Social Media | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Facebook: Covering the Planet in 5 years?

Newsweek’s cover story on Facebook has an interesting quote attributed to a company cofounder:

Karel Baloun, an engineer who worked at Facebook until last year, recalls vividly the baldly stated prediction of one of the company’s cofounders: “In five years,” he said, “we’ll have everybody on the planet on Facebook.”

Is that just a lot of hype? Let’s do the math:

According to Newsweek, Facebook has 35 million users today and has “an astonishing growth rate of 3 percent a week.” Assuming 35 million users as of 8/20/2007 and continued 3 percent per week growth compounding, that would project to 62 million users by the end of the year, 108 million by the time I turn 45 in mid-May and 162 million a year from now.

Let’s take it a little further. By New Year’s Day 2009, Facebook would have something over 285 million users, and would log its billionth account around October 22 of that year. User 2,000,000,000 would sign up on April Fools Day 2010, with the total reaching 3 billion by Independence Day, just a few months later.

If that weekly growth trend continues, Facebook would have 6 billion users in January 2011, which would make that cofounder prediction of blanketing the planet in 5 years come true.
Of course lots of factors could intervene to diminish Facebook’s growth rate. As the old prospectus boilerplate says, “Past performance does not guarantee future results.” But even if Facebook’s “astonishing” growth rate were cut by a third, to 2 percent a week, it would have 400 million users by January 2010.

Here’s a PDF of the Excel spreadsheet I used in these calculations.

Facebook Growth Rates

I also uploaded the spreadsheet to my Facebook profile using the file sharing utility MediaFire, so if you want to play with different growth scenarios you can friend me and then get the file yourself and plug in different rates.

At any rate (if you’ll pardon the pun), you can see why Mark Zuckerberg turned down $1 billion for Facebook (I’ll bet he’s calculated the growth trends, too), and why many investors consider it worth more than MTV. With friends inviting friends to join, and with companies like MediaFire developing applications that extend its usefulness (I don’t have to worry about sending large email attachments anymore), Facebook’s “astonishing” growth is likely to continue.

Technorati: Facebook, users, growth, MTV, Newsweek, MediaFire, Facebook Platform

Facebook Newsweek Cover Story

The cover story in Newsweek‘s current issue is about Facebook and how it’s a) not just for college kids and b) the hottest internet property since Google. Here are a couple of key summary paragraphs:

Zuckerberg himself, whose baby-faced looks at 23 would lead any bartender in America to scrutinize his driver’s license carefully before serving a mojito, eschews talk about money. It’s all about building the company. Speaking with NEWSWEEK between bites of a tofu snack, he is much more interested in explaining why Facebook is (1) not a social-networking site but a “utility,” a tool to facilitate the information flow between users and their compatriots, family members and professional connections; (2) not just for college students, and (3) a world-changing idea of unlimited potential. Every so often he drifts back to No. 2 again, just for good measure. But the nub of his vision revolves around a concept he calls the “social graph.”

As he describes it, this is a mathematical construct that maps the real-life connections between every human on the planet. Each of us is a node radiating links to the people we know. “We don’t own the social graph,” he says. “The social graph is this thing that exists in the world, and it always has and it always will. It’s really most natural for people to communicate through it, because it’s with the people around you, friends and business connections or whatever. What [Facebook] needed to do was construct as accurate of a model as possible of the way the social graph looks in the world. So once Facebook knows who you care about, you can upload a photo album and we can send it to all those people automatically.”

I’ll have more to say about this article later; for the last few weeks I haven’t been talking about much else on this blog, as you see here. For now, just go here and give it a read, and also check out the related articles here, here and here.

What do you think about the Newsweek cover story?

Technorati: Facebook, Newsweek, social media, networking, cover story, Google

Top 10 Facebook Business Uses

Over the last couple of weeks, I have done several posts relating to Facebook and how businesses and organizations can take advantage of its easy community-building and networking capabilities. Not to mention that it’s free.

Here’s a synopsis of the highlights (so far), with links to the posts with fuller discussion. I started to do a top 10, but then realized I’ve done a dozen. No extra charge for the last two.

Crisis management – creating “dark” sites in Facebook (or on a WordPress.com blog) that can go live quickly to communicate effectively with affected constituencies. Communicate meaning two-way conversations.
Limited profiles – how to set a division between what you reveal to close friends and family vs. business and professional networks.
How Facebook makes everyone a “connector” and why Facebook has reached a Tipping Point
Facebook vs. “White Label” social networking software, and why and when organizations should consider each.
A case study of a group spontaneously formed in Facebook surrounding the I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis.
How Facebook can put the “relations” back into Media Relations
Examples of organizations with Facebook groups, official and otherwise
Why organizations should get in on the Facebook groups land rush
A vision for how Facebook could become a “Cheers” for industry-specific journalist and newsmaker interactions (which is related to the “putting relations into media relations” post.)
And another related post, Toward a Medical News community
The Facebook/social networking session at the Frost & Sullivan MindXChange
The WordPress.com application for the Facebook platform, which ties what I put on this blog into my Facebook profile (and you can “friend me” here)
To make it a Baker’s Dozen, here’s one more, my initial thoughts as I started this Facebook trek.

