Facebook Tops 500 Million Users

Quote:Facebook, the social network created in the dormitories of Harvard six years ago, said on Wednesday that it now had 500 million members.

The company has grown at a meteoric pace, doubling in size from a year ago and pushing international competitors aside.

Each month, Facebook says, more than 30 billion photographs, links to Web sites and news articles are shared through the site, and its members spend roughly 700 billion minutes there.

“This is an important milestone for all of you who have helped spread Facebook around the world,” Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s 26-year-old chief executive, said in a company blog post.

Facebook’s dizzying rise has not been without stumbles. Most recently, the company was the focus of intense scrutiny over changes to its site that encouraged members to make more information about themselves accessible to anyone on the Internet.

A recent survey by the American Customer Satisfaction Index showed that user satisfaction with Facebook stood at 64 on a 100-point scale, which placed it in the bottom 5 percent of the companies covered in the index.

Facebook’s popularity has also spurred competition from the likes of Google, which views the billions of links and hours spent on the site each month as a threat to its business.

But if anything, the site’s steady growth in spite of its setbacks only validates the company’s approach, said Ray Valdes, an analyst at the research firm Gartner.

Facebook has been aggressive in pushing users “to the edge of their comfort zone,” Mr. Valdes said. “But Facebook has proven that it can weather those challenges and still grow.”

Mr. Valdes, who estimates that Facebook is adding 50 million new members each month, attributed the company’s rapid ascension to its continuous effort to change and improve the service.

“That keeps it bubbling away,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/22/techno...TVUDDqjCLQ

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Interesting article by Mike Elgan (you may remember his article I posted about google) about his take on why facebook is 'doomed'.

I have actually seen some of this ... a few members of my church youth group (I'm actively involved in youth work) have quit facebook, some have come back... but it's mostly the things he's talking about here.

So, even if he's not exactly right, there's definitely some truth to what he's saying:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9...book_grief Wrote:Opinion

The five stages of Facebook grief
The world's largest social network is about to hit 500 million. But users are losing interest. Here's why.
By Mike Elgan

July 17, 2010 06:00 AM ET

Computerworld - Facebook has a huge problem. No, it's not privacy, security, application spam or even horrible P.R. from the upcoming movie, "The Social Network." These are short-term annoyances for the company, but not existential threats.

Here's the real problem: Facebook's social network can't mirror the actual social networks, or social groups, that people have. Because of that, users are beginning to notice a curious effect: The more you use Facebook, the less usable it becomes.

It turns out that our feelings about Facebook aren't static. They're evolving in a way that will eventually lead many of us to quit and find something else -- or at least minimize use.

Facebook is structured on the false assumption that you have one social network. But nobody has one social group.

A nine-year-old has at least two -- parents and peers. A teenager has at least three -- add "trusted close friends." And a middle-aged adult has many: Former school-mates, former colleagues (each company is a separate peer group), non-nuclear family, nuclear family, current co-workers, close friends, etc.

While it's true that you belong to all your social groups, you're the only person in the world who does. Each other member of any group does not belong to your other groups. Sooner or later, your social groups are going to clash and you're going to get burned.

Here are three real-life examples (Names have been changed to protect the guilty):

• Maria's son posts a status update: "Having a great time at the beach with the parents!" Maria's boss posts a comment: "Didn't you call in sick?"

• Bill posts 30 pictures from college, and tags friends in the photos. One of those friends is Steve, who is shown drunk and vomiting in the picture that shows up on Steve's "Photos" page. Mom, dad and grandma all acquire a new perspective on the financial help they gave Steve for college.

• Janet, a high school senior, posts a generic comment about her mood, saying "feeling bla today." Then Margaret, a close family friend in the same age group as Janet's parents, comments, "what's wrong, honey?" After that, several of Janet's high school friends post a series of profane, obscene or objectionable comments that humorously suggest causes or cures. Because Margaret commented, all subsequent comments flow into Margaret's Facebook News Feed.

These cases all illustrate the clash of social groups, where a member of one social group gains unnatural access to the conversation of another.

One of the most common clashes of social groups happens when the parents of young people sign up for Facebook, so common that there's a blog devoted to the catastrophe.

There are 2 more pages to the article... very interesting reading.

