Asia Continues to be Facebook's Strongest Growth Region

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 0

With Facebook topping 330 million active users over the past week, the company's strongest growth region continues to be Asia. Over the last 12 weeks, Facebook added close to 17M active users in Asia alone. Since my previous post, the share of active users from Asia grew by 2% (to 13.5% of all users), and roughly 1 in 7 users now come from the region. With a market penetration under 2%, Facebook is poised to add many more users in Asia (and Africa).

Compared to the U.S., the proportion of Facebook users in their teens (13-17) or in the 18-25 age group are much higher in Asia:

As was the case in other parts of the world, expect the share of users 45 and older to climb as Facebook becomes more mainstream in Asia. Growth was strong across all age groups in Asia over the last 12 weeks, particularly among teens (+90%) and the 18-25 age group (+60%).

In other regions, notably North America, Europe, the Middle East, and South America, growth in the 18-25 age bracket, lagged behind users 45 and older.

In closing I want to highlight countries (within several regions) where Facebook has been growing rapidly:

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What Does Innovative Social Engagement Look Like For Businesses and Governments?

by Mark Drapeau | @cheeky_geeky | comments: 26

I've been thinking about the topic of Government 2.0 a lot lately. Part of this topic deals with the multi-directional engagement between government and citizens. This is what the White House and others have termed a more transparent, collaborative, and participatory government.

Unfortunately, the engagement for the most part is not very authentic nor meaningful. Boring "fan pages" on Facebook are one example I've written about, but there are many others. Often, engagement, when it does happen has so many rules associated with it, or such a high barrier to entry, or such a limited window as to be practically meaningless.

It seems to me that everyone can celebrate the fact that government entities merely have a YouTube channel here, a Twitter account there, or a Blogger profile some other place (the so-called "TGIF revolution"), or we can think a little harder about what the goals of citizen engagement really might be, and how to go about achieving them. But first, a personal example of responsiveness and engagement from the private sector.

On the evening of Nov 2nd, I tweeted from my phone about a local DC restaurant, Co Co Sala, just as I was leaving. We had a nice experience, but the hostess had been a little, shall we say, disinterested in helping us? So I commented as much.

Less than a week later, the co-owner of Co Co Sala sent me an email and cc'd his general manager. He apologized for the treatment I experienced, assured me it was not policy, introduced me to the manager, and said he'd talk to his staff. It was a four-paragraph email. I've never met him before, and furthermore, my personal email is discoverable but not the most easy thing to find.

This is what real social innovation looks like. This is what customer service looks like. This is what true engagement with stakeholders looks like. I want to give this great lounge Co Co Sala a hearty shout-out for not only having a great product, but also really caring about their customers.

Now, imagine we weren't talking about a restaurant here. Imagine we are talking about the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the Patent and Trademark Office, or your Congressman. If you tweeted, would they see it? Would they care? Would they react in any way? I think the answer in many cases is no. And when was the last time you gave the DMV a shout-out for a job well done?

Let's look at a sliver of data. According to TweetStats.com, the people behind the White House Twitter account reply to individuals less than 2% of the time, and seem to have never @ replied to any single more than once (i.e., they have never come close to a conversation). They re-tweet others' tweets about 6.5% of the time, but they only seem to re-tweet other government accounts and the New York Times. Granted, there are more people tweeting about White House issues than Co Co Sala, but does the above data represent any caring in any way, shape or form?

The terrific techPresident blog recently noted that actor Vin Diesel is the single most followed living person on Facebook - and that he recently passed up President Obama. Perhaps that's because Vin Diesel's Facebook fan page is awesome. He is engaged, his fans are engaged, and the tone is informal and fun. There are also many other high-profile people who have taken the plunge into innovative social engagement; my favorite at the moment is Alyssa Milano.

So when exactly did "serious and formal" become a substitute for "informative and meaningful" in government circles? And why is everyone scared of letting their guard down in public? People and entities that innovate and use new social networking tools to engage with stakeholders will be winners. The ones that don't will be losers in the long run. It's that simple.

If a goal of Government 2.0 is to provide citizens better services, and a strategy towards reaching that goal is to use social media tools to communicate better with citizens on multiple channels, it seems to me that listening and responding better to comments and complaints would be a great tactic.

The reason why people still cite the TSA's blog as a good example of citizen engagement is because few other outstanding examples of federal government social media engagement seem to have emerged in 2009. What does 2010 have in store?

It is somewhat outside the scope of this post, but my guess is that more and more local government responsiveness and engagement is happening. We heard some of those stories at the Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase in September. What are some new ones that the feds should hear about?

The War For the Web

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 61

On Friday, my latest tweet was automatically posted to my Facebook news feed, as always. But this time, Tom Scoville noticed a difference: the link in the posting was no longer active.

It turns out that a lot of other people had noticed this too. Mashable wrote about the problem on Saturday morning: Facebook Unlinks Your Twitter Links.

if you’re posting web links (Bit.ly, TinyURL) to your Twitter feed and using the Twitter Facebook app to share those updates on Facebook too, none of those links are hyperlinked. Your friends will need to copy and paste the links into a browser to make them work.

If this is a design decision on Facebook’s part, it’s an extremely odd one: we’d like to think it’s an inconvenient bug, and we have a mail in to Facebook to check. Suffice to say, the issue is site-wide: it’s not just you.

As it turns out, it wasn't just links imported from Twitter. All outbound links were temporarily disabled, unless users explicitly added them as links via an "attach" dialogue. I went to Facebook, and tried posting a link to this blog directly in my status feed, and saw the same behavior: links were no longer automatically made clickable. You can see that in the image that is the destination of the first link in this piece.

The problem was quickly fixed, with URLs in status updates automatically now linkified again. The consensus was that it was in fact a bug, but it's little surprise that people suspected otherwise, given the increasing amount of effort Facebook puts into warning people that they are leaving Facebook for the big bad unsafe Internet:

All of this is well-intentioned, I'm sure. After all, Facebook is attempting to put in place privacy controls that allow its users to manage the visibility of their information -- and the Web's expectation of universal visibility is not necessarily the best default for much of the information posted on Facebook. But let's not kid ourselves: Facebook is a new kind of web site (or an old kind redux), a world of its own, playing by different rules.

