Inside Facebook: the Facebook Book

In case you’re wondering.  And waiting. 等一下。  Internet es muy rapido.

Without adding much information, despite access to FB’s VC and angel investors, the NYT oh so boldly says that FB insiders believe that FB is worth more than $1B.

Facebook’s great value lies in its structured usable data, which is the most comprehensive personal data set ever acquired about a generation. Furthermore FB is opening access to it in a gradual careful way, so it could become the basis for a large number of services, the same way google search contributes power to many web apps. While the $1.86B yahoo offered (according to leaked deal documents posted at TechCrunch and now removed) is high, and the documents show that at that time the economics of the deal needed to be stretched to make strict financial sense, like the MySpace deal this figure is likely to seem like a value someday.

Very few status messages are noticed by friends on Facebook. Yet I still like to use it. Why? I guess I just like to imagine people are paying attention to me. Real pseudoscientific research follows.
Last November, only 6 of my “friends” replied to a request in my Status to ping me if they saw it. That’s less that 5% taking the trouble to send an empty message. Before this I had posted a note and two statuses about serious personal issues, including a brain tumor of a friend, and received only message related to that. So, serious statuses rarely deliver serious action, and non-serious statuses may get a look, but not enough attention to warrant a 10 second action.

Important people at Facebook may not realize this, because their statuses are greeted with extreme interest. With the new layout, new looks into the status are provided, but emphasize the status of friends. I can’t see my own status back more than a few days. If my status really is for Me, or for someone who really wants to take the time to understand my life, perhaps the longer term views of a single persons status (including my own) would be more interesting.

Even though I know this, I’ll probably continue to shout out into the dark with my status. It’s a fun waste of time, and I get to feel witty, just to myself.

The growth rates of non-college networks must have dramatically risen, since alexa notes that FB unique vistors have grown from 0.6% of the internet population to 1.3% in the first 3 months of this year, lifting facebook into the top 20 global sites.
Dustin, as usual more humorous and witty than humble, notes that at present growth rates FB will have every internet user registered around 2010. To get these numbers of off Alexa’s current 1.3% reach, Dustin must be seeing is an amazing rate of around 15% growth/month. That would project to something like 60M at end 2007, with a doubling period of 5 months, 6 doubling periods and 30 months later would see 4B around the middle 2010.

Amazing what compounded growth off of a large base can theoretically achieve.

At this moment, according to alexa, yahoo.com servers 6% of all internet traffic, google around 2%, and facebook 0.8%. Amazing for a site that is around 3 years old. Fast Company’s May edition has a traffic chart showing FB exceeds 15M Active daily users.

Dustin once noted with a straight face that FB is the best architected web application on the internet. While google wins that award, facebook page delivery scales very nicely. It will be interesting to see whether the relevancy of the Feed can be improved while the data flow continue to grow exponentially.

Over the last four months where I took a writing fast, I

• Completed a relaunch of ptrades.com, THE commodities trading community. Go look.
• Built a ton of infrastructure for mEgo.com, which will be out public in a few months.
• Completed planning for 3 new sites, which will come out around summer.  I know, you can’t wait.
• Thought about stuff.  So I’ll be posting again more regularly, until my next fast.

I like to hear your feedback and ideas, even more than I like to write my own.

cheers,

Karel