Flavio about Business 2.0

Disclaimer: This is a paid posting, powered by trigami.

After finally having received some invitations to blog for trigami, I decided to give it a try with a new Web 2.0 service. The product is called Netvoting and is basically a polling service, with widgets that you can implement in your blogs - a product that has been existing for years. What they added now is a social network layer to the voting, hoping this would create additional value and convince bloggers and other pollsters to use their service.

The registration proved difficult because gmail classified the confirmation email as spam and had to be found in the spam folder. And gmail normally has a very good spam recognition rate, so I wonder why it failed this time.

After having registered, the use of the platform is pretty straightforward. You create your poll by:

1. Entering the question
2. Entering the possible answers
3. Choosing some settings

and off you go!

I must say that the product is great when it comes to settings, it let’s you choose between fraud detection over cookies or cookies and IP and correctly warns you that if you use IP some people sitting behind the same NAT Router might not be able to vote correctly, so it suggests that you use cookies:

After creating your poll you can let people on netvoting vote and you should also be able to embed a widget using javascript, which did simply not work. I had to resort to the code for the working power widget of another blogger to make it work:

This Power Widget seems to be working fine and is definitely a handy way to include a poll into your blog. But the fact that I couldn’t make it work proves that quite a lot of work still needs to be done.Another feature that I really like about netvoting is its statistics visualization of demographics. Here’s a look:

Small but very interesting features are the following:

• rss feed of your voting in order to stay updated of the votes cast (for your netvibes page, for example).

• publish to mainstream blog hosters and also to major social networks including facebook and myspace with just one click

I took a look at the social networking functionality and it really is exactly the same as on every other social network: profile, friends, groups etc. And I frankly don’t see the connection between voting and social networking. On a social network, you might want do polling from time to time, but would you want to do social networking around polling?

Overall, the amount of features are great, I especially like the social network and rss integration. On the other hand, I see no need to create yet another social network around polling. And it is definitely not stable yet, as a couple of things didn’t work out properly. But if they can fix that, it is a useful quick poll creation service with extensive publishing functionality.

robwebb2k did a manual calculation of facebook penetration in different countries using the facebook flyer pro tool, which nicely indicates how many people you are reaching with certain demographic selection, like male/female - single/in a relationship or even favorite band or movie.

Here are the results:

As you can see, the penetration in Canada has reached an absolutely unbelievable 22%. More than every 5th Canadian is on Facebook - more than any political party for example has voters.

Extremely high penetration is also reached in Norway, where about 19% of the population is already on facebook.

If you look at other European numbers, Switzerland has a quite high penetration of 1.32 %, much higher than it’s neighbors France, Germany or Italy. Probably due to the internationality of our country.

How much longer until we reach 20% in Switzerland?

When are votes going to be cast over facebook or official government decisions broadcast? I bet you can reach more people than through traditional media.

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?

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)