But this isn't just about Facebook.

The Apple iPhone is the hottest web access device around, and like Facebook, while it connects to the web, it plays by a different set of rules. Anyone can put up a website, or launch a new Windows or Mac OS X or Linux application, without anyone's permission. But put an app onto the iPhone? That requires Apple's blessing.

There is one glaring loophole: anyone can create a web application, which any user can save as clickable application on their phone. But these web applications have limits - there are key capabilities of the phone that are not accessible to web applications. HTML 5 can introduce all the new application-like features it wants, but they will work only for web applications, and can't access key aspects of the phone with Apple's permission. And as we saw earlier this year with Apple's rejection of the Google Voice application, Apple isn't shy about blocking applications that it considers threatening to their core business, or that of their partners.

And now, of course, we see the latest salvo in the war against the accepted rules of interoperability on the web: Rupert Murdoch's threat to take the Wall Street Journal out of the Google search index. While most people have repeated the existing wisdom that to do so would be suicide for the Journal, a few contrarian observers have noted the leverage Murdoch holds. Mark Cuban argues that Twitter now trumps search engines when it comes to breaking news. Even more provocatively, Jason Calacanis suggested, a few weeks before Murdoch's announcement, that all big media companies need to do to cut Google off at the knees would be to block Google, while cutting an exclusive deal with Bing to be found only in Microsoft's search index.

Of course, Google wouldn't take that lying down, and would likely make its own exclusive deals, leading to a showdown that would make the browser wars of the 90s seem tame.

I'm not saying that News Corp and other mainstream media publications would adopt Jason's suggested strategy, or that it would work if they did, but it is becoming clear to me that we are heading into a bloody period of competition that could be extremely unfriendly to the interoperable web as we know it today.

If you've followed my thinking about Web 2.0 from the beginning, you know that I believe we are engaged in a long term project to build an internet operating system. (Check out the program for the first O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in 2002 (pdf).) In my talks over the years, I've argued that there are two models of operating system, which I have characterized as "One Ring to Rule Them All" and "Small Pieces Loosely Joined," with the latter represented by a routing map of the Internet.

The first is the winner-takes-all world that we saw with Microsoft Windows on the PC, a world that promises simplicity and ease of use, but ends up diminishing user and developer choice as the operating system provider.

The second is an operating system that works like the Internet itself, like the web, and like open source operating systems like Linux: a world that is admittedly less polished, less controlled, but one that is profoundly generative of new innovations because anyone can bring new ideas to the market without having to ask permission of anyone.

I've outlined a few of the ways that big players like Facebook, Apple, and News Corp are potentially breaking the "small pieces loosely joined" model of the Internet. But perhaps most threatening of all are the natural monopolies created by Web 2.0 network effects.

One of the points I've made repeatedly about Web 2.0 is that it is the design of systems that get better the more people use them, and that over time, such systems have a natural tendency towards monopoly.

And so we've grown used to a world with one dominant search engine, one dominant online encyclopedia, one dominant online retailer, one dominant auction site, one dominant online classified site, and we've been readying ourselves for one dominant social network.

But what happens when a company with one of these natural monopolies uses it to gain dominance in other, adjacent areas? I've been watching with a mixture of admiration and alarm as Google has taken their dominance in search and used it to take control of other, adjacent data-driven applications. I noted this first with speech recognition, but it's had the biggest business impact so far in location-based services.

A few weeks ago, Google offered free turn-by-turn directions for Android phones. This is awesome news for consumers, who previously could get this only in dedicated GPS devices or with high-priced iPhone apps. But it's also a sign just how competitive the web is getting, and just how powerful Google is getting, because they understand that "data is the Intel Inside" of the next generation of computer applications.

Nokia paid $8 billion for NavTeq, the leading provider of such turn-by-turn directions. GPS-maker TomTom paid $3.7 billion for TeleAtlas, the #2 provider in the market. Google quietly built an equivalent service, and is now giving it away for free -- but only to their own business partners. Everyone else still has to pay high fees to NavTeq and TeleAtlas. What's more, Google upped the ante by adding in such features as Street View.

Most interestingly, this move sets the stage for the future competition between Google and Apple. (Bill Gurley's analysis is an essential read.) Apple controls access to the dominant device of the mobile web; Google controls access to one of the most important mobile applications, and so far, is making it available for free only on Android. Google's prowess is not just in search, but in mapping, speech recognition, automated translation, and other applications driven by huge, intelligent databases that only a few providers can offer. Microsoft and Nokia control comparable assets, but they too are Apple competitors, and unlike Google, their business model depends on selling access to those assets, not giving them away for free.

It could be that everyone will figure out how to play nicely with each other, and we'll see a continuation of the interoperable web model we've enjoyed for the past two decades. But I'm betting that things are going to get ugly. We're heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it's more than that, it's a war against the web as an interoperable platform. Instead, we're facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.

And it's time for developers to take a stand. If you don't want a repeat of the PC era, place your bets now on open systems. Don't wait till it's too late.

P.S. One prediction: Microsoft will emerge as a champion of the open web platform, supporting interoperable web services from many independent players, much as IBM emerged as the leading enterprise backer of Linux.

I'll be speaking on this topic in my keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York on Tuesday. I'll look forward to seeing many of you there.

Four short links: 22 October 2009

Cognitive Surplus, Scaling, Chinese Blogs, CS Education for Growth

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. Eight Billion Minutes Spent on Facebook Daily -- you weren't using that cognitive surplus, were you?
2. How We Made Github Fast -- high-level summary is that the new "fast, good, cheap--pick any two" is "fast, new, easy--pick any two". (via Simon Willison)
3. Isaac Mao, China, 40M Blogs and Counting -- Today, there are 40 million bloggers in China and around 200 million blogs, according to Mao. Some blogs survive only a few days before being shut down by authorities. More than 80% of people in China don’t know that the internet is censored in their country. When riots broke out in Xinjiang province this year, the authorities shut down internet access for the whole region. No one could get online.
4. Congress Endorses CS Education as Driver of Economic Growth -- compare to Economist's Optimism that tech firms will help kick-start economic recovery is overdone.

