Inside Facebook: the Facebook Book

Alexa now finally lists Facebook in its top 10, after some lag due to their “3-month average” methodology. Facebook is actually 8th now, having leapfrogged biadu, orkut and wikipedia. If I ignore hi5, as I plan to continue to do for a while, myspace is the next site up ahead. That’s the elite company at which FB has arrived with 8 months of explosive, unprecedented growth.

Now we need to find a metric around site utility, which distinguishes the informative content of google or wikipedia, from random profile and photo surfing on a social network. Furthermore, social networks will start to get more sophisticated with their monitization, using their demographic and personal information in unique ways - to seriously match users with purchases or brand identification. Further refining the “value equation” we need to incorporate ajax and flash, which is an increasing part of the facebook (and google and yahoo) experience, optimizing the user experience at a cost to pageviews, in a way myspace would be challenged to imitate.

Have any of you ever woken up on a Saturday or Sunday morning to discover that one of your friends has tagged 18 photos of you from the night before that you don’t quite remember taking? Have you ever received 15 comments on your wall from people you don’t know that well due to a change in your relationship status? Do you ever find yourself saying at least a few times a day “I hate facebook,” when really you check your profile every hour? If there is one thing that I learned after the first day of college, it is that facebook is an unavoidable evil. It is a great tool to stay in contact with friends and send invitations, but you pay a great price for such a tool: your privacy. However! The good news is that some of my most amusing dramas from freshman year came about because of facebook. I will describe briefly for you one of the most fascinating of these dramas: The Facebook Breakup.

When I went to college many of my friends (including myself) were in long distance relationships. Of course, most of these relationships ended within the first few weeks of college. The most memorable of these breakups happened with a friend down the hall. This breakup was memorable due to the classic “facebook war” she had with her ex in Colarodo the week after they broke up. This “facebook war,” as many facebook wars, involved 3 main steps:

1. Changing Your “Relationship Status”

Of course, the first thing you do when you breakup with someone on the phone is not to cry or call your best friend. Instead, you absolutely must change your facebook status from “In a Relationship” to Single. You may think I’m joking, but this is exactly what my friend (as well as many of my other friends) did after a breakup.

2. Changing Pictures

Not only do you have to change your profile picture of your with your past “love,” you also have to make sure that you have untagged all of the romantic pictures you had together. As my friend told me, the purpose of such an action was to “Make the other person feel bad.”

3. Writing Comments About What a Horrible Person Your Ex Is

For many people it is not enough to just end a relationship with a breakup. Many times your bitterness causes you to have a thought that goes something like this, “I’m going to make sure that everyone who is my friend on facebook knows what a horrible person my ex is.” Of course, such an action serves two purposes; to indirectly tell your boyfriend how much you hate him while at the same time thinking that if your publish your thoughts on your ex he/she will never be able to find a significant other again : )

AThought355
www.philisophicalhigh.blogspot.com

Perhaps on the back of the Newsweek cover story, FB just burst up to 2.98% reach on Alexa, so will be at 3% imminently. It took 3 months from mid-march to climb from 1% to 2%, and less than 2 months to jump to 3%.

The pageviews graph shows even more impressive results, with a 4 month climb from 0.5% of internet traffic to 1%, followed by the jump of almost 0.5% in the last 6 weeks. Incredible: according to alexa, facebook is serving 50% more pageviews now than it was 2 months ago, shortly after their api launch. apps.facebook.com is now contributing 5% of pageviews, and 300 applications have over 25K members.

Fred Stutzman reported on Comscore’s analysis of social network growth rates, noting that total unique visitors shows 270% growth for FB between jun ‘06 and ‘07, up to 54 million visits, a rate roughly 3x greater than the competition, with almost 70% of this in the most profitable north american demographic. Much of this with older members, as Business Week discusses, where a tremendous potential for growth obviously remains.

My prediction 2 months ago that FB would supercede myspace within a year is one-quarter achieved as FB rapidly closes the gap, with “reach” growth even more rapid than my chosen metric of pageviews. Since 50% of all FB users visit the site daily, according to company statements, this reach growth is a powerful forward indicator of pageviews. Alexa now ranks FB 8th in the world over the prior week. hi5 is keeping up with its latin american storm, but i see them as another myspace for a different demographic, and couldn’t contemplate betting on them over facebook.

The true tipping point will come when other major websites feel compelled to create facebook applications, just as they felt in 2000 a need to make a website. We are 6-9 months away, and other major social networks will actually contribute to the inevitable pressure by encouraging those apps to build for their networks as well.

The latest rumors postpone an IPO out to two years. If so, general market pressure would be the culprit, and FB would be waiting for conditions to support a huge new market cap after this current mortagage/debt recession weakens, just as google 2004 IPO showed the web 1.0 bust was well past. Having zero insider knowledge at this point, I still predict an IPO in 2008, after a few explosive revenue deals (showcasing its demographic and rich data uniqueness) and its position in the public mind within the same tier as myspace and google secured.