The top facebook apps are listed here.
Ignore the first one (UADA), its some sort of association of smaller developers.
Oh, and you can ignore their ‘valuation’ figures, which the industry generally regards as being nonsense. 
I was recently taking a look at which data is mandatory and which is optional when people sign up to some common social networking and file sharing websites.
The attached table summarises what I found.
We all sense that a website should collect only the data it needs, and that the more data it tries to collect the more it may turn off potential users (concerns of privacy, etc). But as business people we also have to balance this with the need to add value to user signups (i.e. more data to help us profile users and deliver to them info and offers that are relevant).
It seems like the amount of mandatory data varies between 2 and 6 items (from simple email and password, to things like zip code, town, gender, country, DOB, occupational status).
The marketeers want as much data as possible, the technicians and user advocates want less. One would think that well-known sites are probably able to ask for more data and people will still not be put off, but younger sites who do not yet have repuation may need a more softly softly approach to data collection. Perhaps one way to satisfy both user and business needs is to take only minimal (eg email and password) at signup, but then incentivise the user to add more info, not with monetary reward but perhaps by unlocking site features.
Very interesting interview with Mark Zuckerberg, from 60 Minutes.
Part 1 is here:
Part 2 is here:
Saw this on Techcrunch today…
Bebo Snubs Google With Facebook Platform Clone
Erick Schonfeld
Let’s call a spade a spade here. When the third largest social network in the U.S. announces a platform for social applications that mirrors Facebook’s and appeals to Facebook developers, it is a snub to Google. For all the promise of Google’s competing OpenSocial platform (which Bebo is also supporting), it is just not ready yet. Bebo’s embrace of Facebook says a lot about the true state of competition between Google and Facebook. The fact that Bebo will have Facebook apps running on Bebo before OpenSocial apps indicates where its priorities lie.
When OpenSocial launched, we suggested that Facebook might have no choice but to join it as well, given all the initial support from other Websites and application developers that Google was able to muster. But this move suggests otherwise. Facebook is not going to join OpenSocial unless it has to. In fact, Facebook actually helped Bebo with this effort, and for good reason.
How does Facebook crush OpenSocial? By helping to make Facebook applications easily portable to other social networks. It would rather open up its own application platform to other social networks and compete head-to-head with OpenSocial. That’s the game plan. Facebook already has all the developers anyway. This is Facebook’s game to lose. Round Two goes to Facebook. But can it get LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, and others—some of whom have opened up their own platforms to outside developers—to also play ball?
(Read our on-the-scene coverage with full details about Bebo’s platform here).
Update: In fact, what I suggested above is exactly what Facebook is doing. (See this post on the Facebook developers blog). And this was just added to its wiki for developers:
In the next step of opening up Facebook Platform, Facebook is now making its platform architecture available as a model for other social sites. Facebook will even license the Facebook Platform methods and tags for use by other platforms, which means that the 100,000 developers currently building Facebook applications can make their applications available on other social sites with no extra work.
It is mano-a-mano, folks.
Facebook privacy anyone?
A few weeks ago a friend emailed me an FT article about Facebook’s Beacon social advertising app/strategy. The feelings then were mixed: the promise to advertisers was great, but would users really be happy with the invasion of privacy.
Techcrunch explains it nicely
“Beacon is a social form of advertising that shares your purchases or other actions you take on an advertiser’s site with all your friends on Facebook through their News Feeds. What has privacy advocates up in arms, and advertisers skittish, about Beacon is the way it seems to be spying on you as you surf the Web and then, on top of that, reporting what you just did to everyone you know.This objection was doubly true when Beacon was being forced down every Facebook member’s throat whether they wanted to be tracked this way or not. And it was the main reason that MoveOn.org made killing Beacon its Cause Du Jour. Since then, Facebook has addressed most of the initial concerns by wisely forcing people to deliberately and repeatedly choose to participate. But there are still some serious issues with the way the whole system works technologically.
According to one security engineer’s analysis, Beacon partners transmit data to Facebook in bulk about members who visit their site. This is true even for those who opt out of Beacon by clicking on “No Thanks” when asked if the data can be shared with Facebook. The data is sent anyway.”
Here is a great article by Sam Sethi (Blognation) that just about sums it up from the users’ perspecive. Its all well and good having a great advertiser story, but if your users all dissappear your story counts for nowt.
A related article on Techcrunch is here
3rd Dec–> Its all kicking off!!! Here’s the latest from Mashable, more advertisers flee Facebook
4th Dec–> And more from Mashable here
Bebo, the UK’s biggest social networking site yesterday announced partnerships with a string of broadcasters, including the BBC, Channel 4, Sky, ITN and CBS, in a move hailed as one of the most significant yet in marrying old and new media.
Traditional broadcasters hope that distributing and marketing their programmes to Bebo’s 40 million users will help them reconnect with the so-called “lost TV generation” of 13 to 24-year-olds who make up the social networking site’s core audience.
