Facebook growth is amazing. Here are some statistics to illustrate that: over 800 million active users, over 50% of active users login daily, over 60 million status updates per day, users are uploading more than 250 million pictures per day, 350 million active users currently access Facebook through mobile devices, the average user spends more than 700 minutes using Facebook per month.
Facebook is innovating big time. This is good for users, of course; there are some privacy issues from time to time, but the majority of users don’t care so much about privacy or they are not savvy enough, so new features are rapidly embraced and used.
The latest and greatest Facebook features are the Timeline and the Open Graph. More than 2 million people became Facebook developers in order to try the Timeline before it went public.
A lot of websites are using Facebook Like buttons. Often the number of fans on Facebook measures the success of a brand. The new Open Graph allows website owners to measure all kind of user activity. It’s a natural evolution of Likes and Facebook is hoping this will change the Internet. Chances are it will.
Open Graph creates opportunities to share more and more of users actions with their friends. This is also a great opportunity for organizations and brands, especially the frictionless sharing experience provided by Open Graph, allowing sharing without the click of a button. Facebook statistics will explode… again.
Open Graph allows organizations to reach an unprecedented amount of users from all over the world.
In a blog post presenting the early Open Graph results, Facebook says that “Media companies have long been early adopters of Facebook Platform tools, including the Like button, Facebook Login, Comments Box, and most recently, the Open Graph, to drive traffic to their sites, engage readers and attract new audiences... The early results from social news partners are encouraging, once again showing that news sites that focus on building social and personalized news experiences will see the most dramatic increases in traffic and engagement.”
All this will help popular stories become (much) more popular. Of course, some other niche information may be buried down as a consequence, but hey, it’s the same old story Google had with the search results, nothing new there.
Another drawback is that Facebook might have to face same challenges Google had: companies will write content for traffic and at some point we might see some news become popular not because the content is great but because it was carefully crafted SEO-like. We count on Facebook to do the same great job Google did with search results.
Facebook have great websites and applications, though as developers we were often frustrated by the APIs bugs, the lack of documentation or multi-environment support (we had to build separate Facebook applications for the development or staging environments). The good news is that is about to change also.
I attended the Facebook Open Graph Technology Day in New York on October 25th. Facebook informed us that they are working on supporting multiple environments for a single application. They launched the so called “operation developer love”, putting a lot of effort into making the developer’s life easier.
My team develops hundreds of Facebook applications every year, so of course we want our users and their friends to add these applications to their accounts. Obviously, Facebook want this also. Some are saying that sharing activity shouldn’t be passive and users should always consciously publish every action. Maybe, but then again, the majority of users don’t care so much. For them, Facebook platform benefits are much more important. Plus, Facebook started to take privacy very seriously and to make privacy settings easier to understand and manage.
The days when the higher number of fans was the only objective of campaigns are over. We will be able to isolate the most relevant content and the most engaged users, ultimately to improve the user experience.
So yes, Facebook is taking over the Internet. Is this bad news? I don’t think so if the result is a better user experience and easy access to relevant information.
