to success. He's showing a graph depicting explosive growth in Rock You's usage.
Key Takeaways for Viral Growth: - New User focus: Without it, viral isn't possible. - Simplicity - Novelty - Universal Applicability
When you communicate with new users, focus on actionable items because it's the action that's viral. Don't make your users fill out a form.
Anti-viral is thinking. Deliver something with immediate value proposition.
Simplicity is also co-related to virality. Things that take 10 seconds are more viral than things that take 30 seconds. Things that take 1.5 minutes aren't viral at all.
In the viral space, people who know viral get big really quickly. To win virally, you must be novel. There are a lot of free gifting applications. Even small ideas that make an existing application novel can hit big, but there must be something novel about about it.
Games can be very specific or very broad. Casual games do really well on social networks.
RockYou's competitors are experts in viral marketing who look for immediate exposure. Don't market until there's a base established for viral methods.
Good viral methodologies generate 2 new installs per user. Even viral rate of 1.001 is healthy.
Building Viral Engagement: (chart of circles with inner to outer most: user -> direct friends -> indirect friends -> interested parties) 1. New users => build clean flows -- New users are absolutely key to viral engagement (vs returning user). -- focus on linear, one-action flows to maximize activation for new users -- forget registration. 2. Direct friends => deliver clear value proposition -- provide clear value proposition to new user for inviting friend network (Likeness) - ensure invitation is first/second step new user flow to maximize viral value of user (superlatives vs superatives) 3. Indirect friends => focus on messaging -- focus on on messaging to invite/notification receivers to drive more friends invites -- deliver increasing AND simply understood value to app w/ ever friend invited (Zombies) 4. Interested Parties => allow universal use -- enable simple tols (comments, ratings, answers) that allow interaction w/o requiring full engagement w/ application (My questions). -- Old school discussion boards are awesome -- If you depend on creativity for something viral, you're dead. -- for e.g. for movie review, have pre-created choices for users (I love this, thumbs up OR I hate this, thumbs down) --- Click rate for this kind of engagement is really high.
Remember, activities drive awareness. Facebook will reduce an application's ability if your emails don't get clicked on. Your bandwidth on platform will decrease.
Marketing opportunities with social applications How do you market something successfully in social space? Successful marketing for social media should focus on social applications.
1. Application content integration -- Integrating brand or product as part of user experience (e.g. Indiana Jones character) -- Example: likeness quiz, virtual gifts, greeting cards, virtual actions etc. -- build applications that take into account existing user behavior. 2. Sponsorships or branding of applications -- app takeover or skinning w/ possible promotion -- Example: Skin application w/ sweepstakes or cntest 3. Custom social application building and distribution -- Build a social app for advertiser and/or distribute it through social network specific ad networks -- Example: build, viraal tune, launch and seed an app recruiting users from RockYou's leading ad network jumpstarting viral spread of app. 4. Rich Media.
For Sweeney Todd campaign, there was a 0.01% CTR for banner alone but when they did integration with application the CTR jumped to 0.65% (65x better).
RockYou created a SuperWall card for Step Brothers and provided that as an example for application integration. They featured two custom designed greeting cards on SuperWall. Greeting Cards were placed in top placement, pre-selected and expanded upon roll-over. The card appeared in user's profile. The results were 8M impressions on application pages. 6M cards sent and immeasurable viral impressions through newsfeed events and in-profile prominenece. These were traditional CPM based campaigns.
Women tend to be more active in sharing content.
Application Sponsorship: RockYou worked with Sony and Resident Evil to create skins or brand applications. ResidentEvil campaign was expecting 10K registrations for contest but they achieved a million registrations for the contest.
CTR rate: Social networks: 0.13% Web 0.20% Avg RY ad: 0.28% Best RY campaign: 30%!!!!
Application development and Promotion: - 3rd party ad networks on Facebook can radically accelerate Facebook application adoption -- RockYou -- SocialMedia -- Lookery
- From RockYou's experiecne, advertisers can generate between 1000 to 20,000 installs a day - CPI can be as much as $0.60. - Consider potential throughput of the ad network - quality of ads => requires constant tuning to maintain high CTR - Ad copy => make it actionable and presonally identifiable - viral tuning => work with a team that knows engagement / growth - successful applications require ongoing investment.
Stylefeeder: Largest fashion/shopping application on Facebook with over 1 million installs. They are getting multi-dollar CPMs. Their goal is to drive traffic to existing website.
