This afternoon while walking around the OnMedia conference in New York City, I got into a conversation with the founder of a company that is looking to extend their service through Facebook Connect. Without getting into the details of the individual product, the main service they’d like to add is the ability to add Connect support to their fourth party widget.

As I’ve highlighted on numerous occasions, Facebook has yet to completely clarify what their fourth party policy is making it challenging for many companies looking to build a business that leverages Facebook Connect. Personally, I think much of the reason behind a less clarified fourth party widget policy is that Facebook has yet to determine how they truly want to implement Facebook Connect.

The Emphasis Is On Structured Data

Last month I wrote about Facebook’s custom tags and ultimately I think this was the beginning of something much bigger. Currently, numerous applications on the platform publish stories about user actions and now those same stories can be extended outside of the platform via Facebook Connect. There are currently three primary incentives for developers to integrate with Facebook Connect:

1. Access to social graph data


2. Social distribution


3. Decreased registration barrier

For Facebook the rationale for launching this service is to become an identity management service and to help extend the social features of the platform to the rest of the web. The largest incentive for Facebook Connect is to access user actions around the web which are eventually published to user news feeds. The only problem with those stories currently is that the data within them are not structured.

For example, say someone purchased a book on Amazon.com. While Amazon.com may consider publishing a story which says that they purchased a book, Facebook wouldn’t have a simple way of interpreting that information. What would be one million times more effective is if Facebook could capture that data and then use that information to improve their advertising algorithm.

How To Turn News Stories Into Money

If Facebook presented a way for news feed stories to insert structured data, the company could immediately improve their targeting algorithm. So how do they do this? First, Facebook lets developers publish news feed stories from Connect with external facing links. Rather than publishing a basic URL, Facebook should force developers to use structured tags in order to link to sites. One example would be: <fb:book isbn=’XYZ123′ title=’Think and Grow Rich’ author=’Napoleon Hill’ url=’http://www.amazon.com/think-and-grow-rich’ />.

This would pass Facebook the data that they would like and it would provide developers with the ability to drive more traffic to their site. It’s a fair exchange and it’s one that could make Facebook a lot of money. Rather than the company spending excessive resources to monitor every application that leverages Facebook Connect and then launch their own custom solutions, Facebook should simply provide a system which forced developers to provide valuable targeting data.

Honestly, Facebook is in some ways “crowd-sourcing” the design of the structured data through their custom tags service that I mentioned earlier. It’s only the beginning though and ultimately if Facebook can collect all of this information and allow developers to help define the structure of that data, the company is on the verge of developing one of the most powerful targeting networks (in my own opinion).

If you are a developer would you provide structured information to Facebook? Do you think this is a fair exchange between Facebook and developers?

As predicted, the ChatToText application was shut down after violating the terms of service for blatently incentivizing users to invite their friends. The application attracted just under 20,000 users before it was shut down and now many are wondering what’s going to happen with the $6 that each user paid to join the service? My suggestion for the founders is to take the money and run since a $120k payout on a Facebook application is pretty damn good.



The developers took the time to build a fairly robust product though so my guess is that they are going to try to take another stab at launching the application. Fortunately for them they get to start with $20,000 users. Will people really pay to use the application now that they can’t make money off of it anymore? I doubt it but I’m sure there will be a lot of unhappy people that had their money taken from them.

Were these developers successful? Most definitely! While the company clearly violated the terms of service and was eventually shut down, they generated a lot of revenue. Large applications that are successful at temporarily violating the platform terms of service have actually become one of the biggest problems plaguing the Facebook platform. I’ll save that discussion for another post though.

For the time being ChatToText is offline and it will probably take a couple days at a minimum before it comes back online. At the minimum, the company has generated a ton of buzz about their application. There’s also a chance that the developers walked away with a pretty nice payday. If every user paid $6 then the company generated around $120,000.

Did you use the application? Are you waiting to get your money back?

This is a guest post by Jesse Pickard, Social Media Specialist at Razorfish. You can find Jesse on his blog or Twitter.

After spending the last few months digging into the intricacies of Facebook Connect, I’m here to go on the record: Facebook Connect is much more than the latest bright and shiny object. It has the potential to transform the way we interact with the web and the way agencies like Razorfish for which I work to build online experiences.

