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.

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.

Valleywag came up with an interesting map, showing which Social Networks have the highest penetration in each countries:

Interesting to see how Social Networks are distributed throughout the world. Lately, I have come under the impression that everyone is looking at facebook and that other players are loosing game.

But the bloggers, including Techcrunch, Mashable and my humbleness, might not see the entire picture.

In many regions of our world, facebook is very insignificant. In fact, if you look at the world map above, facebook dominates only very few countries. (Note: The map only shows the leading social network in a country.)

Now there acts the principle of the self-fulfilling prophecy: When bloggers talk about facebook and about how it’s platform is revolutionizing the internet, they are aggressively accelerating facebook growth themselves, by evangelizing it (absolutely for free, by the way).

Facebook indeed is a winner here, because they were the first to implement a platform for developers. They are thus gaining importance by the huge amount of attention they receive from the blogosphere. Linkedin’s or MySpace have just barely announced they’re planning the implementation of platforms, and have received only minuscule coverage.

The map also reveals that facebook might not have the impact everyone thinks it has. As pointed out by Andi, Facebook’s market share in Asia is close to zero, as well as in Latin America. Basically, everything except the anglosaxon part of the world.

Now obviously the arising question is: Will one player step up to plate and gain everything? Or maybe there is only one professional network and one student / fun network?

Interesting is also this article, showing how facebook and myspace mirror a class division in the USA.

No matter how strong facebook grows, they’re still very far away from myspace and will not overcome them anytime soon. Xing and Linkedin both hold very strong positions in their home markets and there is no signs of a consolidation in either one of them.

Maybe with the development of meta tools, which quickly allow to import/export profile and contact data, more appealing social networks might grow even quicker than now and actual take market share away from weaker players until they can’t carry on with their non-profitability.