Facebook uses 1,500 users to create Spanish Facebook

 

 

Not long ago Facebook took an innovative approach to translating its site into various languages - get the users to do all the work.

Users can ask to translate bits of the site, which are then voted on by other users until a good localized version is created. Users have been hard at work translating Facebook into German, Spanish and French.

Facebook says that the Spanish site was completed in less than four weeks and is based on the work of nearly 1,500 Spanish-speaking Facebook users. Facebook has 2.8 million active users in Latin America and Spain.

Today Facebook opened up the Spanish version of the site. If you visit Facebook from a Spanish-prevalent country starting next week, the default language will be auto set to Spanish. Users can also change the default language to Spanish in their account settings.

Facebook takes a very different approach to localized sites than rival MySpace, which is opening up offices all over the world to serve those markets.

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Bebo’s Application Platform is growing fast, watch out Facebook

 

Bebo is not in the social networking spotlight as often as MySpace and Facebook, but it’s doing well away from the press attention. A couple of weeks ago Bebo launched its API (compatible with Facebook’s application platform), and as Programmable Web’s data shows, the number of Bebo applications has since been growing in a steep curve.

 

With a little over 900 applications Bebo is still far from Facebook’s 14,000+ apps, but Facebook’s API has been around much longer. If you look at sheer growth, Bebo is growing at about half the rate of Facebook, which is still a very good result if you consider that Facebook’s API has been a stellar success (although some might argue *cough* me *cough* that most, if not all, apps on the platform are completely useless.)

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Facebook finances leaked

 

 

Kara Swisher’s is reporting details from an all-hands meeting the Facebook founder held on Thursday for employees that had an open dial-in number, in which he revealed the following financial metrics for the still-private company:

2007 Revenues: $150 million

2008 Revenues: $300 to $350 million (projected)

2007 Headcount: 450

2008 Headcount: 1,000 (projected)

2008 Capital Expenditures: $200 million (i.e., servers)

2008 EBITDA: $50 million

2008 Cash Flow (EBITDA - CapEx): negative 150 million.

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Facebook up, but MySpace still a long way ahead

 

 

New figures release by Hitwise show that despite Facebook’s rising traffic, MySpace still dominates US social networking traffic.

Facebook’s traffic grew 51% from December 2006 to December 2007, taking its share of social networking traffic to 16.03%. MySpace’s traffic declined 8% over the same period, to 72.32%, down from 78.89% in December 2006.

To have a little fun with these figures, if Facebook is worth $15 billion, on traffic ratios alone MySpace would be worth $67.67 billion, a nice earn on the $580 million News Corp acquired the site for.

Of course it doesn’t work like that, but given the gap in traffic between MySpace and Facebook, and more recently the $15 billion valuation for Facebook, MySpace would likely be worth more today than the $12 billion figure floated in June 2007.

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Social networking sites slow and inaccessible, Facebook is the worst

 

 

In recent research, WatchMouse found that many of the world's largest online social networks have poor site performance, leaving users waiting for sites to load or encountering errors.

Of the 104 sites monitored, the immensely popular Facebook (facebook.com) site was the worst performer; recording a slow load time and more errors than any other monitored site. Windows Live Spaces (spaces.live.com) also performed poorly while Friends Reunited (friendsreunited.co.uk) and MySpace (myspace.com) loaded well and recorded few errors.

Conductors of the research, WatchMouse, is a leading supplier of website performance monitoring. Combining industry expertise with 25+ global monitoring stations, WatchMouse provides many multinational companies with independent verification of site performance.

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Unique Visitors to Facebook.com jumped 20% in November

 

 

Are Facebook users even aware of their worsening privacy situation? Take a look at the chart below. Looks like regular Facebook users are mostly unaware of their worsening situation, or more likely don’t know what to do about it - not good.

 

 

The next few months figures will be crucial for Facebook as the recent bad press starts to make users aware of Facebook's privacy controversy.

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LinkedIn is growing faster than Facebook

 

 

These Nielsen statistics show 189% growth for LinkedIn versus 125% growth for Facebook.