At Razorfish, I’m tasked with helping our clients integrate community into their web experiences, to make their sites more “social” for lack of a better term and also to deploy marketing programs across the web that foster two way conversations between brands and their customers. In order to be successful, it’s imperative that I constantly question a brand experience’s ability to make people care enough to do things like write comments or build profiles.

When you’re in the thick of a project, there’s a temptation to overestimate how much people actually care about your site. And that’s what’s so exciting to me about Facebook Connect: because users are able to bypass building profiles and a social graph all over again with just one click, building sophisticated social features is now possible for many more brands. Let’s dive into the reasons why.

Higher value user generated content

With a one-click login to Facebook Connect, websites have access to an unprecedented amount of user data. Using this data, sites now have the ability to redefine the way they display user generated content.  Gone are the days where all you will see is content from random avatars. Now sites can surface UGC from actual friends. If your friends haven’t made any actions on the site, then we can surface UGC from people like you – maybe fellow alumni or co-workers.  Say I’m shopping for a TV on Amazon, the 400+ reviews from people I don’t know have limited value to me compared to a review from my friend or even someone I don’t know who is similar to me.

Get brand content in Facebook without advertising

The strategy of fishing where the fish are is timeless. When time spent online was dominated by the big portals, our media dollars went to buying up ads and unique sponsorships on Yahoo and the like. Although Facebook Connect isn’t an advertising buy, it can accomplish the same goals as one (and in an unintrusive manner).  Brands can get their content into Facebook’s viral channels by letting visitors post news feed stories, status messages, photos, events, and more without leaving the website.

Smart brands and agencies will learn that the key to getting content into Facebook is about providing a meaningful value exchange for each Facebook Connect interaction, not prompting their user to post to Facebook at every turn. If a site is successful at giving users a good reason to post content to Facebook, it can make a world of difference to reach and visibility. The strong impact is only partly due to Facebook’s traffic. When brands appear in Facebook via Connect, the impressions interpreted as an individual’s endorsement of a particular product and are not subject to ad tune-out, making the impression far more valuable.

Faster logins, instant profiles, and individually relevant services

Facebook Connect and the like are going to make “social network fatigue” a very short-lived buzzword. With Connect, the social network fatigue-inducing process of registering for site, creating a profile and connecting with friends can be completely bypassed with one click. The value of this cannot be understated. While other Facebook Connect benefits can be slightly unclear, skipping registration is something any mainstream web user can appreciate.

Upon logging in, the Facebook-powered profile can inform a much more relevant, targeted experience. A retailer can feature merchandise based on profile details like location, age, relationship status or even brands that the user has “fanned.”  Another option is for a company to offer special promotions to influencers, or those who have a high amount of friends, tagged photos and wall posts. It’s not exact science, but I’m willing to guess that these people are more influential and vocal than their counterparts and would be a good type of person to convert into a brand advocate.

Enhanced competitions and ranking

Whether it’s through a contest or reputation system, incentives like earning rewards, raising levels, and winning prizes can help create much-needed energy around websites and marketing programs. Facebook Connect can enhance all forms of competition by creating an experience that’s far more relevant and localized to each individual user. By surfacing where a user ranks among their friends and networks, rather than among unknown peers, a user stronger drive to compete is generated. This is one of the key reasons why social games dominate Facebook’s application platform.

So what’s holding us up? Where are the Facebook Connect implementations for big brands?

Reason #1: There’s a valid concern out there that Facebook will change the rules of Connect just as they have with their application platform.

Reason #2: Implementing Facebook Connect into existing sites is not a walk in the park (depending on your platform). This is one of the reasons many of the big launch partners (Digg, Hulu, etc.) are yet to go live.

Reason #3: The Beacon privacy fiasco has spooked some brands into being very cautious with Facebook. It’s one of the main reasons for the “wait and see” attitude out there.

Looking ahead

Facebook Connect will likely get much more powerful as Facebook does two things in 2009. First, they will likely make more profile data available through Facebook Connect as the year progresses. Second, and more important, Facebook is expected to allow users to more easily segment their friends into groups and apply granular privacy settings to each group. Facebook Connect sites will respect these settings and users will feel more confident with logging into Facebook Connect.

Major brands should become familiar with the capabilities of all portable social graph technologies, including Google Friend Connect and the unreleased MySpaceID, along with Facebook Connect. It’s also a helpful exercise to imagine what your online destinations would look like on Facebook Connect as we did in our presentation, Portable Social Graphs – Imagining Their Potential.

