Facebook Ascending

I keep hearing all sorts of astounding statistics for Facebook and I'm never quite sure which ones are correct.  So I asked the the corporate communications folk, and it turns out that the most astounding numbers seem to be the most accurate.

Here's what I got from the company:

• Over 150,000 registrants daily. That's 1 million a week since January.
• 35 million users today.  Of course that number will be off a million one week from today.
• Half user are outside college.  That number was zero in Sept. 2006.
• 0ver 40 billion page views in May 2007
• Average visitor stays 20 minutes
• Most growth is among people over age 25.
• 47,000 Facebook groups.
• #1 photo sharing app on the web. 2.7 billion photos on site.
• More than 2000 applications. The Top 10 are: Top Friends, Video, Graffiti, MyQuestions, iLike, FreeGifts, X Me, Superpoke!, Fortune Cookie & Horoscopes. The smallest of these has over 4.5 million users.

Like Scoble says, "It's a Facebook world."

Comments

[Justin Thorp]

Facebook has definitely been successful. I don't think anyone doubts that.

Social networking sites become a value add when your friends use them. 95% of my friends use Facebook and because of that it can be useful. If you look at Pownce, only 5% of my friends use that so its utility decreases exponentially.

But I dunno... I go back and forth on Facebook. It allows you to stay in touch with a lot of people but it doesn't do it very well. 98% of Facebook communication lacks any substance whatsoever.

Most of the applications don't do much of anything of value. I haven't really seen an app that does a good job of taking advantage of what your social network has to offer.

Most of the groups aren't actually sources of community and discourse. They're badges of common interest, like the "I Enjoy Naps" group.

Don't get me wrong... there IS community in Facebook but does my time in Facebook allow me to actually better stay in touch with people or just help me keep up the illusion of staying in touch with a bunch of people I'm not actually that close to (like high school friends I've not seen since I graduated high school.)

I'd much rather talk to someone over the phone or grab a beer (or coffee) with someone.

As a developer, Facebook is a nightmare. I don't want me to be locked into their environment.

Sorry for the rant.

Best Wishes!
- justin

[patmcgraw]

Justin is dead on target. Life (reality) should be about the quality of the relationships and none of the social networking sights have gone beyond quantity of relationships. I do a shitty job of keeping up with the 80% of my contact base...and all these sites do for me is help keep up with new addresses and job titles. I have reached out to my entire base via LinkedIn (my colleagues and friends aren't on Facebook or MySpace...I have looked and asked them) but I could/should do this via regular old email and telephone.

But social networks and online communities are relatively new and the Holy Trinity is getting press so I try them, test them...and expect that without a major leap in experience, I will leave them behind in the near future.

[Julie]

To Justin and the others,
I get what your saying. I wish all of my friends would choose a different network other than facebook, but the reality, at least my reality is that facebook is too important to be ignored.
So..I found the perfect solution: 8hands.
It's a cute desktop tool that aggregates all your profiles, (myspce and facebook among them.) and with 8hands the emphasis is the quality of the relationships, not their quantity.

[Shannon Clark]

I have to disagree with the commenters - it precisely the small, seemingly meaningless data about your network which is the VALUE of a site such as Facebook (and which Facebook does far better than any other social network I have used).

Think about our social interactions OFFLINE. The glue that holds us together is not "what you can do for me" - rather it is ongoing awareness of each other - the smiles as we pass on the street, the waves we give to our neighbors, the small talk with the other commuters on our way to work (or in line getting coffee etc).

Relationships are much, much more than what we can "do" for each other - they are our awareness of each other, our recognition of each other as humans - not as job titles or positions.

So the constant feed of small datapoints about our network gives us a passive sense of who we are connected to, what they are paying active attention to, what they are telling the world about themselves.

Also, the passive and somewhat random nature of how this data is updated (it is not just in time sequence, the algorithms at Facebook rotate what you see and also weigh people with whom you have interacted to show them more frequently) is a subtle signal that we don't have to pay deep attention to every notice - that we can let them wash over us and only when something strikes us dive deeper into it.

I appreciate these small social gestures and decisions of Facebook - in an event for example it rotates the names and photos shown of attendees - so each time you look at an event you might note a different person.

The utility is in the awareness of others. (Twitter for me serves a similar role - just tonight a friend saw my twitter about a relatively meaningless point, where I was having dinner, and noted that she had almost been at the exact same street this evening as well - that small exchange likely will spark a conversation between us the next time we see each other).

And from that small conversation, who knows - might even be some "real" business - but certainly we'll have a more human and real connection.

Shannon