Flavio about Business 2.0

With the new pages and social ad system that facebook has created it is now possible to see how many people of a certain country are members of facebook. This number differs significantly from the number of people having joined the Switzerland network. Currently, there are 152′900 people from Switzerland that are members while only 106′000 have joined the Switzerland network. The ratio of joining the social network is thus 69% (my estimate earlier was 50%).

If you divide this number by the total population of Switzerland the ratio is 152′900 / 7′507′300 =  2%! In other words every 50th person in Switzerland is on facebook. It’s pretty amazin at which rate facebook has grown in Switzerland. In the beginning of the year when I joined, there were a mere 3′000 users in the Switzerland network and this number has now multiplied itsself by 30. And the number can still multiply by 14, as shown by the facebook demographics of canada and norway.

Interestingly there are more women who use facebook in almost every country (except the arab world). This is also the case in Switzerland where 51.7 % of the users are female.

When will we use facebook as a tool to vote in elections? Which other platform can boast as many members from Switzerland?

robwebb2k did a manual calculation of facebook penetration in different countries using the facebook flyer pro tool, which nicely indicates how many people you are reaching with certain demographic selection, like male/female - single/in a relationship or even favorite band or movie.

Here are the results:

As you can see, the penetration in Canada has reached an absolutely unbelievable 22%. More than every 5th Canadian is on Facebook - more than any political party for example has voters.

Extremely high penetration is also reached in Norway, where about 19% of the population is already on facebook.

If you look at other European numbers, Switzerland has a quite high penetration of 1.32 %, much higher than it’s neighbors France, Germany or Italy. Probably due to the internationality of our country.

How much longer until we reach 20% in Switzerland?

When are votes going to be cast over facebook or official government decisions broadcast? I bet you can reach more people than through traditional media.

In a very interesting article, the New York Times talks about several developers-entrepreneurs who are building facebook applications and try to earn money with it. And really no application is reporting profits. Most people can barely cover their server costs.

A couple of reasons why it is so hard to monetize an application:

• Ads can be displayed only on the canvas page but not on the user profiles, where most user attention goes.
• An application that gives user no incentives to come back and explore more stuff, or that is simply not social enough will not generate enough pageviews to generate a reasonable income - even though it might get a lot of installs, e.g. My Heritage app : has 600′000 installs but only 2% daily active users!
• An application on the other hand that is highly addictive has the same problems that all social networks have. Users are focused only on the content because it is so interesting.
• An app install is a really low commitment by the user, he barely clicks on add application. He is not a qualified prospect at all and is not likely to buy a product featured in the application.

A lot of people are building applications just for the fun of it. But how can people with a VC in their back make apps that much better than the 1000 of developers who code for free?

The only people that are making money with facebook apps right now are people that are selling advertisment in their apps for other people’s apps (like google adsense in a way with pay per install/click ). And that’s certainly not sustainable.

The facebook applications are in an extreme hype. Facebook only VC’s like Lee Lorenzen certainly help the fantasies

growing.

via allfacebook

It’s been not even two months since I blogged about facebook Switzerland having 20k users. As of now, facebook Switzerland has 42k users. So we doubled in just about 8 weeks. If we continue at this growth rate, Switzerland’s whole population will be on facebook in just eight months.

Other growing networks are:

France: 150k users (tripled within those 8 weeks)

Germany: 100k users (also doubled)

Italy: 53k users (more than doubled)

Spain: 57k users (more than doubled)

You see, everyone is reporting almost insane growth in Europe. This could help legitimate the rumor of facebooks current 10 bn $ valuation.

This VC thinks that Facebook is worth 100bn $. He’s running a facebook only VC Fund. He says the valuation of 100 bn $ is realistic if we have 200 mio users in 18 months (time of the IPO?) valued at 500 $ per user. Compared to the approx 100$ valuation of a Studivz User, that doesn’t even seem that unrealistic to me.

Very quickly, facebook could be worth as much as our friends at google: 160bn, at the time of this post. Not to mention yahoo, with a measly 30bn $ valuation. Maybe they should’ve bid a bit more when Facebook said no to 1bn $…

Enjoy the movie with courtesy of Facereview

See also:

Is Facebook worth $100 billion? Yeah, and here’s why: (highly recommended)

Here’s a video taking a look inside facebook. Note that people say as much as they do at google.

I’ve been observing the growth of the regional networks inside facebook. Recently, the facebook Switzerland network has reached more than 20′000 users. That’s up from 3′000 users at the beginning of the year, so thats a 600% increase in just 6 months. Compared to the penetration in Germany, facebook is doing very good in Switzerland:

Facebook Germany has close to 50k users, so that’s 49,146/82,314,900 = 0.0597% of Germany’s population.