It will allow Bebo users to collect and curate clips from BBC programmes such as Doctor Who and EastEnders, behind-the-scenes MTV footage, ITN entertainment news and a host of other items within their own “Personal Video Profile”, displaying them on their homepage and sharing them with friends.
In future, broadcasters are also likely to use Bebo to premiere programmes before they are shown on television in an attempt to build up an early following.
One of their biggest challenges is to cut through the noise of competing channels and get viewers to sample their programmes.
Bebo’s president, Joanna Shields, said the announcement marked a new phase for social networking sites. “We’re revolutionising the way media companies can reach audiences online … particularly the hard-to-reach youth demographic,” she said.
As well as welcoming the world’s biggest media companies, she said the new platform would be open to niche broadcasters, giving them an opportunity to reach Bebo’s millions of users.
A fierce battle is taking place for the eyeballs of elusive younger consumers, who are increasingly turning their backs on traditional media. Advertisers are terrified of no longer being able to reach young audiences, while broadcasters and other traditional media owners are seeing mass audiences eroded.
Bebo, which unveiled a new look yesterday, also vowed to collaborate with broadcasters and independent producers to create more interactive drama and entertainment shows developed especially for the web, following its recent hit Kate Modern.
It claims to be the most popular social networking site in Britain, with 10.9 million users spending an average of 35 to 40 minutes a day on it. Globally, it is third to rivals MySpace, which rose to prominence in the UK thanks to its role in breaking several big music artists, and Facebook, which has an older user base and has been embraced by office workers around the world.
Bebo was founded in 2005 by British-born web entrepreneur Michael Birch with his wife, Xochi, and has steadfastly refused a number of offers to sell to established media players.
The BBC and Channel 4 will initially use the Bebo network to promote their shows using short clips. Because it allows them to embed their own “media players” within the website, they are also likely to show full-length programmes in future.
Andy Duncan, chief executive of Channel 4, said it was “the start of an exciting partnership and the launch pad for future innovations around new formats and existing successful shows”. The broadcaster has already enjoyed some success by heavily promoting youth drama Skins through MySpace.
Shields, a former Google executive, said one of the key differences with Bebo’s offering to broadcasters was that it was not attempting to make any money from their content.
Instead, broadcasters retain control of the rights and can use their own technology, showing their own advertisements around their clips.
The power of online video was first demonstrated by the explosion in popularity of video-sharing site YouTube, much of which was driven by traditional broadcasts being made available illegally, as well as from user-generated content.
While some broadcasters, including the BBC, have done deals with the Google-owned YouTube to feature their shows on their own branded channels, others, including Viacom and the Premier League, have threatened it with legal action.
Broadcasters have for some time been working on how to deliver on-demand programming over the internet and mobile devices.
The BBC has launched a public trial of its long-mooted iPlayer, which offers any programme from the last seven days, while ITV and Channel 4 also offer similar catch-up services. Apple offers paid-for downloads of TV shows through iTunes, while NBC and News Corp recently launched a video site in the US.
The BBC director general, Mark Thompson, has made reconnecting with younger viewers a main plank of his Creative Future plan designed to maintain support for the licence fee in an age of digital choice.
But broadcasters have only recently turned their attention to spreading their programmes throughout the web. Web 2.0 logic dictates that broadcasters will stand a better chance of continuing to reach mass audiences if they are able to scatter clips, programmes and other background material throughout the web to users who will no longer head for “destination sites” to watch it.
To this end, media companies have been engaged in a desperate race to sign deals with new TV-over-the-internet platforms such as Joost, while at the same time policing the web for pirate content.
Shields likened the typical Bebo profile to a teenager’s bedroom. It became an extension of their personality by hosting pictures and notes from friends and displaying their favourite bands and TV shows, she said.
She predicted the new deals would help mark it out from its rivals, describing Facebook as a functional BlackBerry equivalent and Bebo as a multimedia iPod Touch.
Bebo and other websites are now commissioning their own shows. Attempts at interactive online dramas are nothing new - US series The Spot was made in 1995 - but the popularity and marketing power of Bebo has arguably made them viable for the first time. Kate Modern, a thriller starring Ralf Little made by the team behind US YouTube phenomenon LonelyGirl 115, was watched 25m times in three months and allowed Bebo users to interact with the characters. It also featured sponsorship deals, such as one with Warner Music to put its act The Days into the storyline, and product placement of the kind that is banned on television. It will be followed by drama Sofia’s Diary, made by Sony, and The Gap Year, an Endemol “interactive online reality drama”, following six contestants travelling the globe.
Via Guardian Online (Owen Gibson, media correspondent)
Microsoft finally took the plunge into Facebook, acquiring 1.6% of the fast growing social network for $240m. That values Facebook at $15bn, or around $300 per registered user.
By comparison
- When Google bought YouTube they paid the equivalent of $21 per registered user.
