Flavio about Business 2.0

Brad Fitzpatrick, the creator of LiveJournal and is the author of a variety of free software projects such as memcached has just pointed out to me that he has written a greasemonkey script that allows to export the phone numbers of your facebook friends.

The script works great, you can export to vcf which you can use on your iphone for example. Thanks Brad for putting this together!

What is also interesting to note is that facebook DOES allow you to see your friends phonenumbers in fulltext as opposed to email addresses, which are still encoded as images. That means they are implicitly allowing the export of phone numbers through scripts like Brad’s.

But we all remember what happened when Scoble tried using a tool written by plaxo’s to export his friends emails.

When will facebook finally allow the exportation of data your friends WANT so share with you?

Yes it’s true. Just recently I posted that Facebook Switzerland had reached 10% of the population, and now we’ve already reached another milestone: 1 million Swiss residents are on Facebook! (Actually already 1′071′000)

That is the equivalent of 14.2% of the population(!). This is a 42% increase in less than two months.

If you look at the graph, you can see that the growth is still accelerating.

At what level is the market saturated?

It’s official. Every 10th person living in Switzerland is now a member of the ever popular social network called Facebook. That means the number of users doubled within just 4 months!

I’ve been blogging about the growth of Facebook within Switzerland for a long time now, and noted how much faster it had grown here compared to the surrounding countries like Germany (1.1%), France(6.1%), Italy (2.7%) and Austria (2.1%).

Here’s an updated look at the growth within Switzerland:

10% may seem like a lot, but we’re still a long way from reaching Canada’s 30.4% or Norways 28.3%

While Facebook has enjoyed tremendous success in most parts of the world, recently reaching a 100 million active users, it has had real problems growing in Germany. Certainly because Studivz is a strong competition, stronger than I anticipated.

Now Facebook hired Smaboo, a company two friends of mine started a while ago to help them grow in the German market. So first, Congratulations to Adrian, Christoph and Marko for getting this deal with the hottest Startup!

They want students to organize Facebook parties in their universities.

But from a Facebook view, this cries for Desperateness to grow in this very contested market. This is the first time I have heard Facebook SPEND money in order to grow (I am not 100% sure that Facebook is spending money, but I certainly hope so for Smaboo, the students seem to be getting gadgets and party invitations more than real money). Their growth so far has been totally viral and free, they did not even pay the translation of the site.

Looking at the numbers, they are defintely not that exciting for Facebook:

It has 816′000 users in Germany, merely 1% of the population. Facebook France on the other hand boasts 3.3 million users, representing 5.2 % of the population. Or Switzerland, where 660′000 users represent 8.7 % of all Swiss.

It could also mean that Facebook is very confident that they will earn their money back with advertising once they have the necessary amount of users.

Essentially, Facebook is now copying Studivz in their marketing efforts to get German students on the platform, after they sued Studivz for having a similar design.

Update: You can even send regular SMS with your Iphone for free: http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/08/07/13/1727211.shtml

Nick O’Neill at allfacebook has a great post featuring Facebook adding Chat Functionality to their Iphone Application.

He goes on asking correctly “Does this spell the death of SMS?”, to which I say “YES”. Not today or tomorrow, but with Iphone sales soaring (Apple set their target to 45 million Iphones in 2009),  unlimited data plans becoming affordable both in Europe (starting 30 £ per month) (Switzerland has rates around CHF 50 for 1 GB per month which is more than enough for facebook chat) and in the States (starting with 70$ per month and 130$ for voice and data unlimited) and not to mention the humongous facebook penetration, I can very clearly see this replacing SMS. Why would I pay 15-20 cents for 160 characters if I can do unlimited messaging for free?

On top of that you can now chat realtime between with someone that is on their PC and you have a chat history which SMS also lacks (I don’t think going back and opening your sent items folder is very userfriendly)

Already emails are being sent from millions of blackberry devices around the world every day. Also the adoption of the facebook chat feature requires so little effort. If you have the Iphone and you and your friends use facebook you’re all set.

What about Telcos? They will make money with new data plans which will be much requested, but will it account for the loss in SMS revenue that is about to happen?

In 2005, 16 percent of European Telco’s revenue comes from text messaging.

When are we gonna be able to use skype seamlessly on top of our facebook address book?

I mean for me it’s a no brainer. What do you think, will you use facebook’s new chat feature on your Iphone?

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.

Jesse Farmer has provided the blogosphere with an excellent article on the state of the facebook platform, after doing three months of meticulous research on developer activity and active users in newly launched applications.

He’s looked at how many developers are active in the facebook developers forum and finds that the posts per day have decreased by 51%!

Here’s his graphic on weekly postings (graph done by Jesse at 20bits.com)

The trend is pretty clear. The facebook platform is losing it’s hype status. That doesn’t mean nobody is developing new apps, it just means that not everybody is trying to get a piece of the cake anymore.

He’s also looked user activity with new applications and we see the same trend. A new application launched today in average will have 3 times less users than if it was launched 3 months ago!

Obviously the overflow of applications and the increasing limits on the virality (no I’m not the inventor of this word, people have used it before) of facebook apps as imposed by facebook trying keep users unspammed and happy are making it harder and harder to gain a large audience quickly.

Jesse also points out developers are increasingly focusing their time and energy on other platforms, where the conditions for creating a successful app might still be better. The people he’s talked to say they’re not leaving facebook as a platform, but it’s just becoming one of many.

From this we can draw the following conclusions:

a) the dream that facebook will become the new web os is dead. It was probably more created by the media than really targeted as a goal by facebook. There are still almost no useful apps out there and with so much clutter of “my drunk friends” apps it is becoming even harder to stick out as a useful app. Many people just don’t use any apps at all. This is visible now in the declining application developer activity.

b) The fact that developers are less active on the platform than a few months ago may hurt facebook’s valuation in an IPO setting. But then again, how much more are they worth than before their platform launch?

So does the end of the platform - “everybody and his auntie is developing an app” - gold rush matter?

Not really. This is probably one of the most successful marketing and PR campaigns ever created.

How many newspapers and bloggers have written about facebook, how many people even started their blog on facebook since the release of the facebook platform? (The facebook blogs were around before, I know guys…).

How many app developers have invited even more people to facebook just to get them to install their app?

Who has invested in facebook?

Think about how massively this move has brought to everyone’s attention from the biggest tech (but not only tech) corporations to journalists and finally, to new users.

If you divide the worth of the immense amount of free publicity they got by the amount of money they invested in developing the facebook platform, I’m pretty sure that’s a deal most of us would not have hesitated to open up our piggy bank for.

It was a genius move by facebook and allowed them to overtake myspace in reach (at least according to alexa, not so according to compete and quantcast)

Facebook could shut down it’s platform tomorrow and would still be worth as much as today.

[via allfacebook]

I’m here at Lift in Geneva where I had the chance to talk to Scoble about one of my projects. He was kind enough to put up a little video interview of him and me online:

If you’re interested in what I was building, don’t hesitate to contact me and please join our facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5145637860