I don't know about Facebook's long term future, but from my point of view it's not something I use all that often.

It's useful to see what people I know in other countries are up to. But, a lot of the 'conversation' is just mundane everyday stuff.

I use it all the time, but I don't often look at everyone's status updates or posts.

Mostly, I'm addicted to mousehunt, but I also play LevynLight and GhostTrappers

I already quit.

As the article above pointed out, you wind up knowing more than you want to know about people. I'd rather just take my associates at face value than realize that when they say they have no time, what they really mean is that they are too busy playing some mindless virtual life game or catching up with 259 'friends' lipstick color of the day.

But I think the thing that effected my decision the most was to realize that 'social' networks interfere with real human interaction. In real life, what you might share with one person you wouldn't repeat to anyone else. Or you might talk about something among a small group of close friends but wouldn't discuss it with a wider circle of family, friends, workmates and a lot of people you barely know. So.... you write on Facebook walls all day... but really say nothing of more importance than superficial daily activities.

The things of the heart are not discussed. Deep spiritual exchanges go by the wayside. Hugs and embraces that you'd share in person become mere words. Tears and giggles that would have created lasting memories become cyber script on a screen.

And the real danger lies in the fact that because you've been 'in touch' all day, you don't even notice that your human interactions are becoming progressively more and more shallow.

People isolated in little rooms in front of little screens typing little words that have little meaning.

And that's enough of Tula's opinion tonight.

I agree with much of what you say, Tula. We are becoming more isolated from reality because so many, especially the young, no longer 'talk' to one another. They text, and email, and interact through technology, rather than the spoken word.

AND, from those 500 million + users, comes plentiful marketing data. Just came across this article -

http://industry.bnet.com/technology/1000...-pad;today

Quote:Facebook Turns "Like" Button Into Two-Way Street, Challenging Amazon for Buyer Data

Facebook has just announced that it will allow publishers to contact users who have “liked” a page by inserting things into that user’s News Feed. The new feature may annoy users, and that may be the idea. By providing an incentive to use their “likes” wisely, Facebook will help turn the Like button — once a relatively blunt instrument — into a much more refined tool.

The Like button has a very specific purpose, but until now, it wasn’t very good at its job. Like Amazon’s (AMZN) huge catalog of past purchases, or Mint’s (INTU) new “saving” features, Facebook’s Like button is an experiment in purchase data: it’s meant to figure out what you, the user, would like to buy. But unlike Amazon’s data, which is based on actual things you bought, or Mint’s system, which asks you what you’d like to save up for, the data Facebook’s Like button collected was susceptible to all kinds of inaccuracies.

As Ad Age wrote in May:

[The Like button] is tough to choke down even for a data junkie at his weakest. If you show me a cheeseburger and ask me if I “like” it, at any given time of day, you are likely to get a different answer each time. Even when I like something, I may not feel compelled to click “like” unless, of course, there was some benefit to me.

As I argued at the time that the Like button would be susceptible to false “likes,” clicked out of boredom, or out of profligacy, or simply because someone set up an SEO-style system that encouraged people to “like” something for some kind of reward.

But making the Like button into a two-way street means that there are consequences to hitting every Like button in sight. It will turn the News Feed into a kind of inbox where publishers whose stuff you’ve liked can now try to push more of their wares in front of your eyeballs. (If you “liked” a product on the Sears (SHLD) site, for example, Sears could stick ads for more products into your Facebook News Feed.)

This disincentive may help insulate against illegitimate likes. But Facebook isn’t stopping there: it’s also providing tools to help add qualitative information to the button. The company has also built out the ability for the Like button to take comments and publish them in friends’ News Feeds, and has also improved analytics on the button. As the Facebook developer site says:

Now, when a user adds a comment to the iFrame version of the Like button, a larger, more prominent story will be shared with the user’s friends. In the past, we’ve seen comments result in increased distribution and referral traffic.

Even with these refinements, we’ve only begun to see the potential of the Like button.

Inaccurate or not, no doubt "unlike" produces the same marketing / app appeal.

~ Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can - there will always come a time when you will be grateful you did.
- Sarah Caldwell
Play The Game and you are guaranteed to win. JOIN ME!