Rich Media on Social Applications can provide 2x interaction rate and 2x activity rate (e.g. campaign for Ruins movie)
Monetization: Online advertising is growing but social advertising is growing 3x faster. CAGR in global online media advertising is expected to reach $61 billion by 2010.
Context is the key to social application monetization: Search is not viral and has high context and low virality. With social networks you have low context and high virality. With social applications, you can get high context and high virality: Apps add context to social networks and social apps are viral.
Graphing Social Patterns is the premier conference on the topic of social networking and social graphs. The conference is being held in Washington DC.
In a few moments I will be leaving to attend Graphing Social Patterns East. The drive is about four hours so not too bad. I always enjoy driving this route as my first driving route in the US was from German Town, MD to New York.
I wanted to go to Graphing Social Patterns West as well but couldn't so I am very excited to attend the east one. I plan to learn about the inner workings of the platforms and engage in networking opportunities at the conference.
The conference explores social networks from two interesting perspectives:
Business & Marketing Strategy:
* LinkedIn: The Business Social Network * MySpace and Facebook Social Advertising * Apps & Widgets: The New New Ad Units * Social Advertising & "App"-vertising * 10M in 10 Weeks: What Stanford Learned Building Facebook Apps * Social Networks & the NEED for FEEDS * Social Networks for Mobile Devices
App Development & Technical Strategy:
* Google OpenSocial + AppEngine Technical Overview * Poke Back: Facebook Platform Team Live Chat * Bring Your Own Platform (BYOP) * Social Games for Social Platforms * Geek Metrics: App Analytics for Distribution, Engagement, & Monetization * OpenSocial: Open for Business * VIRAL vs STICKY: Designing Social Apps for Reach & Retention * Show Me the Money: App Monetization
The keynotes at the Graphing Social Patterns conference include:
LinkedIn: The Business Social Network by Adam Nash
MySpace Business & Marketing Overview
Facebook Business & Marketing Solutions by Kent Schoen
Google OpenSocial + AppEngine Technical Overview by Patrick Chanezon and Paul McDonald
Technical Overview: The MySpace Developer Platform (MDP) by Allen Hurff
Poke Back: Facebook Live and Interactive by Benjamin Ling, Dave Morin, Ruchi Sanghvi, Josh Elman and Dave McClure.
It should be a lot of fun to see old friends and make new ones. If you are attending, ping me via this blog or by email (on the top right hand side) and let's meet up for a drink or two ;)
I recently came across a cool site named Adonomics that tracks Facebook applications and provides analytics in a variety of a forms. Users can track and compare active usage of Facebook apps. Adonomics also provides a ranking chart and valuation of Facebook apps.
Facebook Lexicon let's you see what words are being used by users on Facebook Wall. Similar in functionality to Google Trends and Technorati, Facebook Lexicon allows you to tap into what's generating the buzz. Facebook blog gives some hints on how the occurrences are calculated:
“How are these numbers calculated? We have a cluster of computers that count the number of occurrences of every term (for example, "juno") across profile, group and event Walls every day. The system strips out all personally identifiable information so that there is no way to track a mention back to a specific person. No human at Facebook ever reads these Wall posts, and Lexicon does not look at personal messages, invitations, or any other private user-to-user communications.” Overall, a nice utility by Facebook. However, one thing that sucks is the lack of embed options, i.e. you cannot post the charts on an external website.
“ * One potential issue that makes social networks resist data portability is the monetizability of the data * Not all user data is created equal, there’s interest versus intent * Social networks generally produce lots of low-value interest data, which has weak ROI attached to it * Search engines, review sites, comparison shopping, etc all produce high-value intent data * Even if you have the data, you have to worry about whether or not you have enough of it to matter - although ad networks and exchanges have started to alleviate that”
The joke among scalability professionals is that Facebook runs on Rails because of its need to keep throwing money at its scalability issues. There are some rumors about Facebook's poorly chosen network based partitioning (sharding) strategy. Facebook has now announced that it will be borrowing $100 million to buy approximately 50,000 servers. This will significantly raise Facebook's gearing ratio bringing it closer to being a high geared company.
Facebook is not the only one with massive need for servers. Business Week quotes Forrester Research's Frank E. Gillet who estimates that Google is consuming as much as half a million servers each year whereas Microsoft is buying close to 200,000 servers a year.
