Archives: October 2008

While there has been debate about a million dollar application among developers, Northwestern Mutual has decided to take another approach. Rather than trying to generate $1 million from advertising on their application, the company has launched the Let Your Worries Go Vote application. The application is extremely simple.

It lets users vote on the organization that the company will donate $1 million to. So far the application has attracted a couple hundred users but somehow it has been voted on by over 110,000 individuals. While I’m not sure on where the other votes came from, it’s clear that this is part of a broader campaign to raise awareness for the participating organizations and of course for Northwestern Mutual.

Given the simplicity of this application, it’s surprising that the company hasn’t spent more money investing in installations of the application. Additionally, there are no viral components built into this application so the chance of it expanding on its own is fairly unlikely. That’s unfortunate considering this application has a good cause.

It’s great to see another large company build a presence on Facebook. Honestly, it’s becoming a requirement for businesses. How each company executes their Facebook strategy appears to be different though. Northwestern Mutual has stuck to the application model and hopes for growth. Now to see if they can get some traction!

As of today, Facebook is available in 23 languages (26 if you count derivative versions of each). There are also 7 languages that are in beta, including the recently seen pirate version. The new languages include a number of Asian languages, primarily seen in southeastern Asia, an area currently dominated by Friendster. As Facebook expands its global reach, it is important that the site be available in all languages.

It appears that many of the languages have been translated in relatively the order of popularity. There are still plenty of languages remaining with 63 other languages being actively translated. One interesting language that’s being added is “Leet Speak” which is the language of uber computer geeks. One commenter on the “Leet Speak” translations section wrote:

I’m sure one of the primary points of debate regarding the translations is how far to vulgarize a word when translating into leet. For example, the word “Leet” could be made into anywhere from l33t to 1337 to 1_ [- [- +. Perhaps this language should be subdivided into different levels of, ahem, legibility?

While another one wrote:

533, i pr3f3r 7h3 v3r510n wi7h n0 5ym8015. 0n1y 13773r5 4nd num83r5

It’s great to see that Facebook is at least leveraging their tools for entertainment purposes and not just utility. Then again, has Facebook ever been simply for utility?

Mike Arrington is reporting that Facebook has devoted zero resources to building an application for Android. Why exactly? Well much of it has to do with the bad blood between Google and Facebook sparked when Facebook banned Google’s Friend Connect earlier this year. Looks like things are not so pretty.

Other reasons for arguing? Well, a little company called Microsoft is the one that won rights to Facebook’s ad inventory. This agreement is similar to the one that Google signed with MySpace. Honestly, what is essentially a childish fight has erupted into bad business practice. As a platform and a product, Facebook’s goal is to expand access to any communications device.

Unfortunately they are deciding to not build for a platform which will soon be on millions of mobile devices. If Facebook was building their own mobile platform, I would totally understand them not wanting to build for others. Then again, Apple has been successful by building their iTunes product for Windows, a competing platform.

When Facebook decides to cut themselves off from accessing millions of individuals because they don’t like the other platform, they are missing out on a huge opportunity. The bottom line is this is bad business and Facebook should most definitely suck it up and hop on the new platform. Otherwise MySpace is going to have no problem picking up some of the slack.

Chris Pirillo posted a discussion of him and a viewer, Mona, who has been on Facebook for a long time. She is pretty angry about the new design. She’s also mad about some of the viral applications as well as a number of other things. Honestly, she goes on a long rant about the new Facebook. What’s really interesting is how long people can talk about Facebook in general.

Personally, I don’t think this is the end of Facebook but many of the discussion points are worthy ones.

If you hadn’t noticed already, Facebook has updated their site statistics to state that the site now has more than 110 million registered users. At one point the company suggested that they were registering over 250,000 members a day and so far it doesn’t look like that’s slowing. While it’s not worthwhile counting every million users Facebook adds, the site is so far the most successful social network in history.

The site also continues to grow at a remarkable rate. While there is no telling how large the site will get, Facebook has only attracted a fraction of the global internet population. According to the World Internet Usage site, the total internet population is 1.463 billion people. That means Facebook has around 7.5 percent of the global internet population.

Still plenty of room for growth! If Facebook is planning for world domination then it makes a lot of sense why they are already investing in lawsuits and marketing campaigns in Germany. The biggest challenge is growth and any country which is posing problems for Facebook they will begin investing heavily in to promote growth.

If the company can obtain a critical mass in each country, then the theory is that they will be able to grow to number one everywhere. Who’s theory exactly? Well it’s my theory but it definitely makes a lot of sense! As Mark Zuckerberg says consistently, the company is still focused on growth and not monetization. While we can debate why that is, it’s clear that they won’t stop until practically everybody has joined the site.

