Flavio about Business 2.0

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).

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]

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?

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.

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)