As several media sites have reported, capital expenditure like this is an ideal reason for not diluting equity. Jim Labe, CEO of Triple Point, a company that specializes in lending venture money to start ups, tells Business Week:
“ The last thing the entrepreneur wants to do is see those precious equity dollars flowing into equipment purchases. It's a very unproductive use of equity to plow it into fixed assets.” However, many industry pundits ponder whether this indicates Facebook's trouble in raising more venture capital. Some even wonder whether Microsoft over-valued Facebook with its $240 million investment for a 1.6% stake in the company. CNN raises a similar question as to why Microsoft isn't buying Facebook.
A Morgan Stanley team consisting of "Queen of the Net" Mary Meeker, David Joseph and Anand Thaker recently did a presenation on Internet Trends.
The presentation focused on the topics of usage patterns, social networking, widgetization and componentization, measurability and transparency, customer satisfaction, video, monetization, mobile, emerging markets and last but not least, recession.
According to the presentation, consumer IP traffic will surpass business IP traffic in 2008 as consumers use more than 5,000,000 TB of data per month. Since 2005E, there has been a 58% CAGR in IP traffic.
"The surge in online content is at the center of the most dramatic changes affecting the Internet today. In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today."
"Fifteen years ago, enterprise technology was higher-quality than consumer technology. That's not true anymore. It used to be that you used enterprise technology because you wanted uptime, security and speed. None of those things are as good in enterprise software anymore (as they are in some consumer software). The biggest thing to ask is, 'When consumer software is useful, how can I use it to get costs out of my environment?'"
Douglas originally gave this quote in a WSJ interview while answering the question, "What's driving the "consumerization" of tech in the enterprise, where companies are borrowing tech ideas from the consumer Internet?"
Massive Transition in Available Ad Units This part of the presentation shows massive decline in the number of page views Yahoo! used to enjoy since 2002. At the same time the Alexa graph comparing Yahoo!'s page views to Google, Facebook and Youtube shows interesting patterns. Specifically YouTube's rapid rise to become the #2 destination on the Internet. This slide also touches on an important point that Supply of ad units is now greater than demand. An important thing to note is that Alexa changed their ranking algorithm recently. The latest Alexa graph for these sites doesn't go back to 2002, however it tells a slightly different story:
- Page views wise, Yahoo! is still number 1, followed by YouTube, Google and Facebook. - Reach wise, Google is number 1 followed by Yahoo!
Social Networking Characteristics - Fast Growth and Low Penetration
Next slide has a graph from from comScore's "Digital World: State Of The Internet" report which highlights growth in Emerging Internet Markets. The graph shows very fast growth for social networking sites but at the cost of low penetration. In contrast, the online search sector showed very high penetration but low levels of growth. Online personals, retail movies and Retail music industries depicted significant decrease in growth. Multimedia, on the other hand, shows decent growth but much higher penetration than social networks. Visitors growth to community focused sites that aren't social networks also decreased although these sites still have a strong penetration (even stronger than social networks).
Some other interesting findings from the comScore report that weren't in the Morgan Stanley presentation:
more than 300 million Internet users from Asia Pacific region, 15 years of age or older, were online in January 2008. This shows an increase of 14 percent over 2007 numbers (compare this to 10.4% increase in worldwide users). According to comScore, this increase "makes Asia Pacific the largest of the five worldwide regions"
Latin America and Middle East-Africa are two other regions that have also experienced "above average audience growth" since 2007. Latin America experienced 16.6% growth where Middle East-Africa experienced 20.2% growth, the highest percentage of growth among five worldwide regions.
US online audience now only represents 21% of worldwide Internet users.
Visits to social networking sites by global Internet users increased 34%
approximately 2 out of every 3 Internet users now visit a social network site with total visitors to social networking sites exceeding 530 million
MySpace and Facebook both now attract more than 100 million visitors per month
YouTube leads the way in online entertainment. Video is now the "dominant online entertainment format." More than 250 million visitors visited YouTube in January alone.
Social Networking Sites Gaining Significant Share of Online Traffic The next presentation slide highlights new entrants in the top-10 list of Alexa as well as top-10 sites of 2005 that have lost significant traffic. The sites that lost their top-10 ranking since 2005 include ebay.com, amazon.com, microsoft.com (not counting Microsoft Passport), google.co.uk, aol.com and go.com.