Technorati: Facebook, business, PR, news media, crisis communications, social networking, 35W, bridge, collapse, WordPress.com, Facebook platform

B2B Facebook: Limited Profile

Note: I originally wrote this post in August, 2007. Facebook has significantly improved its privacy options since then, and now you have the ability to create a better separation of your personal and professional networking. Feel free to read the rest of this post for background, but be sure to check out Facebook 210: Professional Profile, Personal Privacy for more updated information.

I’m distancing myself from some of my Facebook friends.

Really, I like you all, and if you want to be my friend friends, I’ll be happy to open up more access. Just let me know, and I’ll take you off “restrictions.”

My opacity is for the greater good. It’s my part in helping make Facebook a vibrant B2B tool. Not that Facebook really needs my help; but if I can help nudge it along the business adoption curve, I’ll take some satisfaction.

And whether I actually have any influence in helping to break down resistance to B2B Facebook uses or not, at least I’ll be on record: I believe it’s inevitable that Facebook will increasingly be used for networking in the B2B environment, and that those who start using Facebook for interactions with business partners will be leaders in a trend that will seem obvious in hindsight.

Facebook makes it easy to build or renew relationships. I’ve used it to find several former classmates, even though our age group isn’t among the highest users. And I’ve made some interesting new friends through my blog, and Twitter and Facebook.
Business is all about relationships. And so a tool like Facebook that makes it easier to create, maintain and strengthen relationships will become widely used for business relationships, sooner or later. With people increasingly spending time forming and cultivating personal relationships there, sooner seems more likely to me.
But sometimes, too much information can color perceptions and perhaps even poison a relationship. Some employers may be concerned that employees’ personal actions or beliefs may turn off potential customers.

Part of the concern undoubtedly arises from the perceived “tell all” nature of Facebook’s personal profile. After all, among the questions Facebook asks (and you’re free to not provide it) are your political philosophy and religious views. And we all know politics and religion are the discussions businesses want to keep out of their interactions, because people tend to have strong opinions and knowing that a business associate is of a different political persuasion may chill some commercial relationships.

On the other side, part of the fun of Facebook is finding people in your network who share your views, whether on deeper matters or more trivial interests such as TV shows like 24 or Monk. There are even 93 others in my Minneapolis-St.Paul Network who are, like me, fans of Raising Arizona. Some people think that by interjecting too many business relationships into Facebook, we’ll kill what’s wonderful about it.

I remember some of the same concerns about the internet when it began to be used for commerce. Just after Al Gore had his Big Idea, a significant group — and I don’t know whether it was a minority or a plurality or even a majority — thought the internet should be forever preserved as a pristine digital version of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

But as web access became democratized, people found the web was really useful for commerce. So commerce happened. The purists got over it.

The limited profile probably was first started because of kids not wanting parents to see what all their friends were writing on their walls. But it can work to limit personal information shared with business associates, too.

That’s why I’ve started using the limited profile feature on Facebook. Not because I want to hide anything, but lest I alienate potential work colleagues or journalists who viscerally dislike Nicholas Cage, I’m not letting anyone but close friends and family see my full profile.
So here’s what I recommend: Create a limited profile in Facebook. Deselect everything except Contact Info, Work Info and Status Updates, and also deselect the Mini-Feed.

Then, when work colleagues or internet strangers ask to add you as a friend, you can accept like Scoble, but instead of two clicks (accept, skip this step), you’ll have three, including checking the box so they only see the limited profile. So in this way, as Scoble says, Facebook becomes the new Business Card/Rolodex, but much more powerful because it also is the new media distribution network.

That way your business network members can know how to contact you, where you’ve worked and what you’ve last updated as your status, but other things of a personal nature will be hidden.

This gets a long way toward creating a wall between personal and professional Facebook profiles. The only sticking point is that applications in the Facebook Platform still show up in the limited profile. I can turn them off for all of my friends, but not just for those in the limited profile. So everyone who is my friend gets to see my favorite Weird Al Yankovic videos.

There is a simpler option, and that is to decline friend requests from people who aren’t your family or kindred spirits. You can still use Facebook to send them messages, and you can belong to the same groups. You just won’t see each other’s personal information.

Everything above can be done right now. For a complete and more satisfying solution, a bit of programming will be needed by someone, likely in one of two ways.

The first is for application developers to enable users to block display of the applications in their limited profiles. The better way would be for Zuckerberg & Co. to develop another level of “friend.” Then the existing privacy mechanisms could be used to block these professional associates from access to information from applications like iLike, Twitter or Mac Lover.

People could even set their defaults so that when new friends are added, they are accepted as “acquaintances” or whatever the middle-level “friend” would be called, instead of being given full access.

Just as VeriSign and others developed encryption to make credit card transactions secure and increase confidence in commercial use of the internet as a whole, if Facebook can create these two tiers of friends, or maybe even multiple levels, this will pave the way for maximum B2B Facebook use.

Technorati: B2B, Facebook, BtoB, B to B, profile, limited profile, ANWR, Raising Arizona, business, marketing, pr, Twitter, iLike, Weird Al