- News Corp bought MySpace at the equivalent of $6.37 per user.
- Bebo has repeatedly refused offers, the highest of which would have represented $25 per user.
- Skype (slightly different) went at $30 per users.
- Friends Reunited, went years ago at $20 per user.
This sort of valuation represents the changing perception of what communities of users like Facebook are worth, when News Corp bought MySpace everyone thought they paid too much, and now this. The big difference of course between MySpace and Facebook is the extent to which users are engaged deeply and daily with the latter. There is no doubt that Facebook users are way more engaged with the site than the MySpace crowd. Facebook presents a big opportunity for online advertising, in part because it collects detailed information about its users — such as their hobbies, favorite music, location, age, and gender — that can be used to place highly targeted ads.
Here are some useful stats:
* More than 49 million active users
* An average of 200,000 new registrations per day since Jan. 2007
* An average of 3% weekly growth since Jan. 2007
* Active users have doubled since Facebook expanded registration in Sept. 2006
Source: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
Here is the Wall Street Journal article that reported the news: here
Another point to consider is that with revenues of £150m (according to those familiar with the company) and 50m users, that means Facebook is earning around $3 per user. Prior to this metric, previous stats that I had gathered in relation to a number of social networks put the average per user revenue at around $1.26.
Here’s an interesting piece from Michael Arrington at Techcrunch about how Google is lining up to tackel the “Facebook problem”…
Google To “Out Open” Facebook On November 5
Michael Arrington
Yesterday [DI> Sept 20th] a select group of fifteen or so industry luminaries attended a highly confidential meeting at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View to discuss the company’s upcoming plans to address the “Facebook issue.”
The meeting was so secret that all attendees had to sign confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements strictly forbidding them from discussing what was shown to them at the meeting. Notwithstanding that NDA, I’ve now spoken with three of the attendees off record to get an understanding of what Google is planning. Google’s goal - to fight Facebook by being even more open than the Facebook Platform. If Facebook is 98% open, Google wants to be 100%.
A great article here from Charlene Li at Forrester… I have reproduced it in its entirety…via her blog on Forrester
News from WSJ is that Microsoft is looking to take a 5% stake in Facebook for an investment rumored to be between $300-500 million. That would place Facebook’s between $6-10 billion.
It’s that last number that has people swooning — how could a business that didn’t exist just a few years ago be worth THAT much?!?!! Especially when a year ago, Yahoo! was rumored to be willing to pay $1 billion for Facebook.
Let’s break it down. First, Facebook has significantly changed its business from a year ago. It now is open to anyone, not just college students. Moreover, the advent of its open platform means that it any developer worth his or her salt is writing a Facebook app.
This is a crucial point — I wrote a year ago that “as Facebook opens up and grows beyond its core membership of college students, it will have to replace the context of the college campus with content and experiences that people share”. Today, I can find out where my friends have traveled, challenge them to a game of chess, or support them in their favorite causes. Facebook has created a platform and ecosystem that sustains and can grow the community that’s there.
And grown it has. This past August, Facebook had 19 million monthly visitors in the US according to Nielsen Netratings, compared to 9 million a year ago. Facebook says that it has 42 million active users worldwide. At a valuation of $6 billion, those 30 million visitors are worth $142 a piece, and at a $10 billion valuation they are worth $238 a piece. That’s lifetime value — over the course of that person’s relationship with Facebook, it’s the belief that a member will generate that much in advertising and commercial value for Facebook.
Ad spending is roughly $2500 per adult in the US (about $250 billion in US ad spending divided by 100 million US adults). $200-$333 represents between 6-10% of ad spend. If people spend as much time as they potentially could within Facebook, those numbers are feasible.
Why an investment at this time? Facebook’s ultimate goal appears to be an IPO, likely in 2009, because they want to solidify their business and advertising base. That means they’ll need to buy time and a large amount of cash from a strategic partner — or a large institutional round — will give them the leverage to also make strategic acquisitions ahead of an IPO.
Two thoughts about why Facebook would want an investment with Microsoft. First, they already are working together. Microsoft sells the display ads that are targeted against profile information, and will make up about half of the $150 million in revenues Facebook will generate this year. This is part of a multi-year agreement that will extend until 2011. And Facebook’s unique marketing value is that not only can the display ads be highly targeted at actual profile elements, but marketers can also develop a deeper relationship with Facebook members — marketer relationships that Microsoft has in spades.
Second, Facebook needs to scale up a business that’s both consumer-oriented and also developer friendly. Microsoft has excellent developer relationships and also knows a thing or two about how to build successful consumer (and business — watch this space carefully) applications.
Microsoft’s interest is obvious — it wants a stake in one of the hottest companies out there. If they couldn’t outright buy Facebook (they tried last year) they’ll settle for a piece and make sure that no one else — like Google or Yahoo! — can be a part of the party.