The new entrants in the top-10 list as of 2008 (based on old Alexa ranking model) included youtube.com, live.com, facebook.com, hi5.com, wikipedia.org and orkut.com. If the ranking list was a top-15 list, my employer would have been included at number 13.
How People Worldwide Spend Their Time Online
22% time is spent in online communication
16% time is spent in social communication. The presentation makes a note that this category didn't exist 3 years ago.
8% time is spent in online shopping activities
14% time is spent in entertainment and leisure activities
6% time is spent in work, business and education activities
Another interesting point made by the presentation, although no surprise, is that younger users (aged 15-24) tend to communicate more via Facebook whereas older Internet users (aged 44+) tend to use Yahoo! Mail more to communicate. The presentation raises the question whether email is becoming more archaic.
Comparison of popular sites
Facebook (#4 in global minutes) has experienced most growth (305%) since last year reaching 101 million members according to comScore. YouTube (#3 in global minutes) had the second highest growth (94%) with a total of 258 million users. Other two sites mentioned are PayPal and Skype, both eBay properties.
Two interesting facts about YouTube that I didn't know: A very high number of YouTube visitors (51%) visit the site weekly and half of the users "watch all videos to the end"
What is the most important source of Information?
Citing a study titled "Online World As Important to Internet Users as Real World?" conducted by Annenberg School for Communication , the presentation makes an important point: personal and online sources are two most important sources of information, and together they are the "essecnce of a social network."
The original report by digitalcenter.org also says that "online communities are a catalyst for connection and activism" and that "involvement in online communities leads to offline actions. More than one-fifth of online community members (20.3 percent) take actions offline at least once a year that are related to their online community." The original report also states that online activism is making online users get involved "in causes that were new to them when they began participating on the Internet" and that "more than 40 percent (43.7 percent) of online community members participate more in social activism since they started participating in online communities."
Another interesting point is that according to the Digital Future Project, Internet users 17 years of age or older trust Internet more (80%) than personal source (73%)
Some other important findings from USC-Annenberg Digital Future Project's report:
64.9 percent are involved in new causes
43.7 percent now participate more in social activism
56.6 percent log in to their community once a day
70.4 percent of community members "sometimes or always interact with other members of their community while logged in"
7.4 percent of American Internet users maintain a blog
23.6 percent of Internet users now post photos online. Previously only 11 percent were posting photos online.
12.5 percent of users now maintain their own website.
Internet users meet an average of 4.65 "friends online whom they have never met in person" and 1.6 "friends met in person whom they originally met online"
Facebook growth
Next, there are some metrics from Facebook's growth. Some highlights
as of 03/08 there were more than 14 million photo uploads a day being uploaded to Facebook and 6 million active user groups on Facebook.
there are 55,000 total networks (partitions?/shards? :) ) and 50% of the networks are outside of college. I wonder how many networks are location based?
Segment of users who are 25 years or older are the fastest growing segment. No surprise for me as my mother in law just joined Facebook.
There are more than 250,000 new registrations per day since January of 2007.
There are more than 859 million installations of 20,000 applications
Super Wall by Rock You! is the most popular application with 28 million installs on Facebook followed by Top Friends (26 million installs) and Fun Wall (25 million), both by Slide
Both Slide and Rock You! have 3 applications each in top 10 applications.
Facebook's own Video application is ranked #7.
Reasons for Facebook growing faster than MySpace
advertising that is considered less intrusive
news feed that is personalized
UI that is cleaner
friends section that receives more prominence
ads that are more personalized
more applications
more mobile friendly
facebook focusing more on monetizing word-of-mouth and conversations
The presentation titled Internet Trends is available on Slide Share, thanks to Tech Crunch.
Reid Hoffman, Chairman and President, Products at LinkedIn, talks in this business and marketing keynote, presented at Graphing Social Patterns 2007, about the Business of Facebook Applications.
He addresses five themes:
Social Networks and Platforms What makes social networks, platforms? What sets Web 2.0 social networks apart? Is Social Networking a feature, an application, or a platform? He talks about Friendster being referred to as Match.com but with a friends list added on top of it and for that reason it was considered a feature. He credits MySpace allowing the ability to "hack in 'widgets'" as the start of social network as a platform. He clarifies that according to his understanding it wasn't a 'deliberate design decision' by MySpace but rather an 'artifact of their platform' that didn't turn off or filter javascripts. This by accident lead to a 'robust ecosystem' through which users were including rich media etc. Ning then created a 'different conception of social networking as a platform,' allowing users to build any kind of social network. Facebook then 'launched the first platform on a large social graph.' Facebook applications could then rely upon the social graph in order to build.
