Facebook by the numbers

Interesting numbers around facbook usage here. Amazing the sheer scale of this site, would be good to see what sort of infrastructure supports it!

Global Voices

Very interesting presentation from TED. You need to stick with it to the end to get a full understanding of what Ethan is talking about. It is more then just breaking out of your own social network, but breaking into some very new spaces, and, why is this not really happening today on the Internet.

Community Managers

Got a web site? Got a community manager?

I must admit, the role of a community manager is one that I have only recently become aware of, and for large sites, trying to foster and develop a community it makes sense. I wonder if it makes sense for smaller sites?

A community manager in basic terms builds and nurtures the web sites community. They need to (I think) -

- Be well connected, and know who to connect with online
- Allow the community to act freely, to a point (maybe a very grey point)
- Put a human face to the company they are representing on the web
- Be an advocate for the community within the company

It sounds like a quite difficult job, you may need to support and protect the online community while they are beating up the company who's web site they are sitting on, or, via twitter etc.

This role to me sounds like the next logical step after listening to your customers online. Once you have started to listen and have been acting on what they say, a way of interacting and workign with them seems like a good idea!

Listen to your customers

Everyone is always talking about listening to your customers, and so you should, but actually doing something based on their feedback is not as common (generally only when they are upset do companies act , take the recent Vegemite iSnack 2.0 "scandal"or new coke).

Anyway, rather then going on about the virtues of listening to customers, here are a few ways that you can actually monitor what people are saying.

- Set up a facebook "fan" page for you product, monitor what people who take the time to link up to you, have to say about your offering.

- Ensure you have a corporate twitter account, and follow people who follow you. Also set up search profiles for your company (search on name, industry keywords, etc).

- Set up a google search for your company, and key industry terms. This way you will also pick up on what is being said about you on the web and in blogs. I run my google searches into my RSS feed reader, but you can also set them up to Email on a regular basis the information they find.

- Network online with people who are key to your industry, LinkedIn, myspace, linkMe, where ever key people in your industry may spend time, you need to spend some time there also.

Oh, and by the way, do something with the information you gather!

I missed this one!

I wrote a little while ago about taking the blinkers off, in that post I spoke about missing the size of some of the Chinese social networking sites, and how one in particular claimed to have 376,000,000 users, making it by far the largest site in the world. (oh, and they were making money)

Well here is another Chinese site that is just massive if its claims are true. QQ claims to have 800 million registered users and 300 million active users a month on their IM network. They claim to have the largest online community in the world, they may be right if their numbers are true!

Point being, there are massive sites in China no matter what, working out how to make a small amount of money, from each user in such a massive community, must be a gold mine! But are the numbers true?

Who tweets the twitter?

Twitter is down at the moment, well I think it is down.

I am not quite sure, I assume its down for everyone, not just me, but I don't know how to find out, you see, I would normally go to twitter to find out if a service I use (such as Gmail) is down or not.

All I need to do is look at the trending topics, and bang! there it is, "Gmail" or what not, then have a look at a couple of tweets, and yep, Gmail is down.

But this morning I am lost, twitter itself is down (I think), and I don't know how to work out what is going on, am I the only one with problems? Who tweets about twitter when twitter is down!?!?!?!

Hang on, tweet deck just popped a message up, nah, false alarm I think its still bust.

What do you do when twitter is down? Where do you go for information?

Edit - Was just reminded of the twitter status page - http://status.twitter.com/ , its quite the same thing as getting real time updates from tweets, the info on the status page is a little general, and a little out of date....

The twitter secondary market

Twitter reminds me of a RSS feed reader. If you look the the stream of tweets in the same way you look at a RSS feed some things start to make sense to me.

Twitter is like a personal RSS feed. I currently subscribe to over 200 RSS feeds in my feed reader, it is impossible to work out what's important when you have well over 1000 items a day appear in your inbox. Twitter is the same, the more people you follow, the more noise there is in your feed, the more noise, the harder it is to work out what is important.

So to manage the RSS feeds you use a feedreader, automatically filter feeds, tag important ones, save items to read later, etc. Twitter needs to be managed the same way, hence the secondary market.

Applications such as tweet deck and web services such as peoplebrowsr.com take the twitter feed and let you manage it, these "secondary market" players have a fantastic opportunity, they make sense of twitter!

So what's the opportunity in the secondary market? Fundamentally it looks like the opportunity is in removing the noise from twitter, so you can receive the signal. What you do with the signal is then up to you. There are any number of articles that discuss the social networking, customer service, citizen news, marketing, presence indicator, take your pick.

How will secondary market players make money? Take the feed and filter it, the more intuitive the filter is, the more value it can provide, and hence, in the future can be charged for (primarily in the corporate space for marketing and customer service).

Have fun twittering, and good luck with the signal to noise ratio!

Time to take the blinkers off

I recently read and article from TechCrunch on Chinese social networking platforms. The article talks about the fact that many social networking sites in China are actually making a profit, more so then the best known site in the western world, Facebook.

I was interested in how these guys were making their money, as the question always asked of all social media today to is "wheres the business model?". What became more evident and striking to me however were the numbers of users on these platforms in China, the largest claiming 376,000,000.

China has a large population, of course there would be a large number of users. The platforms better meet the social norm's in China, better then say Facebook or Myspace. User numbers dont actually mean that much in the real world. Yes, I know, this all this makes sense, what I was interested with was the fact that 99% of the material I read had not mentioned the fact that the largest social networking site in the world was in China.

I was surprised with myself, that I was not aware of this small, but incredibly significant fact! While I daily get a flood of information with commentary asking how and when sites like Twitter will start making money, wondering on how much (if any) money Facebook is making, blah, blah, blah, there is a business model in China that has far eclipsed anything else happening.

I understand that the Chinese model may not work in the western world, the point is that I completely missed a major player in the market, time for me to take the blinkers off and have a good look around!