LinkedIn is smaller than Facebook, so when you measure percentage growth, smaller sites have an obvious advantage.

LinkedIn has a clear value proposition to older business people who have a tougher time seeing the value of Facebook.

Building a profile on LinkedIn is no harder than inputting your resume. Setting up a Facebook profile that doesn’t embarrass you takes a little more thought.

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Pornographic Ad on Facebook

 

Over the last 24 hours Facebook has seen a number of pornographic adverts like the one above. I saw two within the space of around 30 pages.

Maybe this was a present from Facebook on Thanksgiving!

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Facebook is 2/3 women

 

 

Paul Francis has looked at the Facebook user data via an advertiser tool that facilitates audience targeting.

The data shows a total of 42,966,780 members in the top 31 countries. The U.S. leads with just over 18 million users, followed by the UK (6.8m), Canada (6.7m), Australia (1.9m) and Turkey (1.6m).

Forty percent of U.S. users are male, compared to 36% overall. If you are looking for women, head to China, Italy, Singapore and New Zealand.

The figures show that Facebook is very low in users in Asia. While Friendster is considered a failure in the US, it is worth remembering that they have a very large user base outside of the US. 

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Are Facebook’s social ads illegal?

 

 

While Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg has promised a revolution in advertising there has some been some backlash and more importantly the social ads may be illegal.

According to the NY Times Facebook's ads may be illegal under a 100-year-old New York privacy law. The statute says that “any person whose name, portrait, picture, or voice is used within this state for advertising purposes or for the purposes of trade without the written consent first obtained” can sue for damages. Moreover, such a use is also a criminal misdemeanor.

According to William McGeveran, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who wrote about these laws in a blog post today, the law would apply to Facebook users anywhere if the ad were displayed in New York.

While the lawyers will no doubt find a way to resolve the legal issues, the bigger picture revolves around a backlash from the internet community. If any form of backlash picks up momentum Facebook may find its new ad platform a thorn in its side.

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Facebook Ads is based on trusted personal recommendations

 

 

Facebook Ads has finally launched and can be simplified into three parts:

1. Ads targeted at Facebook members using their profile data such as age, gender, relationship status, work history, and stated interests (Social Ads)

2. Ad widgets that advertisers can put on their own sites that allow Facebook members to become product endorsers, and spread that endorsement to all of their friends on Facebook through their personal feeds (Beacon).

3. Aggregated profile information that is exposed to Facebook advertisers that tells them what kind of people are getting their ads and who is clicking on them (Insight).

At the lanch press conference Mark Zuckerberg said “Once every hundred years media changes. the last hundred years have been defined by the mass media. The way to advertise was to get into the mass media and push out your content. That was the last hundred years. In the next hundred years information won’t be just pushed out to people, it will be shared among the millions of connections people have. Advertising will change. You will need to get into these connections.

“People influence people. Nothing influences people more than recommendations from a trusted friend. A trusted referral influences people more than the best broadcast message. A trusted referral is the Holy Grail of advertising."

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MySpace to compete with Facebook with targeted ads

 

 

MySpace will today launch a new advertsiing service that allows it to sell advertisements targeted to the individual tastes and interests of its millions of users.

The advertising sales system is called "hyper targeting" because it uses the personal information which users input about themselves to tailor personalised online adverts.

This news will overshadow the recent news from Facebook who is also expected ot launch a similar ad network.

MySpace says click through rates on its hyper-targeted advertisements are 300 per cent greater than for other advertisements on its site.

More than 50 advertisers have signed up to the MySpace scheme, including Procter & Gamble, Microsoft, Ford and Toyota.

Online advertising i presentoy experiencing a big boom in term sof new startups and as a sustainable business for many publishers.

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Facebook to launch ad network to rival Google Adwords

 

 

Mark Zuckerberg will be announcing the launch of Facebook’s new advertising system on November 6th. 

This news comes days after Facebook released an unannounced upgrade to their Flyers system, enabling users to view demographic data within the site. Interestingly, Facebook recently filed a trademark for “SocialAds” just last month.

It appears as though this is finally taking place next month. Facebook is also expected to launch an advanced analytics package and e-commerce features for the Facebook platform.

