[ 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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Tomorrow, I am attending Social Ad Summit which is being held at Tribeca Rooftop. Nick O'Neill has done a tremendous job with the session and speaker lineup which includes:
9:00am - 9:45am - Social Network Advertising • Spencer Ante, Computers Editor at BusinessWeek and author of “Creative Capital” (Moderator) • David Borstein, Director of Sales, MySpace • Bill Alena, VP of Advertising & Business Development, MyYearbook.com • Mike Trigg, Director of Marketing, hi5 • Martin Green, COO, Meebo • Mark Dillon, Vice President of National Sales, Classmates.com
10:00am - 10:45am - Media Buying on Social Networks • Brian Morrissey, Digital Editor, AdWeek (Moderator) • Shiv Singh, Vice President of Social Media & Global Strategic Initiatives, Avenue A | Razorfish • David Bear, Executive Director of Mobile, BBDO • Jennifer Bertheaud, Director of Account Management & Strategy, Noise • David Berkowitz, Director of Emerging Media, 360i
10:45am - 11:00am - Sponsored Plenary Keynote • Mike Lazerow, CEO & Founder, Buddy Media
11:00am - 11:15am - Sponsored Plenary Keynote • Gordon Peters, General Manager, SocialCash.com
11:15am - 12:00pm - Branded Experiences on Social Networks • Ian Schafer, CEO, Deep Focus (Moderator) • Scott Monty, Global Digital & Multimedia Communications Manager, Ford Motors Company • Deborah Korb, Brand Manager, JP Morgan • Don Steele, VP of Digital Marketing, MTV Networks
1:45pm - 2:30pm - Social Ad Network Solutions • Allen Stern, Editor, CenterNetworks (Moderator) • Gordon Peters, General Manager, SocialCash.com • Seth Goldstein, CEO & Co-Founder, SocialMedia • Anu Shukla, Founder & CEO, Offerpal • Scott Rafer, CEO, Lookery • Chris Cunningham, CEO, appssavvy
2:45pm - 3:30pm - Social Advertising Metrics • Sean Ammirati, Contributor at Read/Write/Web, Founder of mSpoke (Moderator) • Albert Lai, CEO, kontagent • Ian Swanson, Co-Founder & CEO, Sometrics • Cam Balzer, VP of Emerging Media, Doubleclick Performics • Jodi McDermott, Director of Analytics, Clearspring
3:35pm - 4:20pm - Widget Monetization • Kevin Barenblat, Co-Founder & CEO, Context Optional • Hooman Radfar, CEO & Co-Founder, Clearspring • Carnet Williams, Co-Founder & CEO, Sprout • Sam Wick, Head of Business Development, Userplane • Ben Pashman, VP of Sales & Business Development, Gigya • Heidi Henson, Director of Advertising, RockYou
4:30pm - 5:15pm - Alternative Social Advertising • Mike Lazerow, CEO & Founder, Buddy Media • Matt Sanchez, CEO, VideoEgg • James Gross, Director of Sales, Federated Media • Alex Blum, CEO, KickApps • Clara Shih, Director of AppExchange Product Line, salesforce.com and Creator, Faceforce • Ari Gottesmann, Co-Founder, Sightix
5:30pm - 7:00pm Networking reception with open bar.
It should be a lot of fun and I am looking forward to it.
If you're a rock star web developer with expertise in Rails/Java/PHP and MySQL, I have several exciting opportunities available in New York.
I've posted the job description for web developer and graphic designers at my MySQL blog.
About the company: Give Real is a well-funded startup in the midst of an exciting period of growth and success. Our technology uses a patent pending platform that combines the ubiquity of credit card transactions and the power of social networks to create a new gifting experience.
Animoto is experiencing You Tube and Facebook style growth. The difference is that Animoto actually has a proper business model!
Move over, Slide and Rock You! here comes Animoto with a totally kick ass slide show experience. They take your photos, your music and do magic to create slide shows that "feel" the music.
To sign up and save $5, click on the graphic above with code: oxqeiaug
Animoto, which is currently experiencing explosive growth and went from 25,000 users to 250,000 users in just three days, runs on Amazon EC2 and uses S3 for storage.
A demo of Animoto produced slide show is below:
At Startup School 2008, Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, talked about Animoto. The video of his talk follows:
According to Right Scale, which Animoto uses for handling their EC2 instances, mentions that Animoto has been adding 40 EC2 instances per minute during their peak time.
“The upshot is that there are a lot of moving parts! Each one of the subsystems consists of many servers and everything needs to scale-up as the load increases. What Animoto CTO Stevie Clifton did really well is to connect all the operations using queues, many of them in SQS. One queue contains work items that list photo URLs to fetch from other sites, such as Facebook, Flickr, etc., and that is processed by one array of worker instances. Another queue has the list of render jobs and each work item in there points to the set of photos sitting at the ready in S3 and at the music files also on S3. All of these queues are held in Amazon SQS and the arrays of worker instances are managed by RightScale. This allows the monitoring part of our service to detect when the queue gets too large and more instances need to be launched. What’s nice about using queues is that it decouples the various parts of the site, so if the renderers get backlogged the queue simply builds up and users have to wait a little longer for their video to be produced. Waiting is not good, but dropping requests on the floor is much worse!”
Right Scale blog also touches on some of the important lessons learned from Animoto's growth:
“First of all, when you scale 10x and then 10x again to run on thousands of servers every little problem turns into a large one. That insignificant error rate of 0.1% gets multiplied by 1000x per second and you end up with an error a second, and actually, the error rate typically increases in itself too because of the added load on the system. So suddenly it’s not something you can ignore anymore. An example for this was having exponential backoff for uploads to S3 when using curl, but forgetting that the 5th retry exceeds the S3 connection timeout. Normally, this happens only once in a blue moon, but when tens of uploader instances are banging hard on one S3 bucket the S3 error rate goes up a bit and suddenly uploads are failing left and right. Once we changed this to a constant retry timeout it all went smooth again.”
“The frequency of visitation to social networking websites globally implies that many Internet users are no longer simply ‘trying out’ these sites, but rather adopting social-networking as a significant part in their evolving digital lifestyle. What will be interesting to monitor is the affect social networking will have on other online and offline entertainment behaviors that ultimately compete for a share of the consumer’s disposable time. We have already seen some effects of social networking cannibalizing other online activities in some markets.” - Brian Cruikshank, Executive Vice President & Managing Director (Ipsos)
According to the graph above
Penetration of social networking sites is highest in South Korea where as many as 66 percent of Internet users belong to a social network.
In USA only 32 percent of Internet users use a social network, 24 percent of those users visited within the last 30 days.
55 percent of Internet users in South Korea visited a social networking site in past 30 days. This is the highest of all countries surveyed, followed by Brazil (41%), China (27%), Mexico (26%), USA (24%), UK (20%), Canada (16%), India (16% based on an Urban sample), Germany (14%), France (12%), Japan (9%) and Russia (1%).
In Japan, it seems that although 22% of users use a social network, less than half of those users visited the social network in the past 30 days.
In Brazil, majority of social network users visited their favorite social networking site in the past 30 days. Similar trends can be seend in USA, UK and Germany.
Social networking sites have very low penetration in Russia, where only 3% of Internet users belong to a social network, according to the graph.
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.
