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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Social Networking is the Means to Achieve Workplace Collaboration

by Mark Drapeau | @cheeky_geeky | comments: 9

Yesterday I live-blogged a bit from the terrific Government 2.0 event produced by FedScoop.com at the Newseum in Washington, DC. I wrote a post about how collaboration was not the means, but rather an end made possible by the means of social networking tools. You can read my original writing and some initial comments here. Below, I expand a bit on these ideas.

My post was initially inspired by one speaker's (WFED's Chris Dorobek) notion, shared by some others (Justin Houk commented that, "Taxpayers don't want to think about those in government sitting around on Twitter all day even thought that might be an effective way to collaborate."), that social networking tools come across as too social or "fun" and that being social is not what people are truly doing (in the government) when they use them - they're collaborating. Thus, when marketing Government 2.0 to wider audiences, he feels that a term like "collaboration tools" is more appropriate.

In my opinion, while this might sound better to a more traditionalist, untrained ear, I think it is factually wrong to say that things like Facebook or Intellipedia are collaboration tools. True, collaboration often happens with these tools. And perhaps one could argue that collaboration is mainly what people hope to accomplish with them in the workplace. Fair enough. But I think that collaboration is the end result of leveraging social networks, which is in actuality what the social networking tools are for.

In other words, social networks are a means by which to accomplish something. This something might very well be collaboration. It might also be putting together an office softball team, or a study group of employees all learning Arabic. Is arranging players on a softball team "collaboration"? I don't think so. Is it an important part of a coherent, productive workplace? Perhaps. There are many important things that happen in workplaces based around social networks that are not strictly collaboration on work projects.

One big thing I've been thinking about lately is "leveraging social networks to accomplish important stuff" and no one can deny that personal relationships can influence collaboration. How well you know someone, how much you identify with them, how much you trust them, their level of reliability or transparency - all of these are values derived from social networking that then, when leveraged, can influence collaboration. Collaboration is not an end in itself, of course - it is a means to accomplish some end (finishing a draft report, etc.). So, social networking is a means to collaboration, which is a means to achieving some work or personal goal.

I also reject the notion that there is something wrong with having some fun at work. The idea that having fun with social software shouldn't be allowed in serious workplaces is ridiculous. And of course, anyone who's ever passed around a joke-of-the-week email, celebrated a colleague's birthday with a cake in the break room, or ended work at 4pm for an informal happy hour with the office (i.e., effectively every government and corporate employee) would surely agree with me on this. Work can be fun and be productive, too. The director of the Office of Personnel Management recently visited Google for a reason.

So, briefly, I think social networking tools are not necessarily collaboration tools. They are social software that allows social networks to be leveraged to accomplish things you find important. That might be collaboration on a National Intelligence Estimate (protecting America, earning your paycheck), or arranging a carpool with people in your agency (getting to work on time, being more green), or finding a racquetball partner (staying healthy, living well, bonding) - all of which postitively influence the workplace, in government and in the private sector as well.

As Fred Wellman commented on my original post, "I can't help but wonder if Chris [Dorobek] is seeking a more politically correct or business sounding name of the same tools with the goal of breaking down barriers to implementation and usage as opposed to a lack of understanding of the power of social networking applications in the business of government." I think there's a lot of truth to that. But I also think that, as an academic, this is actually not what we are doing.

This may sound a bit esoteric, but from an academic standpoint I think pointing out that using social networks - online and off - is at the very core of what we are doing is an important thing to point out. When we are "collaborating," we are leveraging social networks to accomplish important stuff.

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.

RSS never blocks you or goes down: why social networks need to be decentralized

by Andy Oram | @praxagora | comments: 25

Recurring outages on major networking sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn, along with incidents where Twitter members were mysteriously dropped for days at a time, have led many people to challenge the centralized control exerted by companies running social networks. Whether you're a street demonstrator or a business analyst, you may well have come to depend on Twitter. We may have been willing to build our virtual houses on shaky foundations might when they were temporary beach huts; but now we need to examine the ground on which many are proposing to build our virtual shopping malls and even our virtual federal offices.

Instead of the constant churning among the commercial sites du jour (Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter), the next generation of social networking increasingly appears to require a decentralized, peer-to-peer infrastructure. This article looks at available efforts in that space and suggests some principles to guide its development.