There are Over a Million People Actively Using Facebook Right Now

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 7

A little over a week ago Facebook reached a major milestone: 300 million active users. The fastest-growth region continues to be Asia, but growth in other overseas regions such as the Americas and Africa have also been strong. Currently reaching only 1% of potential users in Asia and Africa, Facebook has barely scratched the surface in both regions:

Growth in the U.S. remains fastest among those age 45 and older, and the share of those users is higher in the U.S. than overseas. In other regions recent growth tended to be more evenly divided among age groups. One notable exception has been the teen group in Asia, which grew over 80% in the last 12 weeks.

Of the 300 million users, how many are actively using Facebook right now? (For the rest of this post active means not just logged in, but actually engaged.) By treating the previous question as a Fermi problem^†, I can probably derive a decent estimate. First, I assume that the average fraction of people actively using Facebook at any moment, equals the fraction of time an average Facebook user is active on the site^††. Without access to any usage stats, I'll throw out the following guesstimate: a typical Facebook user spends 4 hours per month (or 48 per year) actively using the site.

Depending on how accurate you want to be, there are 1.6 to 6 million people actively using Facebook right now. If the average Facebook user spends considerably more than 4 hours per month (actively) using the site, the estimate would be much higher than a 1.6 million. I do have an escape clause: in classic Fermi problems, being within a factor of 10 is considered acceptable.

(†) Increasingly popular in the business world, Fermi problems have long been staples in Physics (and Math) departments.
(††) In other words, if the average Facebook user spends 1% of her time actively using the site, on average 1% of all Facebook users are actively using the site at any given moment.

Fallacious Celebrations of Facebook Fans

by Mark Drapeau | @cheeky_geeky | comments: 10

Publishing "top 10" lists is unfortunately a staple of modern journalism. But alas, writers must drive readers' eyeballs, even when discussing serious topics like the government. And so we find a new list that mixes Web 2.0 with the government: "Top 10 agencies with the most Facebook fans." For the record, this list is topped by the White House with 327,592 fans, followed by the Marine Corps, Army, CDC, State Department, NASA, NASA JPL, Library of Congress, Air Force, and Environmental Protection Agency. Congratulations to all these hard-working agencies.

But what exactly are we celebrating here? The fact that government agencies are embracing new technologies that the citizens they serve actually use? That's nice I suppose, but everyone from Papa John's Pizza to America's Next Top Model (200,000 more fans than the White House, cough) to someone I met once at a party during Internet Week has a Facebook "Fan Page" now, so surely we are not celebrating the mere presence of them. In fact, when everyone in my social circle's social circle asks me to become a fan of their long-standing charity, their favorite television program, or their single-person consulting firm, everything becomes a blur of meaningless, cheap invitations that become remarkably easy to decline. There is no value in simply having a fan page anymore. There may in fact be street cred in not feeling like you need one.

Are we applauding the government's fan numbers? The article leads with, "The White House currently has more fans than the Washington Redskins." The most powerful global seat of power in perhaps the most recognizable office building in the world has more fans than the local football team? Earth-shattering. Let's consider how popular the White House is. Facebook now has 300 million users; thus, approximately one out of every 1000 Facebook users is a "fan" of the White House. The other 999/1000 are not. And since many Facebook users live outside the U.S., one must assume that many White House fans do as well. Should every U.S. citizen using Facebook be a fan of the White House? Is that the goal? What's the marginal value of an additional 10,000 fans? Who knows.

Still, the White House shouldn't feel too bad about those stats. Rounding out the top 10, the EPA has convinced one of every 100,000 Facebook users to become their fans. Bravo. Let's keep this in perspective. Soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo has two fan pages that total four million fans. Julia Allison, who isn't even a real celebrity, has over 15,000 fans - if these numbers are in any way meaningful she's roughly as popular as the State Department, the agency heading up U.S. foreign policy. These numbers seem even worse when one considers that there are hundreds of U.S. Federal Government departments and agencies, many of which haven't a presence on Facebook or anything similar.

But perhaps I'm being too harsh. Let's assume for a minute that these agencies are genuinely touching microniches and that the fans, whatever their numbers, are indeed fanatical about these agencies. What is the government doing with that raving fan base? Not much. Facebook fan pages from the Army and CDC and State Department primarily re-post their own news from their own websites. I didn't see any original writing. I didn't even see aggregation of information about, say, foreign policy from other sources. I certainly didn't see any innovative contests from the Marine Corps, or crowdsourcing from NASA. And while there are fan comments posted on the pages, it's not obvious at all what is being done with that feedback, if anything. Make fun of Tyra Banks all you want, but her show's fan page has 286 discussion topics, hundreds of photos, headshots, names, and bios of people involved in the show, and listings of upcoming events. They're so organized at America's Next Top Model that we might consider asking their staff to inform people about the resurgent H1N1 flu virus.

If you think I'm joking about that, you probably have no business working with social media for the government.

The larger issue here is that the connection of any of these Facebook fan pages to agency goals and strategy is murky at best. As someone who spends a bit of time thinking about "Government 2.0," it's difficult to decipher how this is helping the government. True, the pages are somewhat informative, and to some degree they reach a citizen audience where they are. But it's not novel and it's not social and it's not engaging. The execution is flawed, the tactics are questionable, the strategy is vague, and the goals are unclear. And all the government pages in the top 10 list effectively look the same. Monkey-see, monkey-do.

My personal Facebook page has about 2,000 connections, but this by itself is nothing to celebrate. The meaningful question is not about who has more fans, but about who can authentically and transparently - and usefully - interact with citizens to provide social and intellectual value and become the pulse of their conversations. Here are some questions I have for governments and agencies running Facebook fan pages: What are the names of the people running the pages? What are their titles? What city is their office in? Where do they blog? Which events are they attending this year? (Can I meet them there?) How are you going to get your fans engaged in your mission? How can I tell you my stories about military service, or foreign travel, or amateur astronomy? Would those stories be helpful to you? How are you using social media like Facebook to get citizens involved in their government?

