Burger King has introduced a new Facebook application that is getting lots of attention – “Whopper Sacrifice.” The concept is essentially this: delete 10 of your Facebook friends and get a free Whopper. Each time you remove someone, that action is broadcast to your news feed – apparently, not a big deal to users so far, as more than 50,000 friends have already been sacrificed.
While Burger King’s effort is mostly about quick hit marketing and getting some press (result: success!), they might actually be onto something. As our networks on social networking sites grow and grow with people we barely know, the value of them deteriorates – to the point that removing 10 “friends” for a free sandwich actually seems like a reasonable proposition.
Facebook is evolving its product to deal with this issue – the ability to group your friends and then filter the News Feed to see updates from only certain people helps a lot. But it’s not nearly robust enough – for instance, you still can’t filter status updates by group. Meanwhile, Twitter offers no such filtering, instead yielding the demand for more custom microblogging to a variety of startups.
I like following a lot of people on social sites – it gives me a good idea of what people are talking about and creates an opportunity to engage in more conversations. But frankly, when you’re following hundreds if not thousands, a lot of those people become more or less interchangeable, especially when there are no good options to filter the noise.
I’d trade 10 Facebook friends for a Whopper. What about you?
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Ever tried out Facebook Lexicon? It’s a nifty tool that looks for occurrences of certain terms on Facebook users’ walls and creates a graph that shows how often is the term mentioned over time.
The Lexicon has been around for quite a while now, but while playing with it today I noticed an interesting occurence, which you can see in the image below. Terms like “happy birthday,” obviously, are mentioned pretty much all the time, while “Obama” has had a huge spike during the presidential elections and the subsequent victory of Barack Obama.
However, the term “sex” has an unexplainable spike on Friday, May 30th of 2008. Perhaps it’s just a glitch, or maybe I’m missing something obvious, but I can’t for the life of me remember why would people mention this word more on that particular day than any other day.
Any ideas that can solve the mistery?
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Back in August 2008, Mark Zuckerberg posted on the official Facebook blog that Facebook had reached 100 million users. Now, only 4 months later, this number has grown 50%: Facebook now has 150 million users.
And, these are active users we’re talking about. How they determine this number at Facebook is unknown to me, but it probably means that users who’ve just created an account which sits idle for a long period of time aren’t included. This is huge; Facebook is growing incredibly fast, and at this pace it will will reach 300 million users by the end of 2009.
Also worth noting: Facebook was once a US-only service, but now it has users from over 170 countries. I can personally attest to Facebook’s growth in Croatia, where recent numbers suggest a growth of 100% over the last six months of 2008, with over 400,000 users. If this example is any indication, Facebook has no problems expanding internationally, in fact, it might even be growing faster than in the US.
Besides the obvious benefits of such growth, which include catching up with MySpace and increasing advertising profits, Facebook will also have to deal with scaling problems; some of their features (Chat and Live Feed, for example) simply aren’t working very well, and users are beginning to notice.
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Today’s MacWorld keynote by Phil Schiller introduced massive improvements to the iLife suite of products. In iLife ‘09, iPhoto, iMovie, and Garage Band are all getting performance and functionality makeovers.
Perhaps, most notably, is the introduction of built-in support for online services Facebook and Flickr in iPhoto ‘09. We think the annoucement pretty much trumps yesterday’s release of Picasa for Mac.
The Facebook and Flickr integration is an exciting new addition to the product that will make iPhoto the dynamic photo sharing application it should be. Now, users who upgrade can automatically send their photos to Facebook and Flickr within iPhoto. As soon as you post new photos of friends to Facebook, notifications are also immediately sent to your tagged friends.
With Flickr, when you share your new photos, locations are shown on Flickr photo maps. Given that the new iPhoto also has three additional much needed features - Face Detection, Face Recognition, and Places - tagging faces, names, and places in iPhoto for online sharing turns into an almost completely automated process.
iPhoto ‘09 also adds new slideshow themes, smart albums, the ability to auto-create titles, transitions, and credits, and even a Places feature for animated travel maps that uses GPS geotagging. Given that iLife comes standard on all new Macs and is just $79 to upgrade ($169 if you upgrade both iLife and iWork), we think you might want to place your order now, despite the fact that it won’t ship until later this month.