Barring any privacy debacles, or big advancements from Friend Connect, there should be a strong adoption of Facebook Connect coming in 2009 - especially as major implementations from the likes of Digg and Hulu go live and set an example for brands that are on the fence.

RockYou, a leading developer of applications for Facebook and other social networks - as well as one of the leading ad networks for applications on the Facebook Platform and other social networking platforms - is launching support for video ads today.

RockYou’s video ad network offering will allow advertisers to distribute ad videos across multiple social platforms. The company says it can deliver 10 million video views per day in standard IAB units across its popular applications like Super Wall, Pieces of Flair, and Hug Me, as well as other applications in the RockYou ad network. And when users view the video, they will be able to share it with friends via Super Wall. Here’s how it looks:

Collectively, RockYou’s applications reach over 32 million monthly active users on Facebook, according to AppData. RockYou says it reaches over 130 million monthly unique users on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5 and Friendster overall.

Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps has made a statement on his Facebook fan page apologizing for a photograph that shows Phelps smoking marijuana at a college party. At least Phelps is being proactive about the situation, given his celebrity status as an athlete. Perhaps he’s taken cues from other athletes that have had to deal with a number of different drug-related situations–the public tends to be more forgiving when a celebrity is forthcoming from the start.

The Facebook fan page post from Phelps reads as follows:

“I engaged in behavior which was regrettable and demonstrated bad judgment. I’m 23-years-old, and despite the successes I have had in the pool, I acted in a youthful and inappropriate way, not in a manner that people have come to expect from me. For this, I am sorry. I promise my fans and the public - it will not happen again.“

The interesting aspect of this all is the fans reaction to Phelps’ statement. Since Phelps is a celebrity, he needs the support from his fans. And given the wealth of endorsements that have been thrown at him even before winning a chestful of gold medals at the Olympics last summer, Phelps’ public image is directly correlated with his potential for generating revenue.

But perusing through the comments on Phelps’ Facebook fan page, the swimmer doesn’t have anything to worry about. Though the hundreds of comments left in response to Phelps’ statement are peppered with harsh words, the majority of people feel that Phelps is still an outstanding athlete and person. Some even go so far as to question the very legality of marijuana, stating that if Phelps can smoke marijuana and go on (years later) to win so many Olympic medals, then it must not be that bad of a drug.

That’s an entirely different can of worms to open, but Phelps’ use of Facebook is just one of the many media outlets he used to reach out to apologize for his actions. It was a necessary move, considering Phelps became the most popular person on Facebook last summer. As Nick mentioned, Facebook recognizes the power of a celebrity fan page such as Phelps’ as it promoted the page, helping it grow to its number 1 status. So what does that mean for Facebook and its own potential for future partnerships and promotions? If we’re using Phelps’ current situation as a litmus test at all, I’d say there’s nothing to worry about for Phelps or Facebook.

We have the latest demographic data on US Facebook user as of February 1, 2009. Before jumping into the details below, here are the highlights.

Key Highlights

• Facebook reporting nearly 45.3 million active US users in the last 30 days


• Facebook growing in every age/gender demographic. Fastest growing segment: Women over 55, up 175.3% in the last 120 days.


• Facebook growing faster with women than men in almost every age group. Women comprise 56.2% of Facebook’s audience, up from 54.3% late last year.


• 45% of Facebook’s US audience is now 26 years old or older.

Facebook US Audience Growth by Age and Gender

Facebook’s US audience has continued to grow in recent months, fueled by expansion primarily in users 26 and older. Facebook has been growing particularly rapidly amongst people over 45 in the US, as the charts show below: over 165% amongst both men and women 45-54 over the last 4 months.

While the fastest growing age group by total users is still 26-34, the number of women over 55 on Facebook grew by an astounding 175.3% since the end of September.  Their male counterparts, however, weren’t able to keep up - growing by only 137.8%.  The number of women over 55 on Facebook almost double the number of men over 55 on Facebook today.

Facebook US Audience by Age and Gender

Overall, women now outnumber men in every age group on Facebook. In total, women now make up about 56.2% of Facebook’s US audience, up from 54.3% late last year. Women most outnumber men in the 18-25 and 26-34 age groups, where there are 1.4 females for every 1 male on Facebook.

Facebook US Audience by Age

Overall, 45% of Facebook’s 45.3 million active users in the US is now 26 years old or older. Nearly a quarter of all Facebook users are over 35 today - quite a change from Facebook’s roots as a social networking tool for college students just a few years ago.

