I'd just seen another entry on one of me tech blogs I'm reading on regular basis saying Facebook grown another 700k users. To just incredible amount of over 350 million users. In the top popularity there where 311K registrations of new Facebook user in Poland every week !!.
THE FIGURES
Company Figures
More than 350 million active users
50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
More than 35 million users update their status each day
More than 55 million status updates posted each day
More than 2.5 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
More than 3.5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week
More than 3.5 million events created each month
More than 1.6 million active Pages on Facebook
More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook
Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans
Average User Figures
Average user has 130 friends on the site
Average user sends 8 friend requests per month
Average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook
Average user clicks the Like button on 9 pieces of content each month
Average user writes 25 comments on Facebook content each month
Average user becomes a fan of 2 Pages each month
Average user is invited to 3 events per month
Average user is a member of 12 groups
International Growth
More than 70 translations available on the site
About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application
Platform
More than one million developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries
Every month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applications
More than 500,000 active applications currently on Facebook Platform
More than 250 applications have more than one million monthly active users
More than 80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since its general availability in December 2008
More than 60 million Facebook users engage with Facebook Connect on external websites every month
Two-thirds of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have implemented Facebook Connect
Mobile
There are more than 65 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are almost 50% more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
There are more than 180 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products
Personally I do have an Facebook account, but I'm using it maybe once a month. I started thinking why Facebook is the biggest social network on earth and why in Poland it's the absolute #1 in actively registered users. Let's go through Facebook history and I'll try to answers some questions about the Facebook popularity in our country and over the whole world.
THE BEGINNINGS...
Facebook was started in 2004 for internal use for Harvard University students. After 5 years it has become the most popular place for on-line communities. It received many fundings, from really big companies. Soon it was released to public. Below is a very interesting history of Facebook and why it became the top visited place on the Internet. Some cool facts about Facebook.
Few important figures, investments. I highly recommend you to watch the video.
YOUTUBE VIDEO...
FIRST CONCLUSIONS
Facebook resides somewhere at the crossroads of the consumption model of the Web and the community model. Scrolling through the variety of people, pictures, stories and connections within Facebook, the user is presented with a host of identities and communities in which one may participate. As a consumption model, Facebook offers information and news that is searchable and retrievable. Participants represent themselves or the idea of themselves online for others to desire, emulate, ignore, discard or drink in. Users are able to freely view, click and pick their way through “the goods.”
Unlike many consumption-modeled websites, Facebook allows participants to talk to one another, to sense and see other presences, thus serving as an authentic community. Facebook allows relationships to spawn among groups of individuals where they can interact, crisscross and reinforce one another.
THE Facebook STRENGHTS.
Clean Layout
One of the major strengths of the new look facebook is the clean layout and the simplifying of the profile page so that when you click on a friends profile you immediately have access to their wall/news feed and can quickly see what they have been up to recently and send them a message directly.
Tabbed Browsing
The Profile has been divided up into tabs so that all your personal information is in one place and all your applications are on one tab now called boxes. For many people this has been of huge benefit. You now don't have to wait for ages for a profile to load if a friend has installed 200 applications. Overall the platform seems to be running a lot faster than it did before. Although the tabbed feature is only limited to the profile and doesn't yet extend to other areas where it is desperately needed.
Integration of Wall and Minifeed
Facebook have integrated the wall and the minifeed into one aggregated feed that takes up 70% of the space on your profile page. This major prominence is because facebook has always been designed to focus on creating and maintaining real relationships and building a sense of community. Quickly being able to know what all your friends are doing plays an important role. It has a number of settings and wall filters so you can see only posts made by yourself, others or you can see the stories that facebook has selected for you. You can edit your privacy setting to make sure you only display what you really want to the world.
Makes Sharing Even Easier
Facebook has made the sharing of videos and photos even easier with one dedicated tab and a host of new features to play around with. For more information you can check out a recent blog post facebook the unofficial guide. This clearly shows that facebook can see the future and want photo sharing, video chats and video postcards to be on their system and not on other external services like flickr, ooVoo or Skype.