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Hitwise, a data analytics and research company, today released a report that indicated a big spike in Facebook traffic on Christmas Eve. The research firm says that Facebook hit a new high, with traffic “reaching 2.18% of all U.S. Internet visits compared with 1.42% average for November.”
That’s up 54 percent from November 2008 and 53 percent from December 24, 2007, when it set its last new record. The Santa bump put Facebook fifth among all web sites. In the UK, social networking sites and YouTube accounted for 10 percent of total Internet traffic. There could be many reasons for the bump, such as people using social networks to send personal messages instead of sending emails (I got far fewer emails this year that in the past) and sharing photographs via Facebook, for example. Of course, with fewer gifts (and toys), people might have just spent an inordinate amount of time on Facebook. However, let’s not forget — there was terrible weather around the country and people didn’t have anywhere to go, except to hit the computer.
According to Hitwise Demographics, the top cities (based on DMA or Designated Marketed Areas ) on Facebook are New York, Chicago, Washington, Boston and Philadelphia. These cities were all hard hit by the snow storms last week and the poor weather may have kept people inside with little else to do but send holiday greetings to friends.
This last bit actually could indicate a long-term trend, as we the people might go through 2009 (which is already shaping up to be on miserable year) as the great depressed.
If you remember, the last downturn (2001) helped Google establish its contextual advertising business, which is now like a Middle Eastern oil gusher that keeps spewing cash. It was able to do so because everyone wanted to focus their ad dollars online in a specific sort of a way.
From that perspective, Facebook (or any other social network) could have a lot of our attention, because, well, we don’t have that much to do offline. With far fewer dollars to fritter away on offline socializing (or shopping), there is a good chance we would spend a lot of time in front of the computer, socializing online. Is it too far-fetched to think that this downturn might actually play to Facebook’s advantage?
Startups associated with social gaming were all the funding rage in 2008. (Think SGN’s $15 million last May, for example, or the $17 million that went to Playfish in October.) And though executives with casual game startups recently told me they’re confident they’ll survive this recession, the challenges and opportunities for social games, which still primarily exist on major social networks, are considerably different. So what about the coming year worries and excites top execs in the social gaming space most?
First, the challenges: Many of the execs I contacted brought up the unpredictability of social games. For example, Charles Edward Hudson III, V-P of business development for Serious Business, noted that the majority of startups in the space are still at the mercy of the top social networks, which have a habit of suddenly changing their policies — to the detriment of third-party applications such as social games.
There’s unpredictability in competition, too. Hudson pointed out that most social network-based games are easy to produce, so established developers often find themselves competing with quickie knock-off versions of their IP. Kristian Segerstrale, CEO and co-founder of Playfish, was also concerned with how dubious fly-by-night social games might hurt the genre as a whole. “Poor quality user experiences or misleading monetization mechanisms like some of the aggressive CPA practices we’ve seen in 2008 could jeopardize the perception of social games and our growth potential as an industry,” he wrote me.
In some cases, uncertainty and opportunity are two sides of the same coin. The largest social games have millions of players, for example, but that’s still a fraction of the total user base of social networks. Mark Pincus, founder and CEO of Zynga, notes that social networks went mass market in 2008. “The biggest challenge for social gaming in the year ahead,” he told me, “will be to become useful and fun to non-gamers and to reach the mass market who have yet to embrace web gaming.”