Update: a few days ago, OpenID expert Chris Messina and microblog developer Jyri Engeström published an article with conclusions similar to mine; clearly this is a felt need that's spreading across the Net. Interestingly, they approach the questions from a list of what information needs to be shared and how it needs to be transmitted; I come from the angle of what people want from each other and how their needs can be met. The two approaches converge, though. See the comments for other interesting related blogs.

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Dear DoD, the Web Itself is Social

by David Recordon | @daveman692 | comments: 15

A few weeks ago, Noah Shachtman of Wired's Danger Room blog wrote about how the, "U.S. military is strongly considering a near-total ban on Twitter, Facebook, and all other social networking sites throughout the Department of Defense." According to Wired, the DoD believes that social networks, "make it way too easy for people with bad intentions to push malicious code to unsuspecting users."

In April of this year, Mark Drapeau and Linton Wells II (previously the acting CIO of the DoD) published a thirty-five page report titled Social Software and National Security: An Initial Net Assessment which looked at the interplay between social software and national security. Combining a few of their conclusions, social software, "is an important information sharing enabler between individuals within government, between government employees and communities of interest, between researchers and government data, between the government and its citizens, and between governments of different countries" and that while, "information security concerns are non-trivial" that, "there is a point at which a mission can be hurt by strictly enforcing such draconian approaches that it keeps government from taking advantage of social tools that adversaries and other counterparties are using."

While it would be possible for the DoD to block specific social networks by denying troops access to domains such as facebook.com, myspace.com, twitter.com, among hundreds of others around the World, as Stowe Boyd said on the Department of Defense's Web 2.0 Guidance Forum, "Web 2.0 is fundamentally social, treating the individual at the center of the universe as opposed to groups or organizations, and then basing communication and information paths on social relationships between individuals."

It's my belief that even if the DoD tried to block all access to social networking sites it would be a never ending and ultimately unsuccessful battle as social is becoming a core component of the web itself. Not only are traditional social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace expanding through their own web-wide API programs, but social features are increasingly pervasive in what used to be "normal" web sites. A few examples:

The New York Times "Times People" - The New York Times launched the ability for you to sign in to nytimes.com, create a profile and follow other readers all without having to leave nytimes.com. This includes the ability to directly recommend articles that you're reading to your followers on NYT as well as see those recommendations on every page of their site.

Palm Pre and Android - Both phones have address books that are integrated and updated automatically with your contacts elsewhere. The Android is constantly in sync with your Gmail contacts and the Pre has a feature known as Synergy which combines contact information, calendars and instant messaging from data stored locally on the phone, Gmail, Facebook, AOL, and Exchange.

ShareThis and AddThis - For the past few years, bloggers and other content providers have integrated those Nascar-style widgets into their sites to provide an easy way for readers to re-share articles. While they initially focused on re-sharing via blogging services, today they support and default to services such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and AOL instant messenger.

Google Reader - Not long ago reading blogs and other content online was a solo experience from within your desktop "feed reader." Google Reader changed this with the ability to follow other users and see what your friends are reading. In July they added the ability to group your friends and filter what you read based on what they liked. A few weeks ago they also added ability to share stories via Facebook and Twitter. Lifehacker writes in more detail about Google Reader Updates with Still More Social Features and More Google Reader "Send To" Tricks.

Google Friend Connect - Friend Connect is one of Google's projects to bring social features to the long tail of the web. It provides the ability for non-technical site owners to bring sign in, profiles, following, "comment walls", and other OpenSocial applications just by adding a few lines of HTML/JavaScript to their sites. Friend Connect is already placed on over five-million sites, is available in forty-seven different languages, and integrates with networks including Google, AOL, Twitter, and Plaxo. You can see Friend Connect on Robert Scoble's blog showing the 1,600 people who have chosen to become members of his site directly. (Not to mention that in order to block usage of Google Friend Connect, the DoD would have to block troop access to Google.com itself!)