These are questions that departments and agencies, and private companies for that matter, should be asking themselves before they deploy official new media platforms like a Facebook fan page. The answers to these questions and others should be visible on day one. When the first White House memo of the new administration outlined the principles of a transparent, participatory, and collaborative government, this should have been obvious. It appears not to be so.

Four short links: 8 July 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 3

1. Stop Whining About Facebook's Redesign (Slate) -- How can I be so sure that you'll learn to like the redesign? Because you did the last two times Facebook did it. The conclusion is that sites don't say why they're redesigning, and that causes the resistance.
2. C# and CLI under the Community Promise (Miguel de Icaza) -- Microsoft have announced they won't pursue patents relating to C# or the .NET Common Language Infrastructure (CLI): It is important to note that, under the Community Promise, anyone can freely implement these specifications with their technology, code, and solutions. You do not need to sign a license agreement, or otherwise communicate to Microsoft how you will implement the specifications. Good news for Mono and other .NET-compatible projects.
3. app-engine-patch -- a patch that lets most of Django work on Google App Engine. (via caseywest on Twitter)
4. Scope -- talk by Matt Webb, given to Reboot 2009. Every ten slides I sigh happily as new mental connections slide into place, as only Matt can make them. Worth it just for finding this Stewart Brand quote, "We are as gods and might as well get good at it." That one sentence could direct a lifetime of action.

Jonathan Heiliger on Web Performance, Operations, and Culture

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 0

We were honored to have Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook’s VP of Technology Operations, as our opening keynote speaker at Velocity. Jonathan is one of the most accomplished leaders in our field, and is a master of the craft.

Here is his keynote in its entirety:

Note: Other videos from Velocity are being posted to VelocityConference.blip.tv

Facebook Adds Million of Users in Asia

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 1

Since my previous post on Facebook users by country, the company has grown rapidly in Asia. Over the last 12 weeks, Facebook grew 90% in Asia going from 11.4 to 21.7 million active users. With a Market Penetration of only 0.6% in Asia, Facebook has barely scratched the surface in the region.

The company also gained 11.3M users in Europe (up 19%) and 14.7M users in North America (up 21%) over the last 12 weeks. On a year-over-year basis, Facebook grew 194% (adding close to 150 million active users worldwide) from Jun/2008 to Jun/2009.

For more details, you can view regional numbers below:

Active Facebook Users By Country & Region: June 2007

View more Microsoft Word documents from oreillymedia.

FBML, YML, OSML oh my! HTML, meet Social

by David Recordon | @daveman692 | comments: 4

This morning Yahoo! launched the first fourteen OpenSocial applications for users of My Yahoo!, though as TechCrunch pointed out they did a bit of forking OpenSocial for their HTML-ish markup. It's not all that surprising considering that OpenSocial's support for this sort of markup (OSML) is relatively new, Yahoo! has been working on their application platform for quite awhile and OSML is just a bit strange.

For instance, the “small view” (i.e. the widgets which actually appear on the MyYahoo page) must be developed using “Yahoo! Markup Language” (YML), which is an extension of HTML with more bells and whistles. Yahoo is trying to bring together YML and the OpenSocial Markup Language (OSML), but right now they are forked. But turning an OpenSocial app into one that works inside Yahoo is getting easier.

Beware, the next few paragraphs get a bit geeky. YML (more info) is a lot like FBML and OSML (more info) in that they are all social markup languages. OSML is a bit different though, unlike YML which only works inside of Yahoo! and FBML in Facebook, OSML is part of the OpenSocial project and is designed to work inside of many different social network containers. If I wanted to display a user's name inside of my application, here's what it would look like:

• FBML: <fb:name uid="4" />
• YML: <yml:name uid="QPR12345" />
• OSML: <os:Name person="${User}"/>

In this simple example, FBML and YML are nearly identical; you pass in a userid. OSML is a bit different, they've created a rich templating language and you're passing in a user object instead of just a userid.

XFBML is the evolution of FBML but designed for use via Facebook Connect. Given that XFBML is designed to work for sites outside of Facebook.com, I'm much more interested in the ideas behind it and how they will ultimately be useful across social networks. Today XFBML is powered by JavaScript, though in the future I can imagine having actual HTML tags for this sort of social content. One of the large benefits of this approach is that a user's privacy settings can be maintained easily across sites (see Thoughts on dynamic privacy, though note that Chris' closing is no longer accurate).

Today XFBML works in such a way that I include Facebook's JavaScript loader in my page, the JavaScript walks the page's DOM looking for tags like <fb:profile-pic uid="4" />, uses your browser (and thus your current cookied session) to request the user's photo, and then based on the user's privacy settings and your relationship to the user fills in their photo (or doesn't). This provides two main benefits: 1) if you only share your photo with your friends, a non-friend browsing this page would not see the photo and 2) if you change your photo on Facebook it will change on this page as well.

Given how quickly the Social Web is coming together, I believe that HTML will need to support social elements someday soon. It's great to see this type of innovation by Facebook running in the wild, but the web itself ultimately evolves best when multiple competing approaches come together. Just as OAuth brought together the best practices from AOL, Flickr, Google, Yahoo! and others, there is a similar opportunity to bring together FBML, YML and OSML along with the client-side benefits of XFBML.

2 Years Later, the Facebook App Platform is Still Thriving

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 8

In a few weeks, the Facebook application platform will mark its second anniversary. While it garnered lots of press coverage in the months after it launched, the arrival of the iTunes app store shifted attention away from Facebook's vibrant ecosystem. The media glow is understandable: among other things, the younger iTunes platform is adding apps at a much faster rate than Facebook or Myspace.

Games comprise a sizable chunk of app revenues in all three platforms and recent stories suggest that 2009 has been a great year for developers. The substantial revenue generated by popular Facebook (and Myspace) apps has been the subject of articles in VentureBeat, TechCrunch, and Inside Facebook. There have also been recent estimates for the revenue generated by iPhone apps (see here and here). Game developers in particular are benefiting from having a multitude of platforms: Games are the largest iTunes category, and the second largest category in both Facebook and Myspace. In addition, 4 of the top 10 most successful Facebook app providers are Game developers.

