Tools

Mike Arrington posted the charts to prove it yesterday, but Facebook has apparently caught up to MySpace in terms of worldwide unique visitors.

The interesting statistic, though, is that in the US Market the difference between MySpace and Facebook is huge—MySpace has exactly twice the number of monthly unique US visits as Facebook does. Arrington points out the obvious question these numbers imply:

Facebook added 75 million monthly uniques over the last twelve month, but just 13 million of those visitors are located in the U.S. MySpace added 5 million U.S. uniques during that period - at this rate it will take 4+ years for Facebook to catch up to MySpace in the U.S. market.

There’s a real question about how valuable all these international users are from an advertising standpoint.

I think it’s kind of a false question though. I’m still not convinced that advertising (at least as we know it today) is the killer solution to monetizing social networks. In fact, I’m still kind of surprised that PayPal and Facebook haven’t struck up some sort of partnership to provide e-commerce solutions for app developers…

Did you guys catch Brian Alvey’s proposed business model for Twitter? I just spotted it now:

All Twitter has to do is keep enough down time to pay for the up time, and they’re good to go…

One of the interesting aspects of social networking is how it’s not confined to an existing system. You don’t have to be on Facebook or LinkedIn or MySpace to be part of an online community. In fact I think most online community happens in places that are not yet well structured.

Social Networks, in a large way, are just putting structure on unstructured online relationships. And it’s not surprise to me to find community features popping up all over the place, like Kotaku.

Kotaku is the gawker media videogame blog, and it’s a site that I don’t visit anywhere near often enough. I checked in today for the first time in a while, and when I left a comment, I found out that I actually have a whole profile I can fill out:

I can put in my gamertag (Squidelf - yeah, I know, it’s a new tag) my Steam ID (here’s my profile on Steam - see? another social network), my Wii friend code, and so on.

It’s useful to me because it’s a community I already belong to. Like MyBlogLog, this helps add some structure to the community aspect of reading, writing, and commenting on blogs.

I think the future of social networking is going to be flat integration with blogs and other web 2.0 technologies. As both Fred and Umair have said: it’s not owning the data that’s important, it’s being part of the system that the data passes through.

Eventually companies will stop their obsession with collecting, protecting, and owning user data. That data - your name, your lifestream, your comments, posts, pictures, and thoughts - that all belongs to you the user, and nobody else.

Once all ownership shifts to the content originator, we will have a much more open system on the internet, and I think that’s going to be very cool.

As Mashable and AllFacebook have already reported, Facebook announced today that they are “open-sourcing” a significant portion of their platform, now called: Facebook Open Platform.

What do you get when you download the open source platform?

This release includes the API infrastructure, the FQL parser, the FBML parser, and FBJS, as well as implementations of many common methods and tags. We’ve included samples and some dummy data to help you get started fast.

Facebook Open Platform also has extensibility points built in so you can add your own functionality, such as your own FBML tags, API methods, etc.

Not too shabby.

Social networks seem poised to take over a significant share of the browser in the way that only search has managed to do so far. The fact that Facebook thrives without letting Google index the majority of its content is FAR more important than in seems at first.

Google holds a lot of power, and it is far from infallible, which can be kind of problematic for any business online.

Facebook wants to own the social networking platform the way Google owns the search platform. And so does Google. And so does MySpace.

Last Thursday VentureBeat took Twitter to task for, essentially, not banning someone who (probably) deserved to be banned, according to Twitter’s own terms of service:

Waldman found herself sending Twitter reps explicit examples of abusive language directed towards her and in response (after a few days, mind you) she would receive back replies stating that while other users were in fact being “mean” to her, they weren’t doing anything wrong. I won’t repeat all the words thrown at her, but it certainly makes you question what Twitter’s definition of “abuse” is.

You can find the issue on getsatisfaction here and the official response on the Twitter blog over here, but I think it essentially boils down to two questions:

1. Are companies like twitter liable for moderating content if they remove users according to their Terms of Service?
2. If removing users who have violated the TOS doesn’t put them in a legal bind, how active should Twitter be in policing its service?

That second one is not a trick question. On Twitter, you have to be following someone to see their updates. And you can’t send direct messages to people who aren’t following you (although adding a “block” option would be nice).

But really, what’s the difference between someone saying something mean about you on Twitter and someone saying something mean about you on Blogger? I don’t think it’s Google’s place to nuke the offending blog for being mean (spam is different, of course).

At the risk of sounding really callous, I think tweets probably fall under free speech, and I’m not convinced that Twitter has done the wrong thing here, regardless of their legal situation.

Okay, so there’s a lot to love about Google’s efforts that go beyond search, (Google Docs and Reader are awesome IMHO…) but I sense that they may be neglecting their core business in a big way.

We all know that a Google Blog Search largely results in — well, crap. We’ve made a small business out of de-spamming the results for clients. As most people who monitor brands can tell you, the posts that appear in these searches are largely garbage, which means that to most surfers, the spammers are winning. This is also the foundation for Calcanis‘ offering — Mahalo.