And there will be plenty of opportunity. “We’ve seen the tip of the iceberg with Spore,” Serious Business’ Hudson told me. He was impressed by the cross-platform features of that Electronic Arts title, predicting, “[W]e’ll see more as things like Google FriendConnect and Facebook Connect are made available to game developers.” Shervin Pishevar, CEO of Social Gaming Network, described the social gaming space as a three-point axis of mobile, social networks and the wider web; the goal for social game developers, he told me, should be “unifying the user experience across these three axis at scale” so their products are seamlessly and consistently enjoyable from whatever platform they’re played. If they’re successful in this, the audience for social games will expand proportionately.
Serious Business’ Hudson foresees improvements in the way social game companies market for-fee services in the coming year, and with them, increased revenue. Playfish’s Segerstrale thinks the recession will boost the space’s prominence, arguing that unlike the traditional gaming industry, which still charges $60 a game, social games are generally free to play, with optional payment systems. “This will be a compelling proposition when there is a squeeze on overall consumer spending,” he said.
And Nabeel Hyatt, founder of Conduit Labs, thinks social gaming will not only be profitable, but culturally transformative: “What started as simply another name for ‘Facebook Games’ will, if we are lucky, evolve to mean games which provide social value.”
Image credit: www.playfish.com
There are a lot of reasons that social networks experience a bump in traffic during the holidays. For one, lots of people are off from work or school. Moreover, there simply isn’t that much else going on – a slowdown in email and news means more time to loiter around your favorite online hangouts.
This year has been no exception, as Hitwise breaks down the numbers. According to the analytics firm, Facebook saw record traffic this Christmas, with 1 in every 22 websites visited in the UK going to the social network. Overall, that made the site the second most popular online destination in the UK during the holiday, behind only Google.
Not surprisingly, watching videos also seems to have a strong correlation with having nothing better to do. YouTube was the 3rd most popular site in the UK for Christmas week, beating out Windows Live Hotmail. In all, Hitwise says that social networks accounted for 10% of web traffic during the period.
Thus, expect to see a big jump in growth when the numbers for top social networking sites are released next month. We’ll also likely see the ever-narrowing gap between Facebook and MySpace close even further in the US, as Facebook’s college-heavy audience enjoys more leisure time in front of their computers.
Meanwhile, if you’re lucky enough to still be on holiday, perhaps step away from the Web for a moment. Or, don’t 
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, liliboas
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It’s that time: predictions for the year ahead and a look back at how we did in the year past.
Several of last year’s predictions proved highly accurate, as many of the topics we devote attention to – social networking, startups, and increasingly mobile apps – evolved according to plan. Looking ahead, we think next year is going to be defined largely by how companies and the entrepreneurs and developers behind them adjust to the more macro issues facing all of us, most notably the economy. Our forecast is largely based on this premise.
Below, a report card and continued outlook for last year’s predictions, as well as a fresh batch of prognostications for the New Year.
2008 Predictions: How’d We Do?
The Good
Hulu Gets Popular: The site most people initially wanted to hate has done well for itself, becoming the 6th most popular video destination in the US this year.
’09 Outlook: There’s no reason to think Hulu’s growth will slow down as NBC and News Corp are likely to continue to put more content online, as well as work to open up the gates to international viewers (their CEO says as much in an interview today with MediaPost)
Mobile Social Networking Takes Off … Sort Of: Indeed, it was a very big year for mobile, fueled by the launch of the iPhone 3G and the App Store. Facebook recently noted that their number of active mobile users has grown from 5 to 15 million this year.
’09 Outlook: As more consumers switch to iPhone, more handsets launch with Android, and Blackberry launches an app store of its own, the growth of mobile apps will continue. For entrepreneurs and developers, it’s perhaps the biggest opportunity since broadband.
Blogs Become Hot Acquisition Targets: It was a good year for a few blogs on the acquisition front. Most notably, Ars Technica got scooped up by Conde Nast, while PaidContent was sold to The Guardian. Several others major blogs, like The Huffington Post, raised big rounds of venture capital instead.
’09 Outlook: Old media still needs significant changes to its business models; blogs could be stretched by the economy and slumping ad sales. These two forces should lead to more deals this year.
