Monday 4 June 2007

Facebook

Why is it so popular? 

Here are some (staggering) facts :

  • Facebook has 24 million active users (who have used the site in the last 30 days) and of them, 50% of them login each day. Apparently the next most active social network,  is not more than 15%.
  • A recent survey has found that 50% of college age females said Facebook was their #1 most important web site (even more than Google, Wikipedia, or anything else) and that 1/3 of college age males said it was their #1.
  • Look how many “addicts” Facebook has, according to Quantcast. 63% of visits are from addicts. eBay is only 56%.
  • Facebook is adding 100,000 new users per day; that’s ~3% growth per month. And the fastest growing segment is over age 25, so at this rate, they’ll have 50 million users by the end of this year, and 75% of them will be out of college. I read just on paidcontent.org that Facebook is the fastest growing social network in the UK, and already 10% of Canada’s population is using it.

With 40 billion pages view per month, Facebook has passed eBay in page views, and is now in 6th place, just behind Google. 

Personally, i'm not a fan of social networking sites, but Facebook has been designed and implemented well, and their recent decision to allow application developers access to core Facebook features, such as user profiles and user connections, and even publishing to the News Feed, all with the control and permission of Facebook users is excellent. So if you build an app and a Facebook user chooses it, it will show up on their profile for all their friends to see, and they can enable that app with a single click, and so your application can spread virally to the 24 million other users.   Food for thought.