Inside Facebook: the Facebook Book

FB’s ambition has been to be the “social operating system” of the internet.  Ebay was an original platform for business, and FB ads the social dimension, and has already passed ebay’s pageviews.  A key link on FB’s marketplace shows the listings of your Friends.  It’s clear we’d prefer to do commerce with people we know, and this is a natural evolution of the internet - in <10 years I predict most web activity will be social.  It's just more natural.  Ebay is market capitalized at $44B, half off of its 2005 high, so is this commercial foray works out, FB will be easily over $5B.  As Peter Thiel noted in the New York Times yesterday, Facebook is not for sale. (anymore)

Formalizing the position of businesses using the Platform (previously call Facebook API) will encourage designers to invest the development time.  For example, I’ll implement it on PTrades.com my niche commodities trader social web application - so that for my on-Facebook members, their executed trades will appear in their mutual news feeds.

I also think F8 is a cool name, and it shouldn’t have been just for the big party.  F8 is geeky, it looks like FB and it is a rather unique search keyword in the social webapp context.  What’s I’M, Microsoft’s new IM initiative?  Try to search google for that - only their sheer brilliance brings one right link into the top ten if you add “Microsoft” to the query.  Now search for “f8 platform”, which shows clear results.

What’s a facebook poke, and why is it important?

Initially FB was very successful at helping people hook up, or find sex friends, which apparently is a big deal at Harvard. As I write in the book, the first version of mobile had an easter egg all about sending your room number if you’re in that mood.

So Poke was a way of showing interest. Now it seems no one know what it means, which is why it is the awesome yet tremendously underused feature.

Poke is: a) a temporary friendship, b) a high visibility and low pressure way of getting attention. As such, it has no conceptual rival in the social networking space. Facebook should promote it, so I go out of my way to revive Pokey. If you create a group dedicated to him, I’ll join it and promote it.

Pokes appear prominently in the top right of the “Home” page view, and don’t go away until you act. Poke allows the other party to see your profile, to gauge interest by themselves in contacting you, so a mutual poke is a temporary friendship. Since friending is rarely undone, even when it should be to prevent friend dilution, it is nice that the poke expiry requires no action. I’d like to be able to archive friends, the same way I’d like to archive FB messages, when I’m not actively involved with them.

Poke just means “look at me”, whenever you like. It’s nice and polite. Go forth, and Poke.

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

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.