Facebook Truly Goes Mainstream: Facebook grew rapidly in ’08, passing MySpace worldwide in terms of traffic and set to eclipse it in the US early next year. It’s also won the battle for mindshare, stealing the title of “it” social network in popular culture.
’09 Outlook: It’s hard to see any significant threats to Facebook’s growth on the horizon, although, that’s what most people said about MySpace just a couple years ago. Personally, I see Facebook continuing to grow big in ’09, far surpassing all competitors by year’s end.
Startup Consolidation: Last year, I wrote that “there are too many companies chasing too many of the same ideas.” That certainly proved to be the case, as numerous startups either folded or combined with others. For example: Six Apart and Pownce, Live Universe and PageFlakes + Revver, Buzznet and Qloud, Automattic and PollDaddy + IntenseDebate, and many others.
’09 Outlook: This trend will only accelerate next year as startups fail to raise more venture capital and are forced to either fold or combine forces with someone else.
Email Doesn’t Die: As ’08 draws to a close, my inbox has nearly 17,000 unread emails. Enough said.
’09 Outlook: Email will only get more relevant as Google and Yahoo push the concept of email as an application platform.
The Bad
Microsoft Finally Buys Yahoo: Too bad I didn’t phrase this one slightly differently. Microsoft certainly tried its best to acquire Yahoo, and the story dominated the headlines for the early part of this year. But Yahoo refused, saw its stock fall to historic lows, and CEO Jerry Yang resigned.
’09 Outlook: Steve Ballmer has said he’s no longer interested in Yahoo, but, given the slowdown in ad spending, Yahoo could get desperate and become too cheap for Microsoft to pass up. I’ll give it a 30/70 shot of happening next year.
News Corp Monetizes MySpace … By Selling It: This one wasn’t actually that far off – in the midst of the Microsoft-Yahoo deal falling apart, rumor had it that News Corp was putting together a bid that involved swapping MySpace for part ownership of Yahoo. But, it didn’t happen.
’09 Outlook: Like most media companies, the value of News Corp has taken a sharp hit this year, in-step with the overall economy. I’d expect them to hold tight and continue to expand MySpace internationally, on mobile handsets, and across the Web through MySpaceID.
The Ugly
Gmail Removes Beta Status: Nope.
’09 Outlook: Much like the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button on Google’s homepage, I’m pretty sure the “Beta” tag on Gmail is here to stay, mainly for nostalgia.
LinkedIn Files to Go Public, Then Withdraws, Then Changes Business Model: LinkedIn stayed the course in ’08, raised a lot of venture capital, and by most accounts, continued to grow nicely.
’09 Outlook: There is absolutely no market for IPOs right now, so I’d expect LinkedIn to remain a private company. As users scramble to find jobs and opportunities in a bad economy, the site could actually have a great year.
2009 Predictions: What’s Next?
Facebook and MySpace Become Aggressive Acquirers: As startup consolidation continues, look for the two biggest social networks to become aggressive acquirers. The reason? Both have ambitions as not only media companies (side bet: look for Facebook to buy or take a stake in a big music app), but as identity providers. One sure-fire way to gain market share as an identity provider is to buy up popular but profitless sites and make their own identity system the standard. This is exactly what Google and Yahoo have done with properties they’ve acquired through the years (see: Flickr, Del.icio.us, Blogger, FeedBurner, etc.).
The eBay Break-Up: eBay has essentially become the Internet’s biggest holding company. As the owner of several businesses that don’t really fit together and facing a decline in popularity for its original auction service, the time has come for eBay to dismantle into several leaner, more tightly focused companies. Skype and PayPal are both still growing nicely – look for at least one of them to be sold or spun-off in 2009, with Google and/or Amazon as likely buyers.
A Big Year for Amazon: This past weekend’s Wall Street Journal noted how dire things are about to get for brick and mortar stores, with massive closings expected across the board. Who is that good for? Amazon, who already reported that its holiday sales were actually up this year. Amazon’s developing data business could also see gains as more Web companies look to trim infrastructure costs.
