Brinkish

Facebook is Rolling

New data out from comScore shows Facebook’s growth continuing to accelerate.

• Unique monthly visitors have almost doubled in the last year from 14 million in May 2006 to 26.6 million in May 2007
• Total page views has increased over 140% during the same time period, from 6.5 billion per month in May 2006 to 15.8 billion per month in May 2007
• Most provocatively, average minutes spent on the site per user per month increased 35% over the last year, from 138 in May 2006 to 186 per month in May 2007

Facebook demographics also saw a rise in the young and the old - it’s no longer just the college crowd.

• Visitors aged 12-17 increased 150% over the last year
• Visitors 18-24 increased 38%
• Visitors 25-34 increased 181% during that time - a huge number
• Visitors 35+ increased 98%

By opening its registration beyond college students and companies, Facebook has succeeded in growing the service beyond its founding core of college students and recent alums.  We expect its recent 30% month-to-month growth rate to continue for at least another month or two as Facebook continues to penetrate international markets and older demographics.

Also -- Facebook recently says,

"We asked ourselves the search question more than once while working on improvements to search in March 2006. At the time, there were bigger search engines out there, including some good open source ones, that we could have used to power Facebook search results. However, we decided that searches carried out on Facebook had a particular structure that only we could understand and optimize for. We wrote a crawler for the site, created an in-memory reverse index using both hashes and ternary tries and created a ranking system that scaled to return unique results for over 28 million user profiles.

Some quick stats about Facebook search:

• Over 600 million searches per month. This makes us one of the top 20 search engines on the web in terms of number of searches.
• Approximately 1 terabyte of in-memory data.
• Average search query time of less than 100ms.
• Most used people search engine on the web.

Facebook search results are sorted by an approximation of social graph distance. People closer to you in the graph—your friends and people in your networks—are likely to be more relevant to you and thus are ranked higher. We also use this concept of "social proximity" to order results within applications like groups and events. Facebook search's key differentiator is that search results are unique to every user because they are based on a individual's place in the social graph.

We have big plans to improve Facebook search in the upcoming months. We want to leverage the power of the social graph to further improve the quality of the results and ensure that you find what you are looking for on Facebook."

Google Feeds Innovation - So Can Your Boss

Google is widely considered to be the most innovative company on Earth (not to mention worth more than 50 Billion) by many in the software industry (and obviously stockholders as well).

A number of Google's competitors have several internal groups whose job is to "incubate ideas" and foster innovation yet it seems that Google is the company most associated with innovation in the online space.

For example, Yahoo! has Brickhouse and Yahoo! Research while Microsoft has Microsoft Research, Live Labs, Search Labs, and Windows Live Core among others. 

Below are some of the ways technology companies can follow Google's  example without having to resort to some of their more eccentric practices like free food prepared by gourmet chefs and on-site massages, dry cleaning and oil changes to motivate your employees.

1.  Everyone is Responsible for Innovation: There are several ways Google has created a culture where every technical employee feels that innovation is expected of them. First, there is the strong preference for people who have a track record of producing original ideas such as Ph.D's [who are required to produce original research which advances the state of the art as part of their thesis] and founders of Open Source projects (e.g. Spencer Kimball (GIMP), Aaron Boodman (Greasemonkey), and Guido Van Rossum (Python)). Secondly, employees are strongly encouraged but not required to spend 20% of their time on projects of their own design which are intended to benefit the company and/or its customers. Not only does this give employees an outlet for their creativity in a productive way, working on multiple projects at once gives developers a broader world view which makes it less likely that they will develop tunnel vision with regards to their primary project. Finally, Google has a single code base for all of their projects and developers are strongly encouraged to fix bugs or add features to any Google product they want even if they are not on the product team. This attitude encourages the cross pollination of ideas across the company and encourages members of the various product teams to keep an open mind about ideas from outside their particular box.

2. Good Ideas Often Come from Outside your Box: A lot number of people in the software industry often criticize Microsoft for it's practice of innovation through acquisition and have compiled lists of Microsoft's innovations that were actually acquisitions but the fact is that the road to success lies in being able to spot good ideas whether they come from within your company or without.

3.  Force Competition to Face the Innovator's Dilemma: One reason that a number of Google's products are considered innovative is that they challenge a number of pre-existing notions about software in certain categories. For example, when Gmail [a product of an engineer's 20% time spent on side projects] was first launched it was a shock to see a free Web-based email service qive users 1 gigabyte of free storage. A key reason that this was a shock was because most free Web-based email services gave users less than a hundredth of that amount of storage. This was because the business model for free email was primarily to give users a crappy user experience (2MB of storage, obnoxious advertising, etc) and then charge them for upgrading to a decent experience. Thus there was little incentive for the major players in the free email business to give free users lots of storage or a rich online experience because isn't how the business worked. Another example, that is likely to be a classic case study of the innovator's dilemma in the years to come is Google Docs & Spreadsheets vs. Microsoft Office. From the Wikipedia article on disruptive technology.