Teenagers now make up about 12% of the overall Facebook audience. Facebook does not publish any data on users under 13, because the terms of service requires all users be at least 13 years old to join.

For more information on Facebook’s international growth in 95 countries around the world, check out the Facebook Global Monitor.

Everyday I receive an email from somebody about how their account was hacked, how a friend tagged them in the photo and they want a way to avoid it, as well as a number of other complications related to their privacy on Facebook. Over the weekend one individual contacted me to let me know that he would be removing me as a friend from Facebook because he was “going to make a shift with my Facebook use - going to just mostly family stuff.”

Perhaps he was tired of receiving my status updates or perhaps he didn’t want me to view photos from his personal life. Whatever the reason for ending our Facebook friendship, I figured that many people would benefit from a thorough overview on how to protect your privacy on Facebook. Below is a step by step process for protecting your privacy.

1. Use Your Friend Lists

I can’t tell you how many people are not aware of their friend lists. For those not aware of what friend lists are, Facebook describes them as a feature which allows “you to create private groupings of friends based on your personal preferences. For example, you can create a Friend List for your friends that meet for weekly book club meetings. You can create Friend Lists for all of your organizational needs, allowing you to quickly view friends by type and send messages to your lists.”

There are a few very important things to remember about friend lists:

• You can add each friend to more than one friend group


• Friend groups should be used like “tags” as used elsewhere around the web


• Friend Lists can have specific privacy policies applied to them

I’ll touch on each of the things listed above in more detail later. A typical setup for groups would be “Friends”, “Family”, and “Professional”. These three groups can then be used to apply different privacy policies. For example, you may want your friends to see photos from the party you were at last night, but you don’t want your family or professional contacts to see those photos.

Using friend lists is also extremely useful for organizing your friends if you have a lot of them. For instance I have about 20 friend lists and I categorize people by city (New York, San Francisco, D.C., Tel Aviv, etc), where I met them (conferences, past co-workers, through this blog), and my relationship with them (professional, family, social, etc).

You can configure your friend lists by visiting the friends area of your Facebook.

2. Remove Yourself From Facebook Search Results

My mom is a teacher and one of the first things she asked me when she joined Facebook is how she could make sure her students couldn’t see that she was on the site. Understandably my mom doesn’t want her middle school students to know what she’s up to in her personal life. There are numerous reasons that individuals don’t want their information to show up in search results on Facebook, and it’s simple to turn off your public visibility.

How to Remove Yourself From Facebook Search Results

Now that you’ve decided that you would like to remove yourself from Facebook’s search results, here’s how to do it:

1. Visit your search privacy settings page


2. Under “Search Visibility” select “Only Friends” (Remember, doing so will remove you from Facebook search results, so make sure you want to be removed totally. Otherwise, you can select another group, such as “My Networks and Friends” which I believe is the default.)


3. Click “Save Changes”

By default, Facebook makes your presence visible to the network you are in. Frequently, people aren’t aware of their visibility, so this is one of the first settings that users wish to modify. By selecting “Customize” from the search visibility drop down you can make your settings even more granular.

3. Remove Yourself From Google

Facebook gets A TON of traffic from displaying user profiles in search engines. Not all of your profile is displayed though. Currently the information displayed in the search profile is limited to: your profile picture, a list of your friends, a link to add you as a friend, a link to send you a message, and a list of up to approximately 20 fan pages that you are a member of.

For some people, being displayed in the search engines is a great way to let people get in contact with you, especially if you don’t have an existing website. Facebook also tends to rank high in the search results, so if you want to be easy to find, making your search profile can be a great idea. Many people don’t want any of their information to be public though.

By visiting the same search privacy settings page listed in the previous step, you can control the visibility of your public search listing which is visible to Google and other search engines. You can turn off your public search listing by simply unchecking the box next to the phrase “Create a public search listing for me and submit it for search engine indexing” as pictured in the image below.

4. Avoid the Infamous Photo/Video Tag Mistake

This is the classic Facebook problem. You let lose for a few hours one night (or day) and photos (or videos) of the moment are suddenly posted for all to view, not just your close friends who shared the moment with you. The result can be devastating. Some have been fired from work after incriminating photos/videos were posted for the boss to see. For others, randomly tagged photos/videos have ended relationships.