Soon after the Facebook platform launched last year, there was an influx of advertising networks racing to fill the new inventory provided by applications. These networks became the primary source of advertising revenue for most of the applications and while there have been monetization partnerships with outside vendors, most of the advertising still comes from third parties.

This afternoon I was looking at an application and saw the ad pictured below. The ad says “You Are Dumb”. Now while the accuracy of the advertisement may be unproven, the ad itself is pretty stupid. So far there appears to be no large brands that are advertising via the third parties without some sort of application tie in which presents a large problem for these ad networks.

If all these ad networks provide is advertising for other applications, how large can they really get? There is also the issue of Facebook competing directly with the advertisers for large advertisement deals. As Ross Levinsohn, former CEO of Fox Interactive told Adage, “There isn’t enough advertising to support all those features, and in compression times, advertisers tend to flock to safe names and sites that have real traction.”

There’s always space for bottom of the barrel advertising, but when it comes to attracting the high CPMs, most of the third-party ad networks (if not all of them) are struggling to come up with solutions. As such, we see that 18 months after the launch of the platform, there are still ads like the one below. At the same time, it appears that there has been a slight improvement in the quality of ads on Facebook.

Unfortunately for Facebook, as I wrote earlier this week, there is still not enough good inventory on Facebook. What do you think the future of 3rd party ad networks on Facebook holds?

According to a new study published today, women on Facebook are becoming “hooked on the urge to ‘acquire’ more and more friends”. The article continues to explain that David Smallwood, a psychologist, “claims women are vulnerable to the addition as they get their self worth from relationships and Facebook compels them to seek out hundred of cohorts.”

The article also suggested that the feminization of the web is being driven by social networking sites. Just last year there was a report published which suggested females between 25 and 49 were spending more time on the web then their male counterparts. At least 10 percent of the Facebook population are at risk of “friendship addiction”. The study claims “women are more vulnerable as they place more of their self-worth on their relationships”.

In the world of social media, friend addiction is common place. We publicize how many Twitter followers we have, friends on Facebook, and the number of relationships on other sites. The issue is a feeling of inadequacy for not having the most friends in a group. Honestly, I think competition for popularity within social circles has always been an issue for many.

Personally, I always try to add contacts as it essentially expands my reach. The real question is not how many Facebook friends or Twitter followers you have though. What’s more important is how many people you have “real” relationships with. No matter how hard we try, that will never be scalable. Locally within social circles in the D.C. metro area, I frequently meet people that are envious of others that have many online friends and appear to be popular.

Image is everything though for many of the more “connected” individuals and much of this image is a facade. So do you have issues with friending addiction? Are your friends Facebook friending addicts?

Last night Facebook announced a new feature that increases the promotional capabilities provided by news feed stories. The new feature is called an “action link” and according to Facebook, the feature “is a call to action for the user to take within your application, directly from a Feed story. For example, it could be a call to buy an album or a book, or write a review. The URL encoded within the action link takes the user to the appropriate place to perform the action.”

This is an interesting feature which most definitely provides a new channel for developers to promote features on external sites including generating affiliate revenue. Imagine seeing that your friend just read a book on Visual Bookshelf with a link to go purchase it right then. The version that Facebook displays (pictured below) is a notification that your friend just purchased a CD (similar to the book version I just mentioned).

There are links to listen, review, and purchase the CD. I definitely see this as a great opportunity to drive users to action. This is a great feature and definitely think developers should quickly find a way to take advantage of the new action links.

This guy dumped Facebook for Twitter. I’m not sure it’s exactly a substitute but the video is short and entertaining.

Side note: The past few posts have all been relationship oriented for some reason. Hopefully I’ll have some news to post in the next few hours!

Over the past few days there has been a lot of buzz about a man who killed his wife after seeing that his wife switched their relationship status to “single”. According to Paul Cheston, the man “drank alcohol and took cocaine before driving 15 miles to the family home to attack wife Emma as she lay in bed.” How did he kill her?

Well with a meat cleaver of course! The interesting part is that the couple had been separated for four days, and switching the wife’s relationship status was literally the final nail in the coffin. “Emma was found in a pool of blood after neighbours were woken at 6:30am by her screams. Near her body was a large kitchen knife and in another room a blood-soaked meat cleaver.”

It was a violent and tragic killing (I’ll avoid the details which are posted in the article linked above). Typically I would avoid such horrible news but this story highlights the massive impact that a facebook relationship status change can have on an individual’s emotions. I’ve know people that have left Facebook indefinitely after ending a relationship because they could bare to watch their ex’s activities on the site.

Social networking has brought about a new level of interconnectedness which can have unforeseen consequences. This example is most definitely an extreme example of what could happen. For the most part Facebook is or should be used for good though. It is only in rare instances that we hear of horror stories such as this.