Google Chrome Gains Meaningful Market Share: One of the few products that launched this year that I actively evangelize with everyone that asks me about it is Google Chrome. For most people, it’s simply a faster and better browsing experience than IE or Firefox offers. Already out of beta, expect Google to market Chrome aggressively, signing distribution deals with PC manufacturers, bundling it with other software, and devoting unsold ad inventory to the browser.
At Least One Big Newspaper Goes All Digital: The Christian Science Monitor already did it, and I expect more to follow in 2009. More specifically, I expect at least one large daily newspaper in the US to announce plans to eliminate a print edition. No more trucks and no more dead trees. And, while it might not happen until 2010, I expect them to have great success with it.
Comments Become the New Blogs: People are commenting everywhere, whether it’s on Twitter, Friendfeed, or actual news sites and blogs. A new platform will emerge where users can truly take ownership of their comments in a blog-like format. We’re already starting to see this with Disqus, and Movable Type’s announced Motion product might go in this direction too. This will become a popular alternative to the traditional personal homepage or blog, because it’s so much easier to update.
Startup Incubators Flourish: Venture capital might be dead for the time being, but the biggest opportunities right now, as I see it, are concepts that require very little up-front investment. Red hot areas like mobile applications, services that leverage data portability, and micropublishing are all low-cost businesses to enter. With investors shying away from big bets and re-upping in bloated, unprofitable startups, look for many more funds of the YCombinator and TechStars ilk to emerge.
Twitter Doesn’t Go Mainstream: Twitter will keep growing, but I don’t see it going “mainstream” as us bloggers like to say. I see it evolving much more like personal blogging: it will keep growing, but eventually it will hit a plateau. Ask people outside of your work life about Twitter and the response will likely be “why would anyone care what I’m doing or thinking?” Sure, they’ll passively consume Tweets as the service continues to be integrated into media, but the number of active Twitter users will not come close to matching what you see on Facebook or MySpace. The value proposition simply isn’t as strong.
How’d We Do?
It’s nice to see so many of our stories from 2008 ended up intersecting with the various predictions we made at the end of last year. What do you think of our forecast for ’09? For that matter, what subjects would you like to see us devote more or less time to on Mashable? Let us know what you think of all of the above in the comments.
We look forward to bringing you continuous coverage of our ever-changing social media landscape in 2009.
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This past weekend, we had yet another tempest in a teapot here in the blogosphere, this time over what, exactly, determines the authority of a tweet on Twitter. Some argued that the number of followers is the best yardstick with which to measure how important a tweet was, while others argued that it is who you follow that’s more valuable.
The high drama made me wonder: Why can’t a tweet just be a tweet? Why does it have to be about authority? (I assume authority means “power to influence or command thought, opinion or behavior.“) Nevertheless the discussion reminded me of a recent conversation I had with Bernardo Huberman, director of HP’s Social Computing Lab. He (along with Daniel M. Romero and Fang Wu) recently collected and analyzed information from the Twitter network to find out which people truly matter in an individual’s social graph – and what ultimately influences a person’s ability to absorb content.
For each user of Twitter in our data set we obtained the number of followers and followees (people followed by a user) the user has declared, along with the content and date stamp of all his posts. Our data set consisted of a total of 309,740 users, who on average posted 255 posts, had 85 followers, and followed 80 other users. Among the 309,740 users only 211,024 posted at least twice. We call them the active users. We also define the active time of an active user by the time that has elapsed between his first and last post. On average, active users were active for 206 days.
Huberman explained that in these time-constrained modern times, our relationships can be measured by the attention we accord to people. We do so by interacting with them — whether by making phone calls, meeting them for coffee, writing on their Facebook wall or in the case of Twitter, sending either direct or indirect replies. Interactions define the social relationship.