Imagine if Facebook, who now has access to over 50 million users’ personal information could target ads based on those profiles anywhere on the web. 

Facebook will be leveraging the cookies installed in users’ browsers after logging into Facebook in order to target them across the web. In the instance that the user doesn’t have one of the Facebook cookies installed, ads similar to those of what Google currently provides will be displayed.

This may well explain why Microsoft has invested $240 million in Facebook.  Thanks to their advertising partnership, Microsoft will now be able to provide targeted ads not only based on demographic data (location, age, gender, etc), but they will also know that the person visiting your site is interested in skiing and guitar.

All of this information will allow Facbook to make considerably more money that the standard Adwords.

Google may well have some serious competition.

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Microsoft takes a $240 million equity stake in Facebook

 

 

Microsoft has announced they will take a $240 million equity stake in Facebook's next round of financing at a $15 billion valuation, and the companies will expand their existing advertising partnership.

Under the expanded strategic alliance, Microsoft will be the exclusive third-party advertising platform partner for Facebook, and will begin to sell advertising for Facebook internationally in addition to the United States.

Making this investment and expanding this partnership will position Microsoft and Facebook to better take advantage of advertising opportunities around the world.

The opportunity to further collaborate as advertising partners is a big reason they have decided to take an equity stake.   

Facebook continues to experience strong growth both in the U.S. and international markets; 59 percent of Facebook's users are outside the U.S. With an average of 250,000 new users registering each day, Facebook continues to be one of the most-trafficked sites on the Internet.

On Aug. 22, 2006, the companies announced a U.S.-only strategic alliance that named Microsoft the exclusive provider of standard banner advertising on Facebook using Microsoft's digital advertising solutions and the Microsoft(R) adCenter platform. In early 2007, the terms were extended to 2011.

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Microsoft and Google face off over Facebook investment

 

 

The race to invest in Facebook is in its home stretch, reports NYP, with Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) and Google (NSDQ: GOOG) duking it out...the investment deal might be announced in the next day or two, the story says.

Each are vying for a 5-10 percent stake, and the valuation could reach the fabled pre-money valuation of $10 billion-$15 billion. On the high side, that means Microsoft or Google would have to come up with $1.5 billion for a 10 percent stake or $750 million for a 5 percent stake.

NYP says it looks like Google might have the upper hand, and that Tim Armstrong, the head of advertising for the company, is leading Google's negotiations.

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What do we really use social networking sites for?

 

 

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Facebook have sold at a $10 billion valuation, traffic is now falling in the US

 

 

The figures above shows Facebook's 9.3% decline in unique visitors as reported via comScore. The graph below shows similar figures from Compete's with a 7.7% fall. These figures only take into account US traffic and we know that Facebook has recently seen huge traffic growth in Europe and Australia.

 

 

Facebook should have exited when it was at the $10B valuation point. With myspace releasing the open API’s soon, a Facebook switch is just 1-click away.

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Facebook applications by popularity

 

 

Tim O'Reilly has released the results of a fascinating study of Facebook as an application platform. Slide, RockYou,iLike and Flixter are the most popular. Tim's got good news and bad news.

The good news has already been widely disseminated: there are nearly 5000 Facebook applications, and the top applications have tens of millions of installs and millions of active users. The bad news, alas, is in our report: 87% of the usage goes to only 84 applications! Only 45 applications have more than 100,000 active users. This is a long tail marketplace with a vengeance -- but unfortunately, the economic models (for developers at least, though not for Facebook itself) all rely on getting into the very short head. Here's the distribution of active users among the top 200 developers. (Some developers have multiple popular applications.) As you can see, the drop-off is extremely steep.

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Facebook continues to grow rapidly

 

Facebook continues to grow rapidly. The graph above shows the three fastest growing Facebook markets outside of the US.

The UK ontributed over 5.5 billion page views in the month of August, which means everyone out there saw an average of 1,100 Facebook pages.

That means and average user looks at 35 Facebook pages per today. These figures are incredibly strong and shows that Facebook may not be a fad, as suggested by Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer.

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