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Goodreads vs Twitter: The Benefits of Asymmetric Follow

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 61

I am never more painfully reminded of the limits of symmetric “friend”-based social networks than I am when I post a book review on Goodreads. I love books, and I love spreading the word about ones I enjoy (as well as ones I expected to enjoy, but didn’t quite). Most of the time, my reviews go out quietly to a small group of friends, whose book recommendations I also follow. It’s a lovely social network.

But every once in a while, I post a link to one of my reviews on Twitter, and am immediately deluged with friend requests. Some of them are from people I know, but whose taste in books I may not share (or even care about), and many are from complete strangers. If I say “yes” to any of them, I have to see every book they review as well. As you can imagine, it doesn’t scale.

I don’t mind if anyone in the world reads my reviews, and they are in fact all public on the site, but for someone to “follow” my reviews (get notified when I write them), they have to be accepted as my friend, in which case I see all their reviews as well. Asymmetric follow should at least be an option on any social network. It’s the way the world really works. We never find ourselves in clearly delineated friend-circles, where everyone has or wants complete visibility with everyone else, or none at all.

If you’re even a minor-league celebrity like me, there are way more people who are interested in what you are doing or thinking that you can possibly keep up with. I can’t even keep up regularly with the 500+ people I do follow on Twitter; keeping up with the 400,000 who follow me would be impossible.

Asymmetric follow is why I use Twitter regularly and Facebook much less often. With Twitter’s model, I can find people I’m interested in, whether or not they know me, and learn about them and their lives and thoughts. Others can include me in their lists. You become “friends” with complete strangers over time, by communicating with them (responding with @messages for example), perhaps by mutual following. In fact, Twitter’s wonderful system of @ messages means that anyone can address me - and so I find myself having conversations with complete strangers as well. I actually follow my @ messages more faithfully than I do my planned Follow list.

On Facebook, I’m expected to approve every request, and alas, I turn down far more than I accept. Amazingly, few people who I don’t know even bother to explain who they are and why they want to be my friend. I sometimes do accept strangers who make a good case for why I’d be interested in them, but I always ignore those I don’t know who don’t bother to even say hello. Ditto for LinkedIn and Plaxo and all the other greedy networks that are clamoring for my time and attention while requiring me to take explicit steps to approve or deny each request.

(Meanwhile Dopplr has seemingly implemented a form of reverse friending, in which I am forced to see the trips of anyone who has requested the ability to see mine, a kind of Bizarro-world asymmetric follow that has rendered Dopplr completely useless to me.)

Asymmetric follow is also a good way to boost viral growth, as it encourages people to try the service without having to be an active user. We learned long ago from Usenet and mailing lists that there are always more lurkers than posters.

So, consider this a LazyWeb request to all social networks out there: even if you have your own ideas about how to organize social networks, have an option for users to turn on “Twitter-mode.” I think you’d be surprised how well it works.

Active Facebook Users By Country

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 24

Since I last posted numbers on Facebook's user base six week ago, the company has added close to 20 million active users.

I've had a few requests for detailed numbers by country so I quickly assembled an update for each of the regions shown above.

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Facebook is Growing Fast in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 13

With Facebook recently passing 175 million users, I decided to update my analysis of its user base. The weekly growth in number of users has remained steady, with the last 5 weeks being exceptionally strong: Facebook added over 25 million users since early February. The share of U.S. users inched up slightly from 30% to 31%.

The company added users in all regions but compared to my analysis in early December, growth accelerated in Asia and North America. Note that the number of users in Asia remains small compared to other social networks in the region. The number of users from Canada still exceeds the total in all of Asia (still under 10 million). Within Asia, the fastest-growing countries over the last 12 weeks were Indonesia (up 169%) and the Philippines (up 119%). (For reasons as to how Facebook has expanded in specific countries, I encourage Radar readers to share their thoughts in the comments.)

Europe and South America both experienced double-digit growth rates over the last 12 weeks, but compared to last December, Facebook grew much slower in both regions. A third of all users (33%) now come from Europe. Among the smaller countries in Europe, Facebook grew fastest in the Czech Republic (up 144%) and Slovakia (up 137%). Among the larger European countries, growth was fastest in Italy (up 71%), Spain (up 66%), and Germany (up 48%).

With such a large user base, the company continues to attract application developers to its platform. The number of active Facebook apps continues to grow but at a much slower rate, roughly 2% per week over the last 12 weeks. (For this analysis, I define a Facebook app to be active if it had at least 100 active users.) The graph below compares the relative size of the Facebook, Myspace, and iPhone application platforms:

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Facebook in 2010: no longer a walled garden

by David Recordon | @daveman692 | comments: 18

A lot of what I've been working on the past two years has been built on the assumption that the model that social networks use today will fundamentally change. Social networks have largely been built on the premise of being walled gardens in such a way that users can't communicate or share content or friends across networks; put simply this is what keeps a Facebook user from being able to send a message to a MySpace user. This is the same model that destroyed AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy's ISP businesses when normal people chose the Internet itself versus their thoughtfully curated walled gardens.

Over the past year we've seen an uptick in the infrastructure, development tools and projects designed to build the social web (n.b. I define the social web as something that is inherently decentralized, just like the web itself). On top of that, MySpace has gone from being off of most developer's radars to the most open social network in existence. With MySpace I'm able to use my account to sign into other sites via OpenID, share my activity using Activity Streams, build applications using OpenSocial, interact with their APIs using OAuth and access APIs that not only allow the creation of new content within MySpace's garden but also extract data from it.

While Facebook has made significant contributions to open source projects, ranging from some of their own to memcached, they've largely been absent from much of this progress around building the social web (remember, I define it as being inherently decentralized). Instead, like Microsoft they have willfully ignored many industry efforts in favor of their own proprietary development platforms. To their credit, they've been one of the most innovative social networks over the past two years, pushing the boundaries of what's been thought of as possible with features like social tagging in photos, Newsfeed, Platform, Beacon, integrated chat and Connect.

