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Does Facebook’s Overseas Growth Matter?
Earlier this month, I shared with you my post that called for a big wake-up call for Social Networking sector, thanks to the presence of too many me-too players at a time when recent traffic trends are showing signs of hitting a plateau. Hitwise recently reported that in the US, MySpace and Facebook ranked 1st and 2nd had 95% and 93% repeat visitors for the month.
The May 2008 traffic data from comScore furthers that argument. Another interesting finding of the May 2008 data – Facebook is doing much better than MySpace in the overseas markets.
Nevertheless, of late, I have stopped taking traffic on face value, and instead almost always juxtapose it to how much money you make off those page views. (Dave McClure recently chastised me for thinking too much in the short term.)
Matt Brezina, co-founder of Xobni earlier pointed out that Facebook will take in $265 million and MySpace will bring in $755 million in 2008. So unless the overseas (and overall page view) growth translate into real big dollars, our friends at Facebook (and MySpace) have problems. Experts believe that the answer is in better relevance in display advertising – still the dominant form of advertising on the social networks.
Facebook vs Others
The traffic trends have to be troubling for for geographic hits such as Orkut and Friendster. The overseas growth of Facebook also calls into question the veracity of the decision by AOL to pay $850 million for Bebo. Some data crunching by Andrew Chen (using the newly announced Google Trends) shows that Facebook is making big headway in markets such as UK, France, China, and India. Orkut is very popular in India, while as the map shows Bebo is big in UK and other European countries.
I think it is these guys who need to worry the most with Facebook’s march & MySpace’s rear guard action. I suspect, if Facebook continues to grow, MySpace could opt for buying market share.
But if you take a larger view, Chen’s conclusion, that “Social networks have weaker network effects than previously speculated,” is quite prescient. As someone once noted, social networks are like night clubs – there is always a cooler, hipper, funkier joint being planned by someone.
Over past few years, generally described as the golden years of social networking have led to the sector’s giants resting on their laurels. The fundamental nature (and utility) of social networks hasn’t really changed. The platform-ization of social networks has led to the rise of social apps that are best described as time wasters. You can be fascinated by vampire bites and what not but in the end, there is a finite amount of time you can waste.
In other words, Social Networks need to find new purposes for people to come back every day and be loyal. I had argued in my previous post that the world of social networks is going to be divided into two – the big players (MySpace, Facebook) and niche players (Dogster, Dopplr etc.)
In a recent chat, Ning CEO Gina Bianchini pointed out that they are adding 2000 new niche social networks every day and are now upto 315,000 networks. The niche is allowing the company to get even good non-optimized, straight-up average eCPMs from AdSense. She pointed out that they are about 3 to 4 times better than the average for general one-size-fits-all social networks. “This is because the social networks on Ning are organized around well-defined topics and interests – skiing, smart cars, diabetes, etc. As a result, contextual advertising works more effectively for Ning than it does for other general social networks,” she said.
Photo Courtesy of comScore via C/Net News.com’s The Social.
Here Comes Trouble: A Social Directory
The declining relevance of telephone directories erased 95 percent of publisher RH Donnelley’s market capitalization over the last 12 months. Although Google’s free 1-800-GOOG-411 service may attract some share of the directory assistance business, the crux of the problem lies with the diminished standing of wired telephones in an increasingly crowded communications landscape. The demise of paper directories does not, however, mean there exists a clear alternative to accommodate the growing list of communication coordinates most people juggle. A “social directory” created by merging the telephone directory with the social networking model may provide a way forward.
Given the open-ended nature of the information that gets indexed, search engines remain poorly suited to the task of finding contact information. Success depends on a cleverly structured query; search engines do not, after all, distinguish contact information from other types of information. But while a directory with a relatively finite and narrow data set (e.g. contact information) would greatly increase the probability of success, the process of creating directories still awaits an Internet upgrade.
The standard model for directories fails with respect to mobile phones, email addresses and instant messaging screen names. Posting the Yellow Pages online retains the same city and state search limitations of the paper directories, and the infrequent publishing cycle of directories becomes unworkable at the current pace with which communication coordinates get added and subtracted. Further, the growth in communication options makes it impractical to rely on a single service provider directory. What makes much more sense in our Internet-heavy world is a user-generated directory in which individuals own and update their own listing.