In low-end disruption, the disruptor is focused initially on serving the least profitable customer, who is happy with a good enough product. This type of customer is not willing to pay premium for enhancements in product functionality. Once the disruptor has gained foot hold in this customer segment, it seeks to improve its profit margin. To get higher profit margins, the disruptor needs to enter the segment where the customer is willing to pay a little more for higher quality. To ensure this quality in its product, the disruptor needs to innovate. The incumbent will not do much to retain its share in a not so profitable segment, and will move up-market and focus on its more attractive customers. After a number of such encounters, the incumbent is squeezed into smaller markets than it was previously serving. And then finally the disruptive technology meets the demands of the most profitable segment and drives the established company out of the market.                        

As someone who now maintains several wedding lists in collaboration with his future spouse I can say without a doubt that universal access to our files from any computer without my fiancèe or I having to install or purchase any software is head and shoulders beyond the solution provided by traditional desktop productivity suites. In addition, it is quite clear that Google will move to address the gaps in time (see Google Gears) so we are likely on the cusp of a multi-billion dollar software category undergo upheaval in the next few years.

The main lesson here is Change the Game. Do not play by the rules that favor your competitors.          

Every successful company needs innovation -- tell your boss.

Facebook -- the King of Networking

With the Facebook Platform’s launch and the thousands of independent 3rd party web application developers that have jumped onboard, Facebook’s biggest competitors are reacting quickly to follow suit.

What does this mean?

It means that Facebook is winning the race -- that race being to populate the Internet with people-powered content that is open and shared.

- Last week, Reid Hoffman told Dan Farber that LinkedIn would be announcing platform-esque capabilities later this year:

“Over the next 9 months LinkedIn would deliver APIs for developers, ostensibly to make it more of platform like Facebook…”

- A few days ago, Chris DeWolfe told the Financial Times that MySpace is basically going to follow suit and open up more than it ever has before:

“MySpace is likely to change its technology strategy to allow other online companies to ‘plug’ their web services directly into its social networking site…’The [Facebook] platform is interesting,’ Mr. DeWolfe said.”

With the advent of the Facebook Platform, many entrepreneurs have realized how much harder it is to convince people to build their social network on a new platform than to get them to share a new application with their network where they already are.

Aka, for the last few years...it's been all about creating new social-networking Sites, but now Facebook has made the application plug-in business model a legit possibility like never before.

As  the consolidation of social-graph building onto core networking platforms continues into the coming year, expect to see other social networks, Web 2.0 Sites, and even corporations begin to follow suit with much more open APIs.

What does open APIs mean?  It means more mash-ups, more developers, more creativity, more utilities, more business models, and more Web 2.0 doo-dads that most people haven't even thought possible.

The Facebook Platform is going to show corporations the value of building a third party application ecosystem around their “platform."

The bottom line....Facebook is in the driver's seat with strong and visionary leadership behind the wheel.

Facebook Development Explodes

Justin Smith and Johnathan Lipps have gathered data from all the top apps on Facebook  and one thing’s clear: Facebook applications have taken off like wildfire.

In fact, to the tune of 65 million net application installs over the course of the past 30 days. That’s an average of 2.5 installed applications per every registered Facebook user.

The Top 50 Apps on Facebook:

Rank	Facebook Application	Users
1	Top Friends	7,030,746
2	iLike	4,045,129
3	Fortune Cookie	3,940,960
4	Horoscopes	3,740,614
5	Graffiti	3,738,513
6	X Me	3,441,475
7	SuperPoke!	3,079,407
8	Free Gifts	2,759,771
9	Movies	2,682,796
10	Video	2,643,710
11	Mobile	1,943,948
12	Moods	1,860,925
13	Honesty Box	1,769,460
14	My Questions	1,400,201
15	Favorite Peeps!	1,364,028
16	Food Fight!	1,242,812
17	Slideshows	1,177,410
18	Causes	1,172,609
19	Quizzes	1,102,933
20	HOT or NOT	1,100,466
21	Trakzor	787,070
22	Poke Pro	772,288
23	Where I’ve Been	767,969
24	Super Wall	723,046
25	(fluff)Friends	627,813
26	Emote	624,382
27	Audio	616,605
28	Magic 8 ball	412,495
29	Famous Quotes	411,196
30	TravBuddy.com Countries Visited Map	345,299
31	iGift	340,485
32	Red Bull Roshambull	285,203
33	HotLists	283,157
34	Games	281,830
35	Matches	281,488
36	The Compass	259,052
37	I am Hungry	238,116
38	Compliments	231,057
39	Picnik	202,785
40	Pets	202,032
41	Socialmoth	200,742
42	Glitter Text	191,682
43	Tag!	155,616
44	Drink	137,196
45	Extended Info	130,747
46	Trips	128,473
47	Fast Friends	123,351
48	Election ‘08	121,884
49	Cities I’ve Visited	121,428
50	Daily Bible Verse	115,234