Two weeks ago this changed. Facebook joined the board of the OpenID Foundation, released two-way APIs around status, notes, pictures and videos, hosted a user experience summit focused on OpenID and released a blog commenting widget powered by Connect. Since then they've also talked about how they wish to support the Activity Streams project and have reiterated their commitment to the sort openness that we've been promoting as key pieces of the social web.

I know what you're thinking: "talk is cheap." True, Digg said they'd support OpenID three years ago and we've seen...or wait, no we haven't! I wish I had something concrete to point at to show that my next argument isn't crazy, but I don't. All that I can point to is the change I'm seeing when interacting with Facebook and their interactions with developers this year compared to the past.

My prediction is that by the end of the year Facebook will become the most open social network on the social web. I believe that not only have they now found business value in doing so, but also truly believe that the next phase of their mission, "to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected" requires that they do so. This means that anyone building a business based on the notion that Facebook will remain a walled garden and won't adapt - as was true with traditional media when blogging came about - will have their world turned upside down this year.

Disagree if you like, but my second argument is that if Facebook does not seriously embrace these ideas this year that their current position of dominance will be usurped. I'm not saying that Facebook will go away, that all of my friends will leave, that it will become irrelevant or that tens of thousands of developers will move on overnight. This year, there is an amazing opportunity to find and define a proper balance between traditional walled-garden social networks and completely decentralized efforts like the DiSo Project.

Facebook Growth Regions and Gender Split

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 23

Since we began tracking Facebook demographics in late May, weekly growth has held steady, usually in the low single-digits on a percentage basis. More importantly, it's fair to say that the company has successfully expanded overseas. With close to 128M users, the share of U.S. users is down to around 30% from 35% in late May:

Over the last three months, Facebook has added members across all regions, with the strongest growth coming from Europe, South America, and the Middle East/North Africa:

In Europe, growth has been especially impressive in Italy and Spain. I'm not sure when the Italian translation of Facebook launched, but soon after, Italians started signing up in droves. The (crowdsourced) Spanish translation was completed within a month and launched in early 2008. I've read reports that users in Spain have used the site to connect with long lost relatives in Latin America. Venezuela, Argentina, and Uruguay were Facebook's fastest-growth countries in South America. In late May, some Radar readers were highlighting Facebook's growing popularity in Venezuela, Argentina, and Chile.

I don't have any particular insight into how Facebook is growing in the Middle East and North Africa, but the company has added lots of users in Tunisia, Morocco, and Turkey. (I encourage Radar readers from the region to share their thoughts in the comments.)

Having grown up in Southeast Asia, I've been detecting more interest in Facebook among friends in the region. But for now Facebook still lags Friendster and Multiply. In fact Facebook has far less users in all of Asia than users from Canada! Similarly, the U.K. has more than twice the number of Facebook users than all of Asia. Facebook has to contend with homegrown social networks and slightly different online habits: Asian internet users spend more time on gaming and instant messaging. But even with their relatively small user base and amidst a competitive environment, Facebook is growing in Asia (they added 1.5M users from the region in the last 12 weeks).

Another interesting tidbit about Facebook's recent growth, is that the fast-growing regions discussed above are adding teens (13-17) and college-age (18-25) users at a faster rate than North America.

With a commanding share of college-age users in its home country, U.S. growth has been strongest among working age users (26-59). I was expecting stronger growth in the teen market (13-17), but teens remain the slowest growing group in the U.S.

The Gender split has persisted: Females now outnumber Males, 51% to 44%. In late May the Female to Male split was 41% to 34%. The share of users who decline to state their gender dropped from 24% in late May to 5% in early December.

That Females so outnumber Males may surprise people. While the Female/Male distribution has persisted over time, there is quite a bit of variation across regions. The Middle East/North Africa and Africa are the only regions where Male Facebook users outnumber Females.

Why I Love Twitter

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 99

If you care what I think, you know that Twitter is just about the best way to learn what I'm paying attention to. I pass along tidbits of O'Reilly news, interesting reading from mailing lists and blogs I follow, and of course, tidbits from the twitterers I'm following. These are all the things I could never find time to put on my blog, but that I spray via email like a firehose at editors, conference planners, and researchers within O'Reilly. A lot of my job is, as we say, "redistributing the future" - following interesting people, and passing on what I learn to others. And twitter is an awesome tool for doing just that.

Like a lot of people, I tried out Twitter early on, but didn't stick to it. Most of the early twitter conversation was personal, and I didn't have time for it. I came back when I noticed that about 5000 people were following my non-existent updates, waiting for me to say something. With that many listeners, I thought I'd better oblige. (There are now close to 16,000.) I soon realized that Twitter has grown up to become a critical business tool, ideal for following the latest news, tracking the ideas and whereabouts of people who will shape the future of technology, and sharing my own thoughts and attention stream.

I thought I should outline here some of the specific things I find so compelling about Twitter, with suggestions about architectural features to be emulated by other internet services.

1. Twitter is simple. Twitter does one small thing, and does it well. Folks like Robert Scoble sing the praises of Friendfeed, which you could think of as twitter++. After all, it's got comments and aggregation of data from multiple services. But despite its powerful premise, Friendfeed hasn't dented Twitter's growth. Personally, I don't have time to wade through the comments; for me, Twitter is about quick hits, not about extended discussion. And while I love the promise of service aggregation, I tend to think that trying to marry it to commenting obscures its potential. Less is more. New services like peoplebrowsr are reframing service aggregation in a richer way, as a way of learning more about the people you follow, browsing the social graph. (Peoplebrowsr is still in alpha, but I think it has real potential as a social graph explorer, rather than as yet another people feed-reader.)

2. Twitter works like people do. If I'm interested in someone, I don't have to ask their permission to follow them. I don't have to ask if they will be my friend: that is something that evolves naturally over time. If you're a public figure like I am, the metaphor of mutual "friending" is truly broken. I get tens of thousands of friend requests from people I don't know. Accepting would make it impossible for me to use a social tool to keep in touch with my real friends. Friend groups don't really help.

