Tag Archive for 'social networking'

Blog posts on Liako.Biz for 2007

Continued on – a series of posts that summarises content created on Liako.Biz

You can also read 2008 and 2005 summaries.

December 2007

November 2007

October 2007

September 2007

August 2007

July 2007

June 2007

May 2007

April 2007

March 2007

Analysing the user experience from two social networking sites

Yet again, MySpace has e-mailed me a useless e-mail that frustrates me more than it gives me value . But what I noticed recently, was another social networking site, taking a different approach.

geni

Whereas MySpace is simply alerting me, which is forcing me to painfully log into their service, Geni is actually alerting me the information without me having to take another action.

A few points of reflection on this:
1) Using my business analysis on the consumer Internet , MySpace is offering a content model (hypermedia is how I referred to this in my post) whereas Geni is offering a Utility computing product. Both these businesses consider themselves "social networking" sites and yet both offer a different product model.
2) This also highlights two different business models: MySpace is a platform whilst Geni is working on a network model. Meaning, MySpace’s business model is premised on you visiting them for you to get value; Geni’s isn’t. To be perfectly honest, both MySpace and Geni are irrelevant for me. However platforms can come and go, but network models always stick around. As irrelevant Geni is to me, I still value it – a network business strategy (meaning you follow the user, rather than expecting them to come) builds a long term relationship.
3) Social networking sites when it’s the core product, work best as utility services and not a content business. Look at what a different user experience it is for me, because I can get benefit from my Geni account despite not having to log in. Although I am not giving them pageviews, I am giving them my attention which is translating into greater brand equity for them. When you treat social networking as a content business, this distorts the service offered to users, as misaligned business views on generating revenue drive strategy in a way that is harmful to the consumer ie, I feel like saying "f**k off" whenever I see those e-mails for MySpace . But "thank-you" to Geni.

The main point I want to get at though, is that the user experience is just as important when the user is not on the site as it is when they are on the site. People shy away from the recently-recognised network model of business, because they don’t get the same traffic. I say embrace it, because the market will eventually correct itself to recognise this is a superior type of strategy.

How many people are there on Facebook?

Facebooks new advertising features allow people to create targetted advertising campaigns. I took advantage of this feature to uncover some data about Facebook’s user base as I designed a mock campaign, because I’ve been curious to know where its strongest.

Although not all countries are listed below (ie, I have friends in Russia and Serbia whose data I could not fetch), this does give a good indication on users by country. The subtotal of 50 million is about the amount of users I’d expect to be on Facebook; the countries not included are obviously small and would make an immaterial difference. Fifty million users is within the ballpark of what sounds right (sorry, no link, but I read it somewhere), so the breakdown seems pretty complete.

I thought it might also be useful to add the data of under 18 year olds, to show social networking is certainly an adults tool now and not just some teen fad.

facebook users in US	Canada	UK	Australia	China	Columbia	Dominican Republic	Egypt	France	Germany	India	Ireland	Israel	Italy	Japan	Lebanon	Malaysia	Mexico	Netherlands	New Zealand	Norway	Pakistan	Saudi Arabia	Singapore	South Africa	Korea, Republic of	Spain	Sweden	Switzerland	Turkey	United Arab Emirates<br />

Update March 2008: I’ve done a follow up posting on March 2008 numbers