Identity - Whether via OpenID, OAuth (Twitter), or Facebook Connect it's now simple to use an existing profile to sign into millions of different sites around the web. Well over one-billion people have accounts that are enabled with either OpenID or Facebook Connect. In many cases, it isn't just about sign in but being able to find people you know on these sites and share content you create back into a variety of social networks. I've previously written about the Anatomy of "Connect" and how it's becoming increasingly possible for any web site to integrate profiles, relationships, third-party content and activity sharing with these technologies.

Niché social networks - Whether it is a Ning community like GovLoop, a standalone network like GoodReads focused on book lovers, or Intel Communities for IT professionals, it's clear that social networks will not only be large destination sites. More traditional blogging tools such as Movable Type, TypePad, and WordPress have all added various social features themselves over the past two years. See Movable Type Motion, Top Reasons to Love The New TypePad which includes an activity stream, profiles and sharing, and BuddyPress. (Disclosure: I work for Six Apart who creates Movable Type and TypePad.)

From infrastructure technologies like OpenID and OpenSocial, to widgets like ShareThis and Friend Connect, to The New York Times itself and your phone, features and interactions that you once only found on social networks are becoming ubiquitous. While it may be convenient for the DoD's IT department to think about social networking as a list of URLs that they can block from any network, the reality is that social networking is becoming a core piece of the web itself.

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.

Sarah Milstein on Iranian Protests and Twitter

by Timothy M. O'Brien | comments: 8

Interview with Sarah Milstein

In this 10 minute interview with Sarah Milstein, co-author the Twitter Book, she discusses how Twitter is being used by Iranian protesters and how Twitter has accidentally created a system not easily overwhelmed or controlled by authorities. She also talks about the continued evolution of Twitter over the past few months. I ask her to contrast the reaction to Twitter during the Swine Flu with the reaction to Twitter during the recent events in Iran, and it is clear from her answers that as Twitter becomes more familiar to the general public the significance and meaning of the platform are constantly evolving. Milstein comments on whether Twitter is becoming more "serious", and responds to the continued stream of stories by journalists who feel the need to pass judgment on this still-emerging communications platform. Milstein also discusses this week's 140 characters conference in New York.

On the Iranian protests, Milstein is very deliberate to say that the powerful aspect of Twitter during the Iranian protests is that Iranians within the country were able to use it to communicate with one another and with those outside of the country. Toward the end of the interview, I ask Milstein to comment on inadvertent transparency in the context of a previous post by Brady Forest. The Iranian protests story this week was as much about facilitating communications as it was about making sure that protesters were not communicating unintended information to the Iranian government.

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Captivity of the Commons

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 25

This post is part two of the series, “The Question Concerning Social Technology”. Part one is here. These posts will be opened to live discussion in an upcoming webcast on May 27.

In January 2002 DARPA launched the Information Awareness Office. The mission was to, “ imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness (emphasis added)” The notion of a government agency achieving total information awareness was too Orwellian to ignore. Under criticism that this “awareness” could quickly migrate to a mass surveillance system the program was defunded.

Fast-forward to last week and my near-purchase of Libbey Duratuff Gibralter Glasses (the perfect bourbon glass one might speculate). Over the course of the next few days I was peppered with exact-match ads for Libbey Duratuff glassware on several other websites; A small example of information awareness at work.

Personal data is the currency of Web 2.0. Knowing what we watch, buy, click, own, what we think, intend and ultimately do confers competitive advantage. Facebook possesses your social graph, your personal interests and your full profile (age, location, relationship status etc.) not to mention your daily (or hourly) answer to their persistent question, “what’s on your mind?”. Reviewing the “25 Surprising Things Google Knows About You” should give anyone pause. And it’s not just the Web 2.0 set. Credit Card Companies, Telcos, Insurance , Pharma… all are collecting vast stores of personal data. If you watch the trendline it is moving toward more data and more analytic capability - not less.

So why is it that we seem to have more comfort when the capacity for total information awareness lies with corporations as opposed to government? Experience shows that there is a very thin barrier between the two. To wit, the release of thousands of phone records to the U.S. government - and, conveniently, government immunity for those same corporations after the breach. Google and Yahoo! and Microsoft have all been accused of cooperating with the Chinese government to aid censorship and repression of free speech. What happens if/when we encounter the next version of the Bush administration that sees no problem abrogating civil rights in pursuit of “evildoers”?