   Twitter's brilliant social architecture means that anyone can follow me, and I can follow anyone else (unless they want to keep their updates private.) Gradually, through repeated contact, we become friends. @ replies that can only be seen by people followed by both parties to a conversation create a natural kind of social grouping, as well as social group extensibility, as I gradually get more and more visibility into new people that my friends already know. Meanwhile, truly private direct messages are also supported.

   I don't know who first used the term "ambient intimacy" but it's a great description of what begins to happen on Twitter. I know not just what people are thinking about or reading, but enough about what they are doing that our relationship deepens, just like real-world friendships. People who follow me on Twitter learn that I'm making jam or pies, or gardening or riding my bike or feeding the horses, things that I'd never (or rarely, since I'm doing it here) share on my blog. I know a lot more about many of my professional contacts that makes them more into friends. And in the case of my family, who keep their updates private and visible only to a limited group of real friends, we can keep in touch in small ways that mean a lot. I get special moments of my wife or daughters' day that we might not have shared otherwise. It's truly lovely.

3. Twitter cooperates well with others. Rather than loading itself down with features, it lets others extend its reach. There are dozens of powerful third-party interface programs; there are hundreds of add-on sites and tools. Twitter even lets competitors (like FriendFeed or Facebook) slurp its content into their services. But instead of strengthening them, it seems to strengthen Twitter. It's the new version of embrace and extend: inject and take over. (Scoble recently noticed that 60%+ of his friends' updates on Facebook actually came from twitter. And as John Battelle noted in a recent tweet, "I noticed now that my FBook status is updated with Twitter, I get responses in Fbook, but would like to see them here." It might seem like a strength for Facebook to allow Twitter to update its status feed, but not the other way around, but I think Facebook will one day realize that Twitter has taken them over....)

4. Twitter transcends the web. Like all of the key internet services today, Twitter is equally at home on the mobile phone. Even on the PC, I find myself using a separate client (Twhirl is an Adobe Air program) that provides a rich, alternate interface.

5. Twitter is user-extensible.The @syntax for referring to users, hashtags, and whatever you call the use of $ as a special symbol for reference to financial instruments, were all user-generated innovations that, because of Twitter's simplicity, allowed for third party services to be layered not just on the API, but on the content.

6. Twitter evolves quickly. Perhaps because its features are so minimal, new user behaviors seem to propagate across Twitter really quickly. It's a bit like the reason that fruit flies are used for genetic research: the short lifespan compresses the time for mutations to take hold. Perhaps a better analogy would be the speed of cultural evolution among humans compared to biological evolution. The most fascinating evolution happening on Twitter isn't an evolution of the software, but an evolution in user behavior and in the types of data that are being shared.

   I saw this myself with retweeting, a behavior I picked up not from Twitter itself but from twhirl, the Twitter client I use. Because Twhirl actually has a button for retweeting, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to do it. I became one of the most prolific retweeters, figuring that I have more followers than most of the people I know, and that it would be good form to pass on the best of what they post. But it's fascinating to see the growth of retweeting by others, even those not using twhirl.

In many ways, Twitter is a re-incarnation of the old Unix philosophy of simple, cooperating tools. The essence of Twitter is its constraints, the things it doesn't do, and the way that its core services aren't bound to a particular interface.

It strikes me that many of the programs that become enduring platforms have these same characteristics. Few people use the old TCP/IP-based applications like telnet and ftp any more, but TCP/IP itself is ubiquitous. No one uses the mail program any more, but all of us still use email. No one uses Tim Berners-Lee's original web server and browser any more. Both were superseded by independent programs that used his core innovations: http and html.

What's different, of course, is that Twitter isn't just a protocol. It's also a database. And that's the old secret of Web 2.0, Data is the Intel Inside. That means that they can let go of controlling the interface. The more other people build on Twitter, the better their position becomes.

There's a real lesson to Facebook here about giving other services (like Twitter) access to their social graph. They have the best one going, but because they try to keep users coming back to their interface, and even the applications built on their service have to live in Facebook, they end up as a ghetto rather than a true internet service. It's the data, not the interface! Let other people use your data, build on it, and it will still belong to you. Hold it too tight, and they will compete with it.

Lots more to say, but the beach is calling on this sunny Saturday.

Facebook Growth By Age Group: Share of College-Age Users is Declining

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 12

With the U.S. now accounting for only about a third of all Facebook users, we are starting to see a gradual shift away from its original demographic of college-age users (18-25): 46% of all users are 18-25 years old, down from 51% in late May. The number of users in the 18-25 segment is growing, but at a slower pace than the other age groups. Among the major Facebook age segments, the fastest growing are teens (13-17) and young (26-34) to middle-age (35-44) professionals, with the growth in teens driven by non-U.S. markets. Also note the strong growth in the much smaller 45-54 and 55-59 age groups:

In the U.S., 51% of Facebook users are 18-25 years old, down from 59% in late May. But when one looks at other large and/or fast-growing Facebook markets, the share of the 18-25 age group is less than 50% in most of them:

In the U.S. (51%), Turkey (53%), and France (51%), more than half of all Facebook users are 18-25 years old. In comparison, the other countries shown above have more users who are young (26-34) or middle-age professionals (35-44), pushing the share of 18-25 year olds below 50%. Finally, while there is slight shift away from college-age users both in the U.S. and overseas, the 18-44 age group coveted by advertisers, continues to comprise over 80% of the Facebook user base.

Facebook Growth By Country and the Slowdown in App Usage

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 18

With the Facebook Developers conference slated for later this week, I thought it would be a good time to give a brief update of a previous post on Facebook demographics. What follows are recently published number of users by country and region, along with growth rates for select regions and countries. Over the last four weeks, the fastest growing regions were South America, Central America and the Carribean:

While Facebook grew double-digits in Asia it did so from a relatively small base (approx. 3.7 million users), in a region with hundreds of millions of potential users. Of the countries in South and Central America, Chile is worth highlighting (up 67.5% from four weeks ago). As several Radar readers predicted, Facebook has grown steadily in Chile where it now has over 2.2 million users (around 14% of the population). In other parts of the Americas, Hi5 and Orkut remain the largest social networks:

Looking closely at the top 30 countries, a few European countries have grown more than ten percent over the last four weeks (France, Spain, Germany, Italy), with France having the most number of users (approx. 2.5 million). Skyrock remains the largest social network in France. Norway saw a decline but is still home to more than a million Facebook users. We will continue to track how Facebook is doing vis-à-vis other leading regional social web sites and whether their disputes with other companies affect their growth rates.