The lack of a directory for mobile phone numbers traces to the fear of unwanted calls. A directory that supports authentication along the lines of social networks solves this problem. Keeping your number secret and employing Caller ID are poor substitutes for actually controlling who can call you. The social directory could implement an invite authentication process like any other social network. People already include some contact information in their social network profiles, but a purpose-built social directory could offer additional communication functionality.
The social directory represents a far more elegant solution than that of spamming friends with requests to update contact information through services like Plaxo. The social directory could make a social circle accessible via clickable links while hiding the actual contact information. Rather than giving out a telephone number or email address to a new acquaintance, users of a social directory would associate their listing with keywords (such as “plumber” or “dog lover”).
As the number of communication options increases, so does the burden of managing contact information, yet Internet-enabled directory options remain lacking. Google’s 60 percent share of Internet searches gives the company both gatekeeper status in the information Internet — not to mention a rich market capitalization. However, Google’s revenue represents less than a third of what the declining telephone directories generate in the U.S. alone. Riches await the infocom company that achieves gatekeeper status for the Internet’s communications applications.
FCC Gives Apartment Dwellers Freedom To Choose Their Phone Company
This is one decision I can totally applaud– FCC is banning exclusive phone deals for apartments. In other words, you can pick whatever phone company you want and not be restricted to the “agreements” building owners have with phone companies. I think for once FCC has taken a consumer-first decision. Housing and real estate groups are bitching and moaning… of course they would. What would be great if FCC extends this to broadband as well. For instance, I would love to buy my broadband from Ethernet-based service provider, WebPass and not the two current choices of Comcast and the phone company. [Fixed the bad Web Pass URL. Sorry folks]
FolderShare vs. Dropbox
Earlier this week Om wrote about Dropbox, which he liked so much that we at GigaOM are trying it out for our file-sharing and backup needs. Also this week, FolderShare, another remote file access program, launched its first version since being acquired by Microsoft two-and-half years ago. So I decided to try them out, too.
After playing around with both, I’m torn. The essential differences between the two stem from the fact that Dropbox is all about sending your data to the cloud and accessing it there, whereas FolderShare links two computers that are already online. So for remote access of your files, FolderShare is the clear winner, while Dropbox takes the cake for backup and collaborative work.
I used both programs to link my MacBook with my ancient Toshiba laptop, which runs Windows XP. I’m using Firefox as my browser, and it was nice to see that Microsoft’s FolderShare program respected that and didn’t seek to open in Explorer instead. Both took just a few minutes to install and were easy to get running. Dropbox didn’t install cleanly into the applications portion of my Mac’s hard drive, but I moved it over.
With the install over, it was time to play. I created a shared folder in Dropbox and had the option of either saving files into my Dropbox located on the desktop or going to the Dropbox web site and uploading them. This feature would be nice if I were working on some else’s computer and didn’t want to install the Dropbox client. Could you use this to upload proprietary corporate data even if it was protected from transfer to a USB drive?
To access a shared folder, you send out invites. With Dropbox currently in private beta, it’s a nice way to spread your Dropbox love to friends who might appreciate the site. Another fun things about Dropbox is that you can share your photos with non-Dropbox members via a URL, but that will show all the photos in your Dropbox photo file, so be careful who sees it.
Frankly, because I don’t collaborate with anyone using offline files like Word or Excel, and work from the same laptop all the time, I’m not sure how useful I find Dropbox. FolderShare, on the other hand, is appealing to me in the way it lets me access the random files I have stored on my personal laptop, such as contact data from Outlook and notes taken on my personal PC. I can also use it to grab photos and music fairly easily, although I do wish I could see thumbnails for my images in the display. That would require too much information to be stored on the Microsoft servers, though.
Another caveat is that for FolderShare to work, both computers have to be online. So hibernating computers need to be awakened from their slumber. Bottom line, you could use FolderShare for easy access to your files on various computers and Dropbox for backup and collaborative work. As a word of caution, both services were running pretty slowly while I was playing around with them.
