Flavio about Business 2.0

A lot has happened in the past year in the market for Swiss party portals, famous for being a phenomenon only existing in Switzerland.
Just a few days ago, it was announced that tillate founders sold a big chunk of their stake to tamedia and now hold less than 14% in the company.
In september, Axel Springer bought usgang.ch and partyguide.ch

As Marc points out, the party mostly seems over for the party portals, seeing massive decrease in visitors, mainly because they were the first social networks to exist in Switzerland, had massive growth and users; But now Facebook, with its global reach, innovating rapidly and providing a relatively slick userinterface has taken the entire market.

Good for the founders to have sold now, as I don’t expect visitor numbers for any of these portals to increase in the future.

Just look at these numbers for Tillate:

Tough times for tillate

Laut und Spitz is not faring better:

Laut und Spitz Losing Ground

Usgang.ch is doing a little better, maybe because the rely less heavily on social networking but provide good insights into what parties are going down for a specific day/city.

Usgang.ch doing a bit better

To me these acquisitions look almost as bad as Holtzbrinck’s buying of Studivz, which is still not profitable and has again replaced their CEO, while Facebook is growing rapidly and already has over 1.4 mio German users.

Update: Viadeo has now removed the unfriendly comment from their website on the link posted in the comment below. Here’s the google cached version of the comment:

http://209.85.129.104/search?q=cache:JRpZwg9RqXIJ:
www.viadeo.fr/annonces/annoncestoutes/%3FsubCategory
%3D65700+viadeo+spam&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4&client=firefox-a

Viadeo spam
I have no desire to become a member of Viadeo. I currently receive on the order of several dozen requests daily: **SOMEONE_I_DON’T_KNOW** invites you to join the Viadeo network Hello, I have the pleasure to invite you to join me on Viadeo, the business and social networking website that works. Over the past 2 years, over 1,250,000 people have already joined Viadeo and the network is expanding at over 3,000 new members every day! - etc.- Despite several emails addressed to abuse@viadeo.com …
None - California
Published by No Spam
Published on 02 August 2007 - 2 people interested

I also found this link: http://twitter.com/tv/statuses/298470912, confirming the issue.

I just received the following email:

Sophie Plantieux invites you to join the Viadeo network
Hi,

I’d like to invite you to be part of my Viadeo network.

I use Viadeo to manage my professional contacts and get in touch with other people in my industry. Give it a look : it has paid off for me.

Kind regards,
Sophie Plantieux
Registration only takes a few minutes !
I want to join

Please join now by clicking on the above link.

PS: By inviting your contacts to join your network on Viadeo you increase your networking opportunities exponentially. Some Internet Service Providers deactivate html links. If this is your case, to accept this invitation simply copy and paste this address in your Internet browser:

http://www.viadeo.com/action/index.jsp?actionId
=002p15toal6zhez&urlId=0021v1e4bjtkdcp0

That looks like an ugly spam message to me. Because neither do I know a Sophie Plantieux nor does that person seem to exist, according to google at least. She has a Viadeo account with 19 contacts and a Xing account but with no contacts. This is a tactic that could likely backfire, just wait until a couple of bloggers receive those emails and you will have a mess. On the other hand, bad press is also press, so they might just be waiting for that. Or is it a jealous competitor who is sending emails in their names? The email came from a gmail address, so it can not be proven that it is from viadeo themselves.

Now they boast 1.6 Mio members, almost half of the 4 Mio users that Xing has. Could they be a serious competitor to Xing? I haven’t seen that many French on Xing, they’re mostly on Linkedin and heck - maybe even on viadeo!

Looks like Xing got a good foothold into the spanish market with their acquisitions. But what about the rest of Europe?

As you may have noticed on your Xing account, they introduced a new feature that helps better describe your past. You can now add what you were responsible for at a specific job and what kind of company it is. This is something that Linkedin has been offering since years and is no technological challenge to implement.

Xing has done a nice job adding some ajax layers to facilitate editing. The usability of Xing is great, and they’re doing everything to make it even better.

On the other hand, linkedin has finally introduced profile pictures, a feature Xing has been offering since their start.

Those small tweaks are necessary and help the main professional social networks keep up with others like facebook. While they might not like each other that much, they should maybe be more worried about facebook when they introduce their friend grouping feature.

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.

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

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.