What's more, when we deliver our personal information over to corporations we are giving this data over to an institution that is amoral. Companies are not yet structured to deliver moral or ethical results - they are encouraged to grow and deliver “shareholder value” (read money) which is a numb and narrow measure of value. Do I want my data to be managed by an amoral institution?

To be clear - I want the convenience and miracles that modern technology brings. I love the Internet and I am willing to give over lots of data in the trade. But I want two fundamental protections:

First, change the corporation. The structure of the corporation continues to be driven by 20th century hard goals of efficiency and scale - not by more complex measures of environmental sustainability, value creation and the commonweal. These are simply not adequately factored into any structural, organizational, incentive or taxation systems of business today. Profit and profit motive are fine - but hiding social and environmental costs is no longer acceptable. I want to deal with institutions capable of morality. This is no small task - but if we can build the Internet….

Second. We need a right to privacy that matches the 21st century reality. As a friend of mine likes to say, “privacy is now a responsibility - not a right.” While it is pithy (and perhaps true), the reason we grant rights - and laws to enforce those rights in society is the simple fact that people do not generally have the wherewithal to protect themselves from large, institutional interests. In the same way that regulatory structures are needed to keep a financial system in balance (alas even the Ayn Rand acolyte Greenspan finally agrees with this truism), we need new rights and regulations governing the use of our personal data - and simple sets of controls over who has access to it.

The true work of the 21st century lies not in refining our technology - this we will achieve without any political will. The work lies in re-imagining our institutions.

Four short links: 11 May 2009

Healthcare, Diagrams, Social Networking, and Email

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 4

1. OSCAR Canada -- open source healthcare (EMR) software, akin to VistA. See linuxmednews.com for more.
2. Instaviz -- iPhone app for mindmapping/any other blob-and-line diagram. I'm hypnotised by the correction of a fuzzy hand-drawn circle into a clean crisp algorithmic circle.
3. Buddypress -- open source software that turns a Wordpress installation into a social networking platform. Ok, so social networking software is now essentially free. What's the next big thing that will as hard and new as social networking was in 2003?
4. Getting Insight Into One's Own Email -- Thunderbird now shows interesting facts when there's no message to look at: recently read messages, messages most likely to be interesting, and a histogram of activity.

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.

How Big Data Impacts Analytics

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 9

Research for our just published report on Big Data management technologies, included conversations with teams who are at the forefront of analyzing massive data sets. We were particularly impressed with the work being produced by Linkedin's analytics team. [We have more details on Linkedin's analytics team, in an article in the upcoming issue of Release 2.0.]

At the second Social Web Foo camp, I had a chance to visit with Linkedin's Chief Scientist DJ Patil. As a mathematician specializing in dynamical systems and chaos theory, DJ began his career as a weather forecaster working for the Federal government. Years later, he ended up in an analytics role at Ebay where his prior experience with massive data sets came in handy. In the short video below, DJ shares his observations on how analytics has changed in recent years, especially as Big Data increasingly becomes common. Companies are casting a wider net, and are hiring scientists from fields not traditionally known as fertile recruiting grounds for data intelligence teams.

DJ also talks about his personal journey from mathematics to e-commerce and social networks. Among his previous stints, DJ worked with the DOD and used "... social network analysis to identify terrorists."

Other short videos from Social Web Foo camp:

Ty Ahmad-Taylor on the Challenges Facing Television

Steve Ganz' observations midway through Social Web Foo Camp Year 2

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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Anatomy of "Connect"

by David Recordon | @daveman692 | comments: 5

I'm here at Webstock in New Zealand working on my talk for tomorrow (Open, Social Web) and one of the things I've been thinking about is all of the different "Connect" applications and products that have recently sprung into existence. I mean, we have Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, MySpace (thankfully not "Connect") ID, TypePad Connect, RPX and I'm sure the list goes on. I'm trying to break down all of these products - ignoring the underlying open or proprietary technologies that make them tick - toward a straw man definition of a "Connect" application:

1. Profile: Everything having to do with identity, account management and profile information ranging from sign in to sign out on the site I'm connecting with.
2. Relationships: Think social graph. Answers the question of who do I know on the site I've connected with and how I can invite others.
3. Content: Stuff. All of my posts, photos, bookmarks, video, links, etc that I've created on the site I've connected with.
4. Activity: Poked, bought, shared, posted, watched, loved, etc. All of the actions that things like the Activity Streams project are starting to take on.

