I’ve recently been interviewed by HatchThat’s Ross Hill.
It’s a broad ranged discussion covering:
Application developers are the clear winners of Google’s pending release of Open Social.
Richard MacManus explains:
Open Social is a distributed social network framework…a ‘third place’ of social networks…a set of three common APIs that allow developer to access the following core functions and information at social networks:
The following companies/social networks have apparently signed up to be a part of Open Social – Friendster, Hi5, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, Orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce and Viadeo.
So far a bunch of Facebook app developers, including Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide, have also signed up.
Richard rightly points out that this is an example of Google playing to its strengths – namely creating a distributed system and owning a chunk of a space through its own platform. It will be interesting to see how Facebook and MySpace react.
While some commentators are expressing doubt that they will come to the party, it is possible that this move by Google will lead to some de facto standardization across open APIs. Standards would assist app developers greatly by reducing the friction inherent in mastering the intricacies of every set of open APIs and should lead to a much wider distribution of apps across various social networks.
Om Malik feels that Open Social is attacking Facebooks achilles heel – its quintessential closed nature. A standardised Social Networking Markup Language far outweighs a closed Facebook-only ML.
Used to be a time, not that long ago (pre May 25th – the launch date of the Facebook platform), when the most frequently asked question in VC pitch meetings was, “What’s your China strategy?”
Today, topping the faqs has to be, “What’s your Facebook strategy?”
For CxOs who have not yet cottoned on to the viral coefficient and engagement aspects of Facebook, here are a few metrics worth digesting:
* in the first 20 weeks 366 million applications were installed from the Facebook platform.
* this growth is continuing unabated and is set to track past 1 billion in the first year.
* in August – there were 14 million unique app users (this equated to 33% of all Facebook members)
* in August – there were 88 million app visits
* in August – average dwell time per visit was 4:30 minutes.
Asking whether a company has a Facebook strategy is also shorthand for asking whether its executives have embraced the open architecture model. Facebook is the tip of the iceberg, with many more opportunities to leverage deeply engaged user communities on the horizon.
[Stats courtesy of Justin Smith of InsideFacebook @ Graphing Social Patterns, picture courtesy of BeFitt]
The folks at Cakke have created a compilation of recent viral Internet hits.
Awesome stuff. Thanks Laurel for the tip off.
US politicians are embracing Facebook in the lead up to the 2008 presidential race.
Stephen Colbert has been able to garner 1 million members of a Facebook group called 1,000,000 Strong For Stephen T Colbert in all of nine days. In doing so he has created the fastest growing Facebook group ever.
In contrast, Barack Obama has a group called One Million Strong for Barack, which has almost 400,000 members…after nine months. And the eight month old group One Million Strong AGAINST Hillary (Clinton) has nearly half a million users.
Australian politicians are deep into election campaign territory already. What has been their approach to social media as a vote generator?
Both John Howard and Kevin Rudd have been using YouTube to post videos and also have MySpace pages, but they have not achieved the same level of engagement on Facebook as their US counterparts.
While Howard and Rudd both have profiles on Facebook (official or not), their use of the groups feature has been rather dismal.
The highest ranking Rudd group has less than 5,000 members – Kevin Rudd will ruin Australia.
For Howard the situation isn’t any prettier. His highest ranking group also has less than 5,000 members – I bet i can find 100 000 people that hate john howard!
Given that Australia has 1.5 million Facebook users, you’d kinda think the politicians would be able to garner a few more to support their cause.
If nothing else, it is a stark illustration, to me at least, that Australia sorely needs some fresh political protagonists.
How many of you would sign up for a Facebook group called: 1,000,000 Strong for Australia 2.0!!!