Flavio about Business 2.0

The police of the canton of Zurich has apparently not felt the economic downturn yet and is still looking for new recruits.
I was surprised to see that they use Facebook to get attention. But it definitely makes sense for them, the age requirements for new recruits is between 20 and 34, an age group which is extremely well represented on Facebook. 73% of Switzerland’s Facebook users are between 18 and 34.
These 811′760 people represent 49.8% of the 1′630′000 people in that age group.

Sources: Sociabliz Demographer and Bundesamt für Statistik

Goodguide, an absolute killer company that just minutes ago launched at Techcrunch50 does great things:

They have researched over 60′000 products that are being sold within North America to find out what their ingredients are. The products are then rated in three categories Health Performance,  Environmental Performance  and Social Performance.

So for example I researched a product that I was using:

This information is absolutely great. This company is going to change it all. Think about the impact it will have on products, companies, and even politics! Finally consumers can buy the best products and can punish companies that make unhealthy products or pay their workers to little.

I’m thrilled.

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.

I recently listened to a talk given by the cofounder and lead programmer of viibee, Michael Marth at the internet briefing conference in the world trade center in Zurich.

Viibee is an RIA dating application, giving users the possibility to upload videos of themselves. They’re trying to bring the fun factor back to dating and they say hearing and seeing a person speak is much more fun and tells you more about a person than reading through countless more or less boring profiles.

In his presentation, Michael Marth showed us how they built viibee, Rich Internet Application focused on Dating with flex and ruby on rails. Then he showed us how they integrated their application into existing social networks like facebook, myspace, friendster and orkut.

Here’s a couple of things Michael said:

Facebook integration is very easy and powerful, because there is

• good support of swf files
• a large developer community and good documentation
• interaction with facebook is server side (there’s a rails plugin called rfacebook)

Orkut integration proved more painful due to

• Opensocial is JS based, so FlexJS Bridge was needed and embedCachedFlash, which apparently is still buggy
• Caching on the side of the social network makes testing more difficult

but has a good support of developers (well, google is a developers’ company)

Myspace has a good developer support but

• you have to use MySpace Content Delivery Network so that caching strategy and expiry remain unclear
• you have to use a proprietary Flash Lib, the opensocial JS API has been “extended”

He has only used the client side integration of Myspace (opensocial) and has not yet tried the Myspace REST API, which is quite powerful, because it allows you to integrate on the server side.

Friendster (interesting that people are still considering it, according to google trends the trend is upward, contrary to myspace and orkut)

• no good developer support
• API is based on REST, means the integration is server side but there’s no ruby library available
• opensocial is promised
• apps are within iframes, so you can easily include an swf file
• mostly functional “as advertised”

It would be interesting to have same developer experiences from networks like hi5 or bebo, which both have also launched APIs and are becoming more and more important in the Social Networking space.

He also noted that the virality, like using notifications, news feeds and emails are very specific to the individual social network.

Was it worth it? Michael says yes, very much so. A lot of their rapidly growing number of users are using the application exclusively within their preferred social network.

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]

As you can see, I just switched from Joomla to Wordpress.

Joomla remains a great product, but I didn’t really need most of it’s functionality that wordpress doesn’t also offer. And for simple blogging, wordpress is certainly more powerful and easier to handle.

Maybe this will lead to an increase of the posting frequency, because it is now much less pain to post than before.

Joomla only really makes sense if you have several different pages and need extra functionality that wordpress cannot offer (yet).