In my mind, the Goals of all of these "Connect" applications are focused on helping people discover new content, people they already know as well as new people with similar interests. They also all help to reduce some of the major pain points when it comes to decentralization of social networks; signing up for a new account, eliminating the manual process of filling out your profile, uploading a photo and going through that madness of "re-friending" your friends time and time again. While all of these features aren't new, how this style of application combines them all certainly seems to be. If 2008 was the year of social application platforms (Facebook Platform and OpenSocial), perhaps 2009 will be all about "Connect" - whatever that means.

(I've put together an example of this using Facebook Connect and Citysearch as it seems to be the most complete example that I can find.)

Four short links: 6 Jan 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 7

Four thought-provoking links from the worlds of disaster tech, multicore, bioengineering, and 17th century French nobility.

1. Techies: Volunteering to Save the World - article on NGO work being the new black for technology. In particular, this caught my eye: "Earlier this year, IBM launched a program called Corporate Service Corps to send 100 employees to Romania, Turkey, Vietnam, the Philippines, Ghana and Tanzania to work on projects that combine economic development and IT. And the response was impressive: More than 5,000 employees applied to participate."
2. Laurence Livermore Lab releases Stack Trace Analysis Tool - debugging tool for code running over 20k processors. We need new tools like this to handle the complexity thrown up by a multicore world.
3. Spinning Silkworm Cocoons into Biosensors - interesting article in MIT Technology Review about bioengineer Fiorenzo Omenetto who is using silk to build optical devices that can be used as sensors in the body. "In the devices that ­Omenetto and Kaplan are developing, proteins embedded in the optical material efficiently bind to a target such as oxygen or a bacterial protein; when they do, the light transmitted by the sensor changes color."
4. La Rochefoucauld Quotes - lots of thought-provoking quotes. For example, on the freemium business model: "What seems to be generosity is often no more than disguised ambition, which overlooks a small interest in order to secure a great one." On Twitter: "As it is the characteristic of great wits to say much in few words, so small wits seem to have the gift of speaking much and saying nothing." On social network sites: "However rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship." On Google/Microsoft/Apple/[insert big company here]: "There are heroes in evil as well as in good."

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.

DisasterTech: "Decisions for Heroes"

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 2

One of the most interesting DisasterTech projects I've been following is "Decisions for Heroes" led by developer and Irish Coast Guard volunteer Robin Blandford.

Decisions is like Basecamp for volunteer Search & Rescue teams. The focus is on providing "just enough" process to compliment the real-world workflow of a rescue team, without unnecessary complexity. One of Robin's design goals is that:

User requirements are nil. Nobody likes reading manuals - if we have to write one, we've gotten too complicated.

This is the winning approach for building systems that "serve those that serve others", and is echoed by InSTEDD's design philosophy and the Sahana disaster management system.

Teams begin by entering their responses to incidents and training exercises. They then tag them with things like the weather conditions, the tools and skills required, and who from the team was deployed.

As a team's incident database grows this information can be used to show heatmaps, and provide powerful insight on the locations, weather conditions, and times of year that various incidents occur. Over time this kind of data could be analyzed in aggregate across multiple teams and regions and create an incredibly powerful resource for Emergency Managers. This is very similar to what Wesabe does for consumers with financial transaction data today (disclosure: OATV investment).

Rescue team members enter training dates and levels. The system tracks certification expiration dates and prompts team members & leaders to plan classes and remain current. This is a huge issue for volunteers who have to manage professional-level training requirements with the demands of a regular career.

As more incidents are entered into the system, it compares the skills required for each of the rescues with the team training exercises. This allows teams to identify areas to focus, train, and develop new skills.

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.

Portable Contacts API Starts to Get Real

by David Recordon | @daveman692 | comments: 13

This evening Joseph and John of Plaxo and I have been hosting a hackathon at Six Apart for the Portable Contacts API (video about PorC). The Portable Contacts API is designed "to make it easier for developers to give their users a secure way to access the address books and friends lists they have built up all over the web."