New Features
Facebook have brought in a lot of new features that help to make facebook the pivotal part of your daily life. They have introduced a new blog subscription service where you can join your favourite blog and enjoy all its content without ever having to leave facebook.
Another nice feature is the ability to create a profile badge that you can place on your website or blog that can show your current status and act like a business card and pull people from outside of facebook to become your friends. To access this feature you can find a link on the bottom left of your profile page.
This still had a few bugs in when I last tested it but I am sure Facebook will iron those out pretty soon. I would also like to be able to customise what is displayed a bit more.
Facebook Notes
The Notes feature has increased in prominence, which is great because it gets more people involved in conversations. Anyone who has a blog can import their posts automatically and then tag their friends to come and make a comment. This runs straight into the wall feed and you can make comments directly on your wall/minifeed and keep updated on the topic without having to go back to the post and scroll down to the bottom each time a new person makes a comment.
I would like to hear your positive comments about the future of facebook, and similar websites, and why do you think they became so popular.
I think that in times of continuous rush and lack of time, facebook and similar websites open great opportunity to communicate with friends even if we are busy. For example we can watch changes in our friends life, communicate with then sitting in work and what is the best it doesn't consume much time.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with Adam.
ReplyDeleteFew years earlier was some "movement" about gadu-gadu and grono but now when facebook appears people switched to facebook.
Pages like Facebook have a lot of advantages, but each such page must also have some drawbacks. As far as the advantages are concerned they allow establishing contacts with people that I remember from the young years - even from kindergarten. You can instantly go back to the times when we were still kids. Of course, we can also find out how they cope with their lives, we see their family, children etc. ... Unfortunately, each such page like nasza klasa has negative sides - the most common is probably lack of privacy. It is great place for thefts. Another drawback are the ads. There is also a number of fictitious accounts that are created just to get e-mail to the users and send spam.
ReplyDeleteI was rather sceptical to Facebook phenomenon at first. However, my friends kept asking me: Are you on Facebook? So I must joint and answer myself why it is so popular.
ReplyDeleteI think the main reason is that so many people have joined Facebook and there is a big chance that most of our friend are there. Secondly, it is so simple, but extremely powerful at the same time. Facebook is not the social networking with the most complicated features like 3d avatars, virtual world and tons of other useless stuff. Thirdly, Facebook is not time consuming. I mean, when people check their email they need a few minutes, but they do this many times a day. And similar with Facebook - people use it a lot. Moreover it has easy navigate layout, great content, very good search capabilities and usefull features like importing contacts from email address book.
I agree with most of the previous comments. For me the biggest Facebook advantage is the fact that it helps you to maintaint contact with other people very easily, without much effort.
ReplyDeleteKrzysztof:
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't say that ads are a drawback. There no such thing as free Internet. Almost every webapp is supposed to make money. Ads == money. With no ads each service would have a subscription fee.
I think that facebook still will be growing, mostly due to situations like s4115 said: "Are you on facebook?". It's becoming so obvious that your friends are there and thanks to it's many features people can communicate quickly, easily and also renew their contacts from the past. Personally, I don't like this kind of sites, with lots of information about you that everyone on the world can read (and use?).In example, like Krzysztof said about getting an email to send spam; or knowing thanks to your status that you're away from home or at party. Of course your friends will take it only as an info (or invitation) but some 'bad guys' can use it against you.
ReplyDelete"I would like to hear your positive comments about the future of facebook"
ReplyDeleteyeah, of course it is nice to be on the Forbes 100 list at the age of 25. Congratulations to Mark Zuckerberg. But I want to share with you some of my private experiences with Facebook as developer doing Facebook apps.
the first thing:
it is nice to have this kind of api, especially when it comes to new FACEBOOK graph API. It is nice, and easy to implement
second thing:
it is to restrictive, this means some public data is not avaiable even when is public! How it is possible? this is very smart politics of theirs. They force you to do "the token dance" even if you want access public data like the name of the user! It is understandable but still, very irritating for a developer.