Flavio about Business 2.0

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?