As far as recent trends in the Facebook app platform (the subject of this week's f8 conference), we have detailed reports (here and here) on the subject. At the last Graphing Social Patterns conference, Roger Magoulas provided highlights of our most recent findings. The number of published apps continues to grow steadily (to over 32K) but total usage remains flat. Besides the fact that the top 10% of apps account for 98% of total usage, aspiring Facebook app developers should know that only about 6% of apps average at least 500 active users per day:

(For specific tips on how to launch and build successful Facebook apps, consult this O'Reilly Radar Report.) Finally, as I noted in a previous post, the most popular applications on the Myspace platform continue to account for slightly less users than their Facebook counterparts.

Is SocialMedia Overstepping Facebook's Privacy Line?

by David Recordon | @daveman692 | comments: 6

SocialMedia is an advertising network which places ads within social applications such as those on Facebook and MySpace. SocialMedia claims to be more effective in this type of advertising, due to a patent-pending technology they've developed named FriendRank. SocialMedia CEO Seth Goldstein claims that SocialMedia ads can pay up to 2.5 times more than traditional ads within social networks and that early tests show people are 200 times more likely to respond to a "social ad". See CNET's coverage of SocialMedia's FriendRank launch for more detailed information.

This sounds very compelling, but immediately raises serious questions around privacy and whether a Facebook user knows that SocialMedia is using their profile information in this way. While technology certainly makes this possible, are user expectations being set correctly? Facebook's Beacon functionality faced an uproar at its launch earlier this year not for the technology it provided, but rather for upsetting expectations around privacy, information sharing, and ultimately ad targeting. So how is SocialMedia getting access to the type of information required to create such a compelling social advertising network?

Facebook provides a customizable public profile page for each user (mine is here) which by default makes your name, picture, and a few friends publicly available. SocialMedia could and most likely is using this public information, just like anyone else could too. Multiple sources including ValleyWag and others familiar with the ad platform say that SocialMedia doesn't stop there. Rather they're very quietly also accessing information from Facebook Platform applications directly. This was originally broken by The Social Times a few weeks ago:

So how does SocialMedia display these targeted ads outside of Facebook? Through a collection of data via applications in combination with images obtained via user public profiles and unique cookies they can piece together who you are and who some of your friends are. This is off of Facebook.

The question then is, are social applications properly disclosing the fact that they give your information to SocialMedia, and is that action covered by a clear privacy policy? This is not about the technology behind how SocialMedia might access this information, but rather making sure that the technological implementation matches user expecations. We can start by looking at the process of adding an application on Facebook which does not appear to use SocialMedia for advertising:

If you've ever installed a Facebook application, you're familiar with this screen, which prompts you to grant explicit permissions to each and every application you choose to install. It should be noted that Facebook Platform does not have any affordance for allowing an application to share your information data with a third party. Facebook's Developer Terms of Service explicitly prohibit such sharing, and the technological implementation of the Facebook Platform API make it extremely likely that sharing such data would sometimes involve sharing a developer's secret key with SocialMedia as well. All of this is explicitly and strictly prohibited by Facebook's Developer Terms of Service: (emphasis is mine for readability):

"Facebook Platform" means a set of APIs and services provided by Facebook that enable websites and applications (collectively, "Applications") to retrieve data relating to Facebook Users made available by Facebook and/or retrieve authorized data from other Applications. The term "Facebook Platform" includes any data, images, text, content, code, APIs, tools or other information or materials provided by Facebook through or in connection with such APIs and services (collectively, the "Facebook Properties").

...

5) You may not sell, resell, lease, redistribute, license, sublicense or transfer all or any portion of the Facebook Properties, or use or store any Facebook Properties for any purpose other than as specifically authorized herein.

The bottom line is that though this might seem like an obscure technical issue, sharing user activity and profile information with SocialMedia would be as objectionable as the worst behaviors ascribed to Facebook Beacon. With Beacon people were surprised that their actions from around the web were starting to be shared with their friends on Facebook. It wasn't that everyone objected to this happening, but rather that it was implemented as opt-out which led to information being shared in ways that normal people didn't expect. This in turn completely killed Beacon with participating brands such as Coke dropping support. A few weeks ago Facebook shut off access to Slide's Top Friends application for "allowing access to non-friends' personal information" as reported by Inside Facebook. The following week Facebook's responded with a blog post Building Trust and Protecting User Privacy which started by saying:

Privacy is at the core of Facebook.

Because we provide users with rich privacy controls and respect their choices, users feel safe using Facebook to share their information with their friends. By opening up Facebook through Platform, developers have the opportunity to innovate on top of this information. In exchange, developers commit to treating user information with the same respect that users expect of Facebook. Our Developer Terms of Service strictly limit use of user data and serves as guidelines to these expectations.

But I truly believe that Facebook does try to protect user privacy and by doing so creates an environment promoting the creation of rich profiles tied to real offline identities and sharing more content between friends. Facebook has shown a history of learning from these situations over time. If Facebook learned so much about the dangers of surprise with Beacon, shut off Top Friends for sharing profile information, and continues to block access to Google's Friend Connect for redistribution of profile information then why are they still permitting Platform applications to possibly share this data with SocialMedia? As technologists we must be extremely careful in making sure that our implementations match a normal person's expectations. If we forget to do this, we could collectively end up killing something that might someday become great.

I've tried contacting SocialMedia to ask about how their advertising network works, though unfortunately while I've received replies have not had my questions answered. As full disclosure, I work for Six Apart which launched an advertising network for bloggers earlier this year, and has a privacy policy here. I'll be at O'Reilly's Open Source conference in Portland at the end of the month.