Flavio about Business 2.0

Kevin Foreman took the time to compile the information about the websites that make the most turnover online:

With an estimate of 300 mio $ / year Facebook makes the list on spot 24.
Also interesting to note that the grey old lady makes the list on spot 30.

It seems this list is US focused, I’m sure some Asian or maybe even European companies would also be on that list.
I’m also missing Monster, which made 1.3 billion in 2008, so the list doesn’t seem to be 100% accurate, but it’s still a good reference on what generates sales online.

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.

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

Brad Fitzpatrick, the creator of LiveJournal and is the author of a variety of free software projects such as memcached has just pointed out to me that he has written a greasemonkey script that allows to export the phone numbers of your facebook friends.

The script works great, you can export to vcf which you can use on your iphone for example. Thanks Brad for putting this together!

What is also interesting to note is that facebook DOES allow you to see your friends phonenumbers in fulltext as opposed to email addresses, which are still encoded as images. That means they are implicitly allowing the export of phone numbers through scripts like Brad’s.

But we all remember what happened when Scoble tried using a tool written by plaxo’s to export his friends emails.

When will facebook finally allow the exportation of data your friends WANT so share with you?

Yes it’s true. Just recently I posted that Facebook Switzerland had reached 10% of the population, and now we’ve already reached another milestone: 1 million Swiss residents are on Facebook! (Actually already 1′071′000)

That is the equivalent of 14.2% of the population(!). This is a 42% increase in less than two months.

If you look at the graph, you can see that the growth is still accelerating.

At what level is the market saturated?

While Facebook has enjoyed tremendous success in most parts of the world, recently reaching a 100 million active users, it has had real problems growing in Germany. Certainly because Studivz is a strong competition, stronger than I anticipated.

Now Facebook hired Smaboo, a company two friends of mine started a while ago to help them grow in the German market. So first, Congratulations to Adrian, Christoph and Marko for getting this deal with the hottest Startup!

They want students to organize Facebook parties in their universities.

But from a Facebook view, this cries for Desperateness to grow in this very contested market. This is the first time I have heard Facebook SPEND money in order to grow (I am not 100% sure that Facebook is spending money, but I certainly hope so for Smaboo, the students seem to be getting gadgets and party invitations more than real money). Their growth so far has been totally viral and free, they did not even pay the translation of the site.

Looking at the numbers, they are defintely not that exciting for Facebook:

It has 816′000 users in Germany, merely 1% of the population. Facebook France on the other hand boasts 3.3 million users, representing 5.2 % of the population. Or Switzerland, where 660′000 users represent 8.7 % of all Swiss.

It could also mean that Facebook is very confident that they will earn their money back with advertising once they have the necessary amount of users.

Essentially, Facebook is now copying Studivz in their marketing efforts to get German students on the platform, after they sued Studivz for having a similar design.

Update: You can even send regular SMS with your Iphone for free: http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/08/07/13/1727211.shtml

Nick O’Neill at allfacebook has a great post featuring Facebook adding Chat Functionality to their Iphone Application.

He goes on asking correctly “Does this spell the death of SMS?”, to which I say “YES”. Not today or tomorrow, but with Iphone sales soaring (Apple set their target to 45 million Iphones in 2009),  unlimited data plans becoming affordable both in Europe (starting 30 £ per month) (Switzerland has rates around CHF 50 for 1 GB per month which is more than enough for facebook chat) and in the States (starting with 70$ per month and 130$ for voice and data unlimited) and not to mention the humongous facebook penetration, I can very clearly see this replacing SMS. Why would I pay 15-20 cents for 160 characters if I can do unlimited messaging for free?

On top of that you can now chat realtime between with someone that is on their PC and you have a chat history which SMS also lacks (I don’t think going back and opening your sent items folder is very userfriendly)

Already emails are being sent from millions of blackberry devices around the world every day. Also the adoption of the facebook chat feature requires so little effort. If you have the Iphone and you and your friends use facebook you’re all set.

What about Telcos? They will make money with new data plans which will be much requested, but will it account for the loss in SMS revenue that is about to happen?

In 2005, 16 percent of European Telco’s revenue comes from text messaging.

When are we gonna be able to use skype seamlessly on top of our facebook address book?

I mean for me it’s a no brainer. What do you think, will you use facebook’s new chat feature on your Iphone?

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.

As the data in the facebook ad manager tool suggests, there are now 395′020 people on facebook within Switzerland. Given our current population of 7′554′661 we can deduct that 5.22% of the Swiss Population are now officially on facebook. From 18-25 year olds this number accrues to 187′480 people out of 714′000 people, so 26% of this generation are on facebook.

What does this mean?

• In other words, every 20th person in Switzerland is on facebook.
• Facebook is probably the most successful Social Network in Switzerland ever
• If you are young and live in an urban center like Zurich or Geneva you’re totally disconnected from what’s going on if you’re not on facebook.
• If you want to reach a large amount of young people in a very targed way (age, sex, relationship status etc), facebook provides an excellent opportunity.

I’ve been blogging about facebook growth within Switzerland for the past year and now I’ve taken these data points to see how facebook has grown within this time:

As visible on the graph above, we have seen rapid growth throughout the last 1.5 years and don’t seem to be done yet. And when you see what numbers Norway and Canada show there is good reason to believe this trend is continuing.

• Canada: 28.7 %
• Norway: 26.1 %

Soon every third Canadian is going to be on facebook. So if I were in Canada I’d better make sure my profile doesn’t show too much unnecessary information about myself, because you can be sure that your teacher and your future employer is on the site as well.

Let’s compare to our neighbors (numbers in parentheses show growth in one(!) month)

• France 3.71% (+ 14%)
• Italy 0.78% (+ 24%)
• Germany 0.75% (+11%)
• Austria 1.33% (+14%)

Certainly France has a strong adoption due to it’s strong economic and social relations with both the UK and the USA and the lack of a domestic competitor. Germany’s growth clearly lacks behind others because of Studivz that apparently still has a strong lead over facebook within Germany (all their expansion projects to France, Italy, Poland etc have been abondoned, as I’ve been told from an inside source). Austria is probably just not as international and globally connected as Switzerland and is probably still stronger attached to Studivz. I don’t know why Italy lacks that far behind, perhaps they just prefer to meet up in person than hang out online (not a bad reason, if you ask me).

Appearently this feature has been around for ages, nevertheless I only discovered it today.

It’s called Facebook Phonebook, is accessible both on the web and on the mobile and lists all your friends which have indicated one or more phonenumbers on their profile.

Now the phonenumber functionality of course, has been there since ever, both on facebook and on xing. But I wasn’t aware that you could so easily have an overview over all your friends phonenumbers.

Now I certainly don’t have all these numbers on my cellphone. So it could be really useful to have all these numbers here. A lot of time you write people messages back and forth, when it would be so much more efficient to just give them a call and discuss things or make decisions quickly (like finding a time for a meeting).

What is still not there is the export functionality. Facebook joined the Dataportability Group, but still nothing has changed. Why can’t I export MY data to my cellphone? My friends are sharing this information with me, because they want me to have it! I can export it manually, so why shouldn’t a software be able to do that for me? It would not decrease user privacy by an inch.

More on the matter here: Flavio Rump on Scoble, and the video interview