We originally expected a handful of people to show up and hack on implementing bits of the specification, but so far have been blown away at the progress made and about the twenty people that came. Tomorrow is a summit style meeting hosted by MySpace also in San Francisco to try to finalize the specification among a wide range of providers and consumers. I'm expecting a handful of interesting demos, but wanted to share two that have already come together tonight.

Joseph Smarr and Kevin Marks of Google hacked together a web transformer that integrates Microformats, vCard, and the Portable Contacts API. Given Kevin's homepage which is full of Microformats, they've built an API that extracts his profile information from hCard, uses a public API from Technorati to transform it to vCard, and then exposes it as a Portable Contacts API endpoint. Not only does this work on Kevin's own page, but his Twitter profile as well which contains basic profile information such as name, homepage, and a short bio.

Brian Ellin of JanRain has successfully combined OpenID, XRDS-Simple, OAuth, and the Portable Contacts API to start showing how each of these building blocks should come together. Upon visiting his demo site he logs in using his OpenID. From there, the site discovers that Plaxo hosts his address book and requests access to it via OAuth. Finishing the flow, his demo site uses the Portable Contacts API to access information about his contacts directly from Plaxo. End to end, login with an OpenID and finish by giving the site access to your address book without having to fork over your password.

While the individual building blocks are fairly geeky themselves, pulling them together like has been happening tonight shows that we're only at the beginning of building the next generation of social networks. When the pieces work together, people won't have to know what's going on under the hood; it will just work--and will be almost like magic. John has more photos up on his blog.

Seesmic Starts Adding Features

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 5

Seesmic is a company built specifically to encourage asynchronous video conversations. We spent a few hours recently with Seesmic founder and CEO Loic Le Meur, who kindly gave us an update on the company. Four weeks after opening its service to the public, Seesmic recently announced a product roadmap heavily influenced by users.

After focusing on making sure the service scales, the company is now ready to add features including private groups, the option to block individual users from your Seesmic player, and letting users flag offensive content (e.g. porn). Search is a currently a big problem for them, and according to Loic they plan to address search in several ways: (1) give users the option of adding meta-data to their videos (description, tags, etc.), (2) employ automated audio-to-text software to create transcripts, and (3) since Seesmic videos are already on Google, use Google Video search. With apps for both Facebook and OpenSocial slated to be released in August, Seesmic hopes to draw more teen and college-age users.

One of the problems with following conversations on Seesmic is that unlike text, there isn't a way to skim through video. Some people just take longer to get their point across. Assuming a 2-minute per video average, a conversation involving 60 posts/replies would take two hours to view from start to finish. Board member Pierre Omidyar started a Seesmic thread on the possibility of limiting videos to 30 seconds (a la twitter), but for the moment, there are no plans to limit the length of videos. However, the company plans to provide tools to filter out long videos and to display limited portions for faster viewing.

One month after their public launch, here are some key metrics

• 23,000 unique users from 25 countries (about 50% are from the U.S.)
• 3,000 videos are uploaded each day (total of slightly more than 300K videos)
• average length of a video is 2 minutes
• 30 million page views (doesn't include videos viewed through their API)

The Seesmic community not only provides valuable input for their product team, some users have put together impressive mashups and visualizations. My favorites so far are a Youtube and Seesmic mashup for people conversing in sign language, and a visual of conversations related to the recently released French hostage, Ingrid Betancourt. If you download the PicLens Firefox plugin, a Seesmic user created a fun tool to help you quickly navigate all the videos posted by a particular user: try this sample search ("deepakchopra") and set options to 3D Wall.

As to the inevitable question of business models, Loic is mulling a few possibilities: text ads similar to Google AdSense, premium membership, white labels, and customized players for companies, just to name a few. For now, their recent round of funding gives them the luxury of focusing on growing their user base and improving their service. It remains to be seen whether or not asynchronous video conversations catch on in a massive way. Video may never appeal to the many netizens adept at communicating through text. However, the more time you spend on Seesmic, you start seeing why Loic believes that there will be a market for video conversations. By default, the Seesmic community is defining how that market evolves, and four weeks after launching, they seem to be doing just fine.