3 posts tagged “facebook”
A friend (who I will be interested to see whether he actually reads this post) pointed out that Friendster is on the rise. I scoffed at the suggestion, since my impression of Friendster was a company that blazed a trail in social networking in more ways than one for contemporaries such as Facebook, in that they didn't know when to cash out in the face of untested revenue models (or the lack thereof). (The other reason I knew of Friendster was because of their adventures switching their site from JSP to PHP.) I decided to do a little bit of digging thanks to our friends at Alexa:
One of the more interesting things is that, once you drill down on the Friendster data, you discover that the majority of its traffic originates from outside of western countries. The top four comprises (in order): the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. The United States comes in at a distant fifth.
When it comes to determining a valuation of Friendster vs. Facebook, you could argue that per user, the potential revenue of their user bases will be vastly different: to put it bluntly, Facebook users by contrast are predominantly from developed western countries. On the other hand, Asia (at least east Asia) seems to have a better track record of accepting micropayments as a viable transaction model, and thus represents an alternative to the monetization via advertising that Facebook (currently) relies on.
I wonder how much of an element of vendor lock-in spurs these companies' growth; by definition it's the network effect by which Facebook and Friendster derive their value, so it's vital that you make your walled garden as attractive a place as you possibly can. Facebook is doing, in my opinion, the smarter thing and opening up an API that lets developers integrate new features into their site as a seamless experience -- in effect, leveraging the work of third parties for free to enhance the attractiveness of the platform. The analogy may stretch a little far, but it sounds a little like how a product called Windows came to predominance...
Proof that Facebook Gets It:
It's starting to look as though I need to eat my words about Facebook; they sound like they've got their act together, and maybe the marketplace thing will work (who's a reliable seller? someone in my network of course) but on the other hand they still look to me like an entity seeking to be bought rather than a viable, stand-alone, long-term-profitable business.
On a techy note, I see they use PHP on the backend. So much for the notion that PHP is dead and frameworks like RoR, Django and the myriad others that are built on scripting languages will take over the web universe. What's next? A framework written in Haskell/Scheme/Erlang? (Actually the latter sounds viable to me -- the web or at least the web that matters is all about scale, and Erlang is almost a synonym for scalability.)
A tip for how to feel young again: spend an hour or two (or more) aimlessly surfing on YouTube and Facebook. Anecodotal evidence suggests this is what all the high school and college kids are doing, and a good proportion of the twentysomethings (of which I am still (barely) a part -- yay).
These two sites are probably responsible (along with MySpace of course) for more wasted time than any phenomenon before them... Well I say wasted but at least Facebook seems to be yet another step in the evolution of social interaction -- you are never "alone", you are always in touch with friends even if keeping in touch is just scribbling some random one-liner on your friend's Facebook wall. It's post-IM (but maybe pre-Twitter).
I joined Facebook back when I first started at Microsoft; I put my profile up there, didn't put much effort into it, to be honest didn't have that many people to "Add to Friends" since I could only search through the Microsoft network... But just recently, for some reason, friends and colleagues have been popping out of the woodwork and doing the Facebook thing (or maybe it's only now that I'm noticing). Perhaps I've reached some kind of critical mass where I know sufficient people that network effects start kicking in. It's interesting to see who's connected to whom, and the mini-feed feature is kinda neat (even though when it first debuted people found it kinda creepy that you could see what your friends were doing online at Facebook).
I'm not sure Mark Zuckerberg was wise to knock back the however many millions he was offered for the company (is advertising their only revenue model?), but I have to admit it's one of the best social networking sites I've used. Yes, the garden is walled but the garden is not a bad place to be... It's also fast, sports an attractive interface (in contrast to MySpace whose design ethic if it exists is to encourage its users to make their homepages as garish as is possible), and the advertising is fairly unobtrusively placed (take note Windows Live Hotmail). Oh, and of course it's free.
And without further ado, I introduce you to the concept of Facebook stalking (thanks to Milly for the headsup):
