Flavio about Business 2.0

What great news. According to Ronda, Myspace is launching data availability later today.

I haven’t been able to check out exactly the features since they are not online yet, but I am sure very excited to hear about it.

It is not clear if Myspace is allowing to interact and export more than facebook already does.

If they allow for better and easier export of data they are definitely showing leadership in the state of data portability. Facebook announced earlier the launch of facebook connect.

Let’s hope this is not a hoax.

Update: Techcrunch has some more details.

As the data in the facebook ad manager tool suggests, there are now 395′020 people on facebook within Switzerland. Given our current population of 7′554′661 we can deduct that 5.22% of the Swiss Population are now officially on facebook. From 18-25 year olds this number accrues to 187′480 people out of 714′000 people, so 26% of this generation are on facebook.

What does this mean?

• In other words, every 20th person in Switzerland is on facebook.
• Facebook is probably the most successful Social Network in Switzerland ever
• If you are young and live in an urban center like Zurich or Geneva you’re totally disconnected from what’s going on if you’re not on facebook.
• If you want to reach a large amount of young people in a very targed way (age, sex, relationship status etc), facebook provides an excellent opportunity.

I’ve been blogging about facebook growth within Switzerland for the past year and now I’ve taken these data points to see how facebook has grown within this time:

As visible on the graph above, we have seen rapid growth throughout the last 1.5 years and don’t seem to be done yet. And when you see what numbers Norway and Canada show there is good reason to believe this trend is continuing.

• Canada: 28.7 %
• Norway: 26.1 %

Soon every third Canadian is going to be on facebook. So if I were in Canada I’d better make sure my profile doesn’t show too much unnecessary information about myself, because you can be sure that your teacher and your future employer is on the site as well.

Let’s compare to our neighbors (numbers in parentheses show growth in one(!) month)

• France 3.71% (+ 14%)
• Italy 0.78% (+ 24%)
• Germany 0.75% (+11%)
• Austria 1.33% (+14%)

Certainly France has a strong adoption due to it’s strong economic and social relations with both the UK and the USA and the lack of a domestic competitor. Germany’s growth clearly lacks behind others because of Studivz that apparently still has a strong lead over facebook within Germany (all their expansion projects to France, Italy, Poland etc have been abondoned, as I’ve been told from an inside source). Austria is probably just not as international and globally connected as Switzerland and is probably still stronger attached to Studivz. I don’t know why Italy lacks that far behind, perhaps they just prefer to meet up in person than hang out online (not a bad reason, if you ask me).

Appearently this feature has been around for ages, nevertheless I only discovered it today.

It’s called Facebook Phonebook, is accessible both on the web and on the mobile and lists all your friends which have indicated one or more phonenumbers on their profile.

Now the phonenumber functionality of course, has been there since ever, both on facebook and on xing. But I wasn’t aware that you could so easily have an overview over all your friends phonenumbers.

Now I certainly don’t have all these numbers on my cellphone. So it could be really useful to have all these numbers here. A lot of time you write people messages back and forth, when it would be so much more efficient to just give them a call and discuss things or make decisions quickly (like finding a time for a meeting).

What is still not there is the export functionality. Facebook joined the Dataportability Group, but still nothing has changed. Why can’t I export MY data to my cellphone? My friends are sharing this information with me, because they want me to have it! I can export it manually, so why shouldn’t a software be able to do that for me? It would not decrease user privacy by an inch.

More on the matter here: Flavio Rump on Scoble, and the video interview

This week’s hebdo contains an article talking about Obama’s popularity throughout the world. They start of by mentionning different polls conducted by polling agencies or themselves to show how Obama is the world’s most popular candidate. But then they do one thing which I don’t think can be justified from an journalist view point, they do quote facebook polls (!) to show that 54% of Iraqis support Obama or 71% of Brazilians. As they mention correctly, the poll has been conducted by asking 1000 facebook users in each of these countries. How on earth can this be representative? They do mention that it is an “exotic” way of conducting polls, but reads these details anyway? Especially in the headlines.

They also quote a poll conducted on a polish website where they do in fact remark that this is a questionable way of polling people (it is probably totally useless).

Now you don’t really want to sell me that 1000 facebook users is representative. It is anything BUT representative for obvious reasons!

Just to make sure, in case someone in hebdo’s redaction is reading this, here the reasons:

• Facebook users is a highly biased group of any population, because it contains proportionally more young people. On top of that the people on facebook are more openminded, internet connected people that certainly do not represent the entire population.
• Do you know how easy it is to create a fake facebook account and then vote in these polls?

Where are we today that a major Swiss publication uses facebook as a major source for their articles?

Come on hebdo, you can do better than that.

I recently listened to a talk given by the cofounder and lead programmer of viibee, Michael Marth at the internet briefing conference in the world trade center in Zurich.

Viibee is an RIA dating application, giving users the possibility to upload videos of themselves. They’re trying to bring the fun factor back to dating and they say hearing and seeing a person speak is much more fun and tells you more about a person than reading through countless more or less boring profiles.

In his presentation, Michael Marth showed us how they built viibee, Rich Internet Application focused on Dating with flex and ruby on rails. Then he showed us how they integrated their application into existing social networks like facebook, myspace, friendster and orkut.

Here’s a couple of things Michael said:

Facebook integration is very easy and powerful, because there is

• good support of swf files
• a large developer community and good documentation
• interaction with facebook is server side (there’s a rails plugin called rfacebook)

Orkut integration proved more painful due to

• Opensocial is JS based, so FlexJS Bridge was needed and embedCachedFlash, which apparently is still buggy
• Caching on the side of the social network makes testing more difficult

but has a good support of developers (well, google is a developers’ company)

Myspace has a good developer support but

• you have to use MySpace Content Delivery Network so that caching strategy and expiry remain unclear
• you have to use a proprietary Flash Lib, the opensocial JS API has been “extended”

He has only used the client side integration of Myspace (opensocial) and has not yet tried the Myspace REST API, which is quite powerful, because it allows you to integrate on the server side.

Friendster (interesting that people are still considering it, according to google trends the trend is upward, contrary to myspace and orkut)

• no good developer support
• API is based on REST, means the integration is server side but there’s no ruby library available
• opensocial is promised
• apps are within iframes, so you can easily include an swf file
• mostly functional “as advertised”

It would be interesting to have same developer experiences from networks like hi5 or bebo, which both have also launched APIs and are becoming more and more important in the Social Networking space.

He also noted that the virality, like using notifications, news feeds and emails are very specific to the individual social network.

Was it worth it? Michael says yes, very much so. A lot of their rapidly growing number of users are using the application exclusively within their preferred social network.