Yet in one case we know of intimately, a high page rank site with almost four years of consistent quality content delivery, and thousands of inbound links from trusted sources (Like Scoble, Rubel, Molly, Matt, Jeremiah, etc, etc.) has apparently been incorrectly delisted. Our Blog Business Summit site no longer exists (as far as Google is concerned….)

Why? We don’t know for sure — but our best guess is a post made on May 5th where we discussed two popular blogs (and listed the search terms they rank highly for) apparently raised the ire of the robots controlled by engineers in Mountain View.

Two days after we published hundreds of terms related to digital photography on a high page rank site that didn’t fall inside our usual subject area, our traffic plummeted, and clicks from Google searches dropped literally to zero.

C’mon guys, check out who is linking to, and talking about the site. How smart does an algorithm have to be to know that we’re legit? Especially when search results these days are riddled with dross.

We had a client recently come to us wanting help in leveraging facebook — not because clicks to their sites were not satisfactory, but because they wanted to diversify themselves away from Google-generated traffic. They felt the level of dependence was unsound. We agree.

It’s interesting to read the interplay between Scoble and Andreesen from yesterday about how Google’s new Friend Connect stacks up against Ning and, by extension, other build-your-own social networks.

If I actually understand Friend Connect correctly, and I probably don’t, it’s not really designed to replace the creation of social networking features even in corporate environments. We’ve talk to various potential clients about creating social networks of their own, and often a lot of the value (from a business standpoint) comes from owning the platform underneath.

Which is the opposite of what Friend Connect does.

Friend connect essentially extends the footprint of existing OpenSocial networks, much in line with the data portability steps that are going on at MySpace and Facebook.

So installing Friend Connect widgets on your corporate site instead of using a Ning or custom-grown or white-label social networking solution is basically ceding your business network to one of the existing players. I don’t think that will be an attractive solution to many companies.

No, you’re not going to be able to download your MySpace contacts into your address book, but according to Reuters MySpace is going to allow its users to display profile information on other sites.

It’s step two, along with open social, in pressuring the “walled gardens” of the internet to really let people take command of the social connections they make.

It’s also another step in the “widgetization” of content on the internet, which I think might eventually turn in to a way to actually monetize content on the internet.

[ Update: looks like Facebook is joining the "widgetization of content" and data portability bandwagon and allowing third party sites to mesh with facebook features. It's called Facebook Connect. ]

Facebook recently announced more details about their upcoming profile changes, which include some massive overhaul to the visual interface as well as some significant changes to infrastructure for app developers.

Teresa wrote earlier about what these changes might mean for developers. Now that we have some more detailed information, I think it’s worth looking at the newsfeed in particular.

When the newsfeed first launched, it was a great channel for spreading viral information. However, very few people grant their applications access to the feed anymore.

I was at the Seattle Facebook Developer’s Garage this past Monday, and when one of the speakers asked how many people let apps put stories in their feed, only about 10 or 15 people in 200 raised their hand.

The redesign introduces some new rules for developers around the feed, and it might be an opportunity to reopen some viral channels that have been disappearing.

When you break down the description on the developers wiki, the changes to the feed are as follows:

• The feed will present one line, short, or “full” stories to the user
• Full stories will have access to a robust set of FBML tags, like wall posts
• Applications can publish one-line stories to mini-feeds without needing user approval
• Users can toggle between each form of story in their feeds

What this means for virality is, I think, subtle but important: Facebook is stressing the importance of being engaging as opposed to just “showing up.”

What mattered most when the newsfeed first started popping up is that you were in it, because then there’s a chance that you might get noticed.

Now what you’re after is interaction within the feed, because that’s where Facebook wants to move a lot of user activity. What’s good is that making app developers focus on this is that it’s going to make for a better user experience, too.

I ran across a post by Macteens Editor in Chief Daniel Hollister that explains, quite well, what killer functionality Twitter is missing. He’s right in in a lot of ways - Twitter is very bare bones and it doesn’t provide even the kind of functionality you find in other microblogging services like Pownce.

Twitter relies on its API and its users to develop features that are lacking. Hollister identifies the following gaps in Twitter’s feature set. Here’s how you can make them up with third party solutions (or, in one case, clever use of built in features):

1. Clutter

Hollister find the home page too cluttered, and the 20-tweet per page limit annoying. If you fail to check back quickly enough, you’re going to miss things.

I use the twitter desktop client Twitterific about 70% of the time. I use my iPhone about 15% of the time. I use the home page about 5% of the time.

Twitterific saves tweets on my desktop as it checks for them, which means I can scroll through a few hours worth of updates at a time without paging through.

2. Breadth or depth, but not both

Here he’s more right than with others. You can follow tons of people and get too many tweets, or you can follow very few people and miss a lot of the action.