He believes that social networks are platforms and has invested in several different social networks.
What makes a social network interesting? What creates a robust and interesting environment? "The key thing is that a social network takes patterns of important relationships we have in real life and then pus them on the web in ways that empowers important applications." People still care more about their offline world so if you can "import the relationships that matter to people here and make them available to [either] generate thin or light app yourselves which most of these networks do or provide them as a platform for other people, it actually enables applications that can really change people's lives"
The key elements 'from a sociological perspective' of Facebook's platforms are "extending functions of profiles, communications and messaging and the newsfeed." He goes on to say that Facebook's newsfeed is an example of many to many messaging. Then, you can 'integrate general web applications with data, relationships and communications'
He then goes on to contrast and compare several social networks including Facebook, MySpace and Ning. Facebook offered developers a massive social graph that allows them to acquire customers, leverage key relationships and leverage existing communication scheme. With Ning, although you can build your own social network feature wise, you are also left to build your own user base. For developers the key thing was that if they built something Facebook could get them in front of millions of potential customers. An example of leveraging existing communication scheme is that most Facebook apps have spread through messaging or emails or through newsfeed.
The remaining four themes of the video:
- Social Networks and Professional Networks - One graph to rule them all? - Facebook Platform: some of the opportunities enabled - What does the social platform mean for the evolution of the web?
Dallas News' Tech Blog noticed that "Just for fun" applications dominate overall percentage of apps and points the obvious: "The sad truth is that the collective intelligence of thousands of programmers has done nothing but devise new ways for people with too much time to annoy their acquaintances with pointless 'games.'"
Facebook's smart tag line to snatch advertising dollars from search advertising giant. The graphic reads: Facebook Advertising: Reach your customers before they start searching.
This is the first edition of a new series of blog posts that I will try to write regularly (no hardcore promises though). I will be calling it, for the lack of better imagination and because it's 3:09 in the morning, The Strategy Chronicles, or TSC. The primary purpose of this series is to help me keep track of what's happening each week. So whether you liked it or hated it, please let me know. So, let's get started.
Microsoft makes Yahoo! investors very unhappy: At least some of the Yahoo! investors are now worried about an increased Microsoft bid to acquire Yahoo!. The primary reason being that there are several Yahoo! investors who are also Microsoft investors. Separately, several share holders are blasting Yahoo! for rejecting Microsoft's bid.
Yahoo! losing another ground: Opera has now decided to dump Yahoo! in favor of Google for its mobile browser. - "every month, Opera Mini users browse more than 1.7 billion pages" - most of the page views were related to search. Yahoo! has a serious relevancy problem in addition to the problem of effectively monetizing its search traffic. I can see how easy it was for Opera decision makers to ditch Yahoo! in favor of Google. - Google has been Opera's choice for desktop browser for 7 years.
Even more troubles for Yahoo!: Remember the time when Yahoo! handed over the information about its Chinese users to the authorities? Well, that issue continues to haunt Yahoo! as yet another lawsuit was filed against the company by its Chinese dissidents. Yahoo!'s submitted evidence lead to one year imprisonment of a plaintiff.
Finally!: Meanwhile, Google has finally re-launched JotSpot as Google Sites. Exactly how that will hurt Microsoft's similar initiatives is yet to be seen, however the outlook according to the media, doesn't look so promising as far as Microsoft is concerned.
Clean console!: Consumerist reports about an incident where a passionate Xbox user lost his beloved collection of autographs and custom artwork drawn on the console by prominent members of the gaming community. Perhaps, the Microsoft employee responsible for this thought the collectible autographs were making the Xbox unit look dirty.
Bill Gates now LinkedIn!: Facebook's loss is LinkedIn's gain. Bill Gates recently quit Facebook despite Microsoft's recent investment in the social networking powerhouse, and decided to start a profile on LinkedIn. Once his profile was created, Gates then asked a question that received more than 1,000 answers. Interestingly enough the same day I noticed the featured question, Facebook changed their site's theme.
Sliding the Social way!: Slide, the media and gadget distribution powerhouse announced recently that it will create new applications to for MySpace users using MySpace Developer Platform. This could increase Slide.com's profile and reach significantly. Earlier this year, Slide announced that it raised $50 million in its latest funding round.
