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It may be the largest city in Canada and the centre of the universe to some, but when it comes to Facebook.com, Toronto can only say it’s second best.
Some time last week, London, England leapfrogged the Big Smoke and stole the crown for top geographic network on Facebook. According to statistics from the popular social networking destination ending Monday, slightly less than 810,000 Londoners have signed up to Facebook, while Toronto lagged far behind with 705,000 users.
Facebook senior communications manager Matt Hicks admits he can’t give a specific reason to why London shot past Toronto, but said that both cities’ growth rates are in line with the company’s worldwide user base.
“Canada overall does continue to grow rapidly for Facebook, at about 4 per cent a week and the Toronto network is growing similarly,” Mr. Hicks said in an e-mail.
Although Torontonians may not be the darling of Facebook any more, they are a large part of the nationwide contingent that visits the site in droves. Facebook says that Canadians account for more than 10 per cent of the site’s total population and according to web measurement firm ComScore, in June 2007, 11.4 million Canadians logged onto Facebook, compared with only 343,000 in the same period last year.
Once a social networking haven for college students, Facebook’s decision to open registration to all users in Sept., 2006 has helped attract new visitors from outside the 18-to-24 year-old demographic. Once registered on the site, users can chat with friends, upload photos and place free classified advertisements.
The popularity of the website hasn’t gone unnoticed by provincial officials.
Last May, the provincial government blocked Facebook access to employees, MPPs, and cabinet ministers on government computers. The OPP also uses Facebook regularly to keep an eye out for underage drinking parties and four high school students at Toronto’s Birchmount Park Collegiate were arrested last March following a Facebook-related protest.
October 23 2007
For the last several years, Yahoo, MSN and AOL have all suffered a declining share of pageviews, but that does not mean the portal is going out of style. Rather it has been redefined, first by Google, and now by Facebook
in potentially even more profound ways.
The core question a portal needs to answer for a user is “How do I find the information I need?”
In the early days of the web, the answer was browsing, which made sense when there were a limited number of useful sites. (Remember when it was a big deal for Yahoo to put the “New!” or “Recommended” icon next to a website’s name in their directory?) But as the number of websites became infinite, search replaced browsing as the dominant paradigm for finding new sites, and Yahoo’s failure to keep up in this area allowed Google to take the lead.
Google has continued to leverage its lead in search to become a full-fledged portal. Once users have found what they are looking for, Google makes it easy, through their iGoogle product, to subscribe to that content through alerts, RSS feeds, or a huge selection of widgets, all of which are compacting more useful information onto fewer start pages than ever before. As a result, iGoogle has become Google’s fastest-growing product. But iGoogle has a serious limitation: it doesn’t involve sharing; each user has to make an individual investment in set-up and can’t benefit from the work of others. It’s not really a Web 2.0 product.
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Facebook has a new answer to the portal question. The “social graph,” or your network of relationships, will push information to you. You’ll learn from your friends. Thanks to Facebook’s new developer platform, the types of information being disseminated now include not just news, photos, events, and groups but also music, videos, books, movies, causes, political campaigns — and the list is rapidly growing into almost every conceivable category.
The advantage of this approach is that it makes it relatively effortless for users to access a world of information that is both increasingly comprehensive and personal to them. Even if all this information were available through search (and it’s not), search actually requires work; the user must know what they’re looking for and type it in. Then they must parse the results to determine which are valuable, labor which is not shared and reused by others. By contrast, Facebook requires no work once your network is set up. Your friends push information to you that is likely to be useful, and if not you can tune your preferences until it is. Facebook promises a kind of Socratic knowledge: it tells users things they didn’t even think to ask.
While the process of structuring new kinds of information for the social graph to distribute is still sorting itself out, it is easy to object to the frivolity of information on Facebook. For example, Facebook is great at telling me what my friends just had for lunch, but how about hard news? Well, for starters, I’m waiting for the Digg application to not only display articles I’ve digged on my profile, but also to aggregate all the articles dugg by my friends. This could lead to the kind of social news site that MySpace promised but failed to deliver.
Not only Digg, but virtually all Web 2.0 applications which are based on the wisdom of crowds can be reconceived as Facebook apps based on the wisdom (or trust) of friends. To the extent that these services cater to publishers who seek a mass audience, such as YouTube or Flickr, the social graph will not threaten their business. But to the extent they publish content intended for friends, or if the value of their service increases with the participation of friends, these applications face only two choices: get each user to recreate his or her friendship network on their own site or migrate their service to the Facebook platform lest someone else does it first.
The potential for Facebook to layer on any feature whose value increases with the participation of friends is an incredibly broad canvas for a portal. Moreover, as each new application gains acceptance, it enriches the overall value of the network and makes it incrementally more likely that the next application will be tried. Much of what we know as “Web 2.0″ will eventually be rebuilt on top of Facebook.
To be clear, the social graph will not replace search, in the same way that search did not replace browsing. And search may still be more easily monetized than the social graph. Still, as a basis for a portal, neither Google nor Yahoo has anything nearly as cohesive holding its properties together. Google can layer on any feature where search is paramount, which is hugely valuable, but as it expands beyond this core competency, it becomes increasingly hard to press its advantages into new areas. Yahoo already seems to have reached the limits of its far-flung empire, eliminating redundant operations such as Yahoo Photos.
In my view this is a misdiagnosis of what ails Yahoo. The problem is not too much peanut butter (i.e. that it’s spread too thinly). The problem is the bread at the core. Browsing plus second-tier search is not sturdy enough to hold everything together. The new portals are defined by the quality of their bread, not their peanut butter.
Yahoo was right to focus on an acquisition of Facebook but not for the reason it thinks. In its view of the world, Facebook is just another media property, a particularly fast-growing and sticky one to be sure, but ultimately just more peanut butter. In reality, Facebook’s social graph could have provided the bread to connect Yahoo’s far-flung empire.
But what would be in such a deal for Facebook? They will have their own empire soon enough.