I like to use mobile notifications to separate out those tweeters who I feel are particularly important. I can follow as many people as I like while selectively choosing whose tweets get pushed to my phone.

3. Archiving sucks

The web page does provide some pretty lame archiving features. You can jump through pages of 20 as far back as you want, but that’s about it.

The good news is that you CAN search twitter for past tweets. I like to use either Tweetscan or a Google search targeted at twitter.com (yep, tweets are indexed).

4. Nobody wants to use it & It doesn’t do anything

I know a lot of people who share this view of Twitter. I myself didn’t get it when I first started using it.

But the first part is just wrong (plenty of people want to use twitter, myself included) and the claim that it doesn’t do anything doesn’t really resonate with me. Nothing on the computer is really “doing” anything, if you look at it the right way.

Hollister says that if you remove all the features from Facebook except for the RSS feed and status updates, you have twitter. I’d say you’re still doing something.

One thing that I am 100% behind Hollister on though is this: Twitter is not a social network. Many people are starting to refer to it as a social network. I think that as a whole we (the blogosphere) have a tendency to play fast and loose with our terminology, and it ends up hurting us in the end.

Twitter, in my mind, is a social utility. One component of the growing feature set of the social web.

A few days ago Nick O’Neill posted on AllFacebook about some ad numbers that Justin Smith came up with regarding Facebook CPMs.

Basically, the numbers are low and probably going to get lower. This gets at an issue that I’ve been harping on for some time (although, unfortunately, I can’t seem to find the post that best expresses it): the best approach to Facebook applications is not as a business in and of itself (make apps, then sell ads), but as tool to reach a social media audience with your brand.

If social media were a movie theater, Facebook apps would be the previews, not the feature presentation.

The real winners in the Facebook app space are the companies that take a chunk of their ad budget and dedicate it to creating and maintaining an engaging, well-branded application, not those who try to use an application as a vehicle for making money.

I’m increasingly convinced that social media is a “no-buy, no-sell” zone in a lot of people’s minds. What you really want to do is build relationships in social media. You can sell them somewhere else when the time and place are right.

Voter registration efforts typically rely on a great deal of labor and community outreach. Barack Obama’s massive spring and summer registration effort will likely rely primarily on card tables and paper forms.

But the University of Washington students behind the new Facebook application Your Revolution are working a different angle. By comparing a user’s friend list to their state’s voter registration rolls, this application seeks to determine who isn’t registered to vote. It then gives users the opportunity to send an invitation to their friends to register to vote online:

The app features a sophisticated and well-designed interface and encourages users to participate in a voter registration contest.

Unfortunately, this app only works in states that allow online voter registration. But as more states roll out online registration, I think you’ll see applications like this getting real pickup.

I’m still waiting for the day when we can use a social application to actually vote. Imagine ballots spreading like wildfire among people my age the way that viral videos do. Youth turnout would be through the roof.

Silicon Alley Insider tells us that Facebook’s COO went to a Financial Times “interview” event held by the Financial Times (as SAI correctly notes, nobody in America reads it).

OK, so far so good. Here’s where it gets weird: the even was “off the record.”

What?

But the reporters who were there can’t tell you because the event was “off the record,” one of them tells us. Who played along? A lot of people: Folks from Reuters, the NY Post, Portfolio, Paidcontent and the Huffington Post were all in attendance, but chose not to tell their readers.

Does this happen all the time and I’m just not aware of it?

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about platforms and services as platforms. The recent strategy trend in start up companies seems to be: become a platform.

That’s what Twitter is doing, that’s what Facebook and every other social network is doing. You build an infrastructure and an API and you invite people to play on your system.

But the one thing to remember is that the web is the ultimate platform.

I keep seeing the exodus of Facebook features, one by one, to the native web. Twitter is enhanced, open, archive-able “status updates.” FriendFeed is trying to co-opt the News Feed (what I give credit for popularizing the idea of the lifestream) and bring it out onto the open web. In many ways it is succeeding.

I think it’s inevitable that online community is going to end up as a disparate set of open services that work together instead of a closed system (Facebook) that offers all services.

The future of social networking is that everyone has:

• a blog (profile + notes)
• FriendFeed (news feed)
• Twitter (status)
• flickR (photos)
• del.icio.us or Google (shared items)
• etc., etc.

The smart way to go about “building a platform” is not to build something on top the web that traps users and developers, but to build something within the web so that it connects with everything that’s already available.

What’s the difference?

Facebook sits on top of the web, and it relies on its users and its developers to be content with only a base level of interaction with the greater web. When you build a Facebook application, you’re building a Facebook application, not a web application.

It’s the difference between wearing a Starship Troopers exoskeleton and working out. The exoskeleton is really cool looking, polished, and lets you plug in all kinds of gears and gizmos. But you’re not actually any stronger than you were. And your muscles aren’t really connected to it, even though it’s responding to your push.