Switzerland comes to 0.273% , almost five time the penetration than Germany. This also means that every
365th person from Switzerland is already on facebook. And be reminded that these are the people that actually join the regional networks. It would be interesting to know the ratio of users who joined a regional network versus users from that country. If we assume only 50% join, then we have 40k facebook Switzerland users and every 180th person is already on facebook! I am confident facebook is slowly but certainly taking over studivz in Switzerland.

Facebook is really changing the way we can interact with people. You can now finally find all those people you know but never exchanged numbers or email addresses. You can look up the girl you have a crush on. You can also see who her boyfriend is ;-).

Their name is enough to find them. What will happen, when 1 out of 2 people are on facebook? When your boss is on facebook but also your parents, all your work associates, your future wife? If you’re under 30, the probability that you’re future wife/husband is on facebook is quite high I would say. What’s gonna happen when you met the person? Are you going to look them up next day? yeah, sure. You’ll know more about them than they could possibly tell you: who their friends are, all their favourite movies, where they’ve been etc.

Other regional networks are growing as well:

Italy: 22,633
France: 55,285
Austria: 8,153
Spain: 23,670

England of course has several 100k, divided into individual networks.

Clearly, Switzerland has a predominant position when it comes to users per population. Why is that so? Maybe because Switzerland has a lot of international schools, whose students come from the anglo-saxon world and then started inviting their local friends. Switzerland has also been a country where early social networks like tillate.com, usgang.ch, partyguide.ch already had a lot of users and still have, so that the popularity of social networks is already given.

In fact, those partynetworks are probably much bigger in Switzerland than facebook and studivz when it comes to users. Tillate alone has 200′000 members, about 90% from Switzerland according to WEMF.

The attribute that really differentiates facebook from all the other social networks (except linkedin and xing) is that people are using their real names. That creates a huge impact on how people interact with each other, facebook for example is a much more trusted place than myspace. Will it become THE people directory of the world?

The much hyped facebook apps also has it’s downsides. Not all the users seem to enjoy facebook apps that much:

1. The number of groups against facebook app (not to mention all those that might just be hidden by facebook)

2. Even more significant: tools to remove junk on facebook (and myspace)

There is a general impression that Myspace lost much of the geek/elite users because it is so cluttered. Now the rapidly increasing number of applications on facebook is certainly cluttering up your profile page. Or maybe you’re simply annoyed by all those silly app invites you get everyday, each of them requiring action on your part.

Will this drive users away from facebook? Maybe not drive away, but severly increase the immunity of users against all sorts of requests and messages: friend requests, group invites, app invites, group messages for marketing purposes etc.

The first counter-reactions already emerging (above), there could very well be a major move by facebook that allows users to increase inaccessibility of their attention. This again wouldl probably severely impede apps virality and marketing effectiveness of groups.

According to inside facebook, which smartly monitors facebook’s new job descriptions, they found this interesting new job opportunity at facebook:

Responsibilities:

• Manage the administration and compliance of all employee equity compensation programs such as Stock options, Restricted stock, RSUs, Warrants
• Strong knowledge of SEC, FASB, and IRS rules and regulations relating to stock plans and insider trading (including SEC Section 16, SEC Rules 144, 145 and 701, FASB 123R, and IRC Sections 83, 409A, 421, 422 and 423)
• Partner with Legal, Tax, and Finance to ensure ongoing compliance and for internal and external reporting

Now this certainly looks like Facebook might be preparing an IPO. Others have suggested that facebook might be sold to google, citing Zuckerberg is in love with Google. But soon enough, facebook could take over google in page views:

How much is facebook worth now? Certainly now the 8 bn $ valuation looks more realistic than ever. I’m sure the guys at Facebook think it’s even a whole lot more. (compare googles 170bn $ valuation)

Now it really looks like facebook has done it again: Bay Partners launch the first facebook apps only fund to invest in young entrepreneurs who develop facebook apps. Apparently, they’re looking to invest between 25k and 250k. Not bad for such a facebook app.

The initiative is great and will help fuel the growth of good applications even more. But building a business only on top of facebook also carries certain risks: Facebook can simply decide to shut down your app if they don’t like it for some reason. They can also just modify some settings, like they already did, which can have a serious impact on your business model. Or how about facebook introducing monthly fees for API usage?

I think it would be smart to build a non-facebook dependant part of your business as well, so in case facebook apps is no longer a good option for you, your users are not simply lost, but can still use your service outside of facebook. This presumes your service adds real value for users, also outside of facebook.

via techcrunch and insidefacebook