On Twitter, he found that regardless of the number of followers or followees, there were very few friends in a personal Twitter circle. He used a very weak definition of “friend” — anyone to whom a user has directed a post at least twice. And because of that, Huberman says that in order to “influence a person’s absorption of content, there is a need to find the hidden social network; the one that matters when trying to rely on word of mouth to spread an idea, a belief, or a trend.”
Huberman’s study found that:
- Users with a large number of followers are not necessarily those with very large number of total posts.
- Even though the number of friends initially increases as the number of followees increases, after a while the number of friends starts to saturate and stays nearly constant.
- The number of people a user actually communicates with eventually stops increasing while the number of followees can continue to grow indefinitely.
A group of moms staged a protest outside Facebook’s Palo Alto offices yesterday over the site’s policy to remove photos of bare breasts. While Facebook’s policy is to remove photos where the nipple or areola is visible, attendees of the MILC (Mothers International Lactation Campaign) “nurse in” want an exception for breastfeeding moms.
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The Facebook group “Hey, Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!(Official petition to Facebook)” is a hub for the breastfeeding pic proponents - established last year, it now has over 72,000 members. Some joined Saturday’s protest virtually by switching their Facebook profile pictures to images of breastfeeding.
Heather Farley, organizer of the “nurse-in” outside Facebook’s offices, challenged the social network to change its policy in an open letter to the company this weekend:
Dear Facebook,
My name is Heather Farley and I am coordinating the nurse-in that will occur this Saturday. I have been using Facebook since February 2005 when Facebook was very small and young. I really enjoy using Facebook and being able to connect with friends and family easily. I think this service that Facebook has offered millions of Internet users is invaluable. However, I am upset about Facebook’s recent actions.
I wanted to outline the reasoning and purpose of the nurse-in. As you know, the group, “Hey Facebook, Breastfeeding isn’t obscene (Official Petition to Facebook)” is where this event was organized. Perhaps it seems strange to you that such a “small” issue might have so much attention. I wanted to highlight the impact that the removal of breastfeeding pictures has.
On one hand, it is a public health issue. For many years, the World Health Organization has emphasized the need for mothers to breastfeed and has set minimum standards that many countries, including the United States, still have yet to meet. They have set these standards to help prevent the significant number of deaths of infants in our world. By removing pictures of breastfeeding, the message is sent that it is something shameful, something that should be hidden and not seen. This can undermine the confidence and desire of future mothers to breastfeed their children, to the detriment of their children’s health.
On the other hand, it is an issue of discrimination against breastfeeding mothers. Like issues such as pregnancy, breastfeeding discrimination is a gender issue. When pictures are removed of breastfeeding and not of artificial feeding, breastfeeding mothers are being discriminated against and a wrongful double standard is set. After all, a bottle is simply a plastic, prosthetic disembodied breast in size, form, and function. Additionally, many groups such as the Ontario Human Rights Commission have stated that breastfeeding right issues are human rights issues and that discrimination against a breastfeeding mother is discrimination of her rights.
It is also a public relations and customer service issue. There are more than 60,000 people in the group, “Hey Facebook…” The statements that Facebook does not plan on considering changing the policies about breastfeeding images gives the impression that the opinion of those 60,000 Facebook users is unimportant and inconsequential. However, 60,000 people are not inconsequential and Facebook’s reply of no action may in the future result in the loss of Facebook users and customers.
I do understand that Facebook needs to prevent and eliminate pornography on the site. It might not appear possible to have a user agreement that disallows sexually explicit pictures while allowing pictures of mothers breastfeeding. I want to suggest that this is possible- and such a user agreement is my goal in this nurse-in. I would like Facebook to change their policy to something resembling, “photos containing nudity, drug use, or other obscene content are not allowed, except in the case of a mother nursing a child.” If Facebook added such a clause, pornographic and sexually explicit images could be removed without discrimination occurring towards mothers and babies.
I hope that Facebook will reconsider their position and listen to this group of 60,000, for the benefit of babies and for the rights of mothers.
Should Facebook change its terms of use? Or are these moms crying “censorship” unnecessarily?
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