At the least, a tagged photo/video can result in personal embarrassment. So how do you prevent the infamous tagged photo or video from showing up in all of your friends news feeds? It’s pretty simple. First visit your profile privacy page and modify the setting next to “Photos Tagged of You”. Select the option which says “Customize…” and a box like the one pictured below will pop up.

Select the option “Only Me” and then “None of My Networks” if you would like to keep all tagged photos private. If you’d like to make tagged photos visible to certain users you can choose to add them in the box under the “Some Friends” option. In the box that displays after you select “Some Friends” you can type either individual friends or friend lists.

5. Protect Your Albums

Just because you’ve uploaded photos doesn’t mean that you’ve accurately tagged every photo correctly. This setting is more of a reminder than anything else. Frequently people will turn of their tagged photo visibility to certain friend lists yet keep their photo albums public to the world. If you are trying to make all your photos invisible you must do so on an album by album basis.

There is a specific Photos Privacy page from which you can manually configure the visibility of each album (as pictured below). This is an extremely useful configuration option and I highly recommend that you take advantage of it. This way you can store your photos indefinitely on Facebook yet ensure that the only people that can view your photos are the ones who you really want to see them.

6. Prevent Stories From Showing Up in Your Friends’ News Feeds

Oh, did you really just break up with your girlfriend? I’m sorry to hear that. I’m sure all of your friends and business contacts are also sorry to hear that. I can’t tell you how many awkward relationship status changes I’ve seen. The most regular one I’ve seen recently is when an attractive female ends their relationship and numerous guys hop on the opportunity to console her.

I’ve also seen the end of marriages, as well as weekly relationship status changes as individuals try to determine where their relationship stands with their significant other. My personal policy is to not display a relationship status, but many like to make a public statement out of their relationship. For those individuals, it can be a smart move to hedge against future disasters.

There are a number of ways to control how your relationship status is displayed. The first thing that most people should do is uncheck the box next to “Remove Relationship Status” in the News Feed and Wall Privacy page. In the rare instance that a relationship does uncomfortably end, you can avoid making things more uncomfortable by avoiding a friend notification about it.

Second, your relationship status falls within your “Basic Information” section of your profile. You can control who can see your basic information next to the “Basic Information” setting on the Profile Privacy page. Keep in mind that other relevant profile information like your gender, birth date, networks, and other settings are visible within your basic information section.

Making your basic information completely invisible to friends probably isn’t a good idea, but removing the news feed stories about relationship changes most likely is.

7. Protect Against Published Application Stories

This one is a little more tricky to manage but I’ll explain the issue at hand. Frequently when you add an application, a news feed item is immediately published to your profile. One way to get instantly embarrassed is to visit the “Have Sex!” application (found here). This application has no purpose besides telling your friends that you are interested in having sex with them. Without taking any action, the application will post a news feed story to your profile which says the equivalent of “Nick just published to the world that he is having sex!”

This is surely something that none of your professional contacts if any of your contacts are interested in seeing (honestly I’m a bit confused about that application, but that’s a different story). That’s why it’s important to monitor what takes place after you install an application on Facebook. Once you install an application you should visit your profile to ensure that no embarrassing notification has been posted to your profile.

More often then not, nothing will be posted but there are many applications on the platform unfortunately that publish stories without you knowing it. There are two ways to avoid having this happen: don’t visit applications or scan your profile every time that you do. Ultimately you shouldn’t be concerned about applications that you’ve built a trusted relationship with but any new applications could potentially post embarrassing notifications.

8. Make Your Contact Information Private

I personally use Facebook for professional and personal use and it can frequently become overwhelming. That’s why I’ve taken the time to outline these ten privacy protection steps. One of the first things I did when I started approving friend requests from people that I hadn’t built a strong relationship with, was make my contact information visible only to close contacts.

The contact information is my personal email and phone number. It’s a simple thing to set but many people forget to do it. Frequently people we don’t know end up contacting us and we have no idea how they got our contact information. Your contact privacy can be edited right from your profile. If you have chosen to enter this information, you should see a “Contact Information” area under the “Info” tab in your profile.

If it displays, you simply click “Edit” and then a screen like the one pictured below will show up.

For each contact item that you have in your profile you should set custom privacy settings (as pictured below) so that contacts that you aren’t close to don’t have access to your phone number and/or email. It’s a small change but it can save you the hassle of being pestered by people you don’t know well. Also, protecting your privacy is generally a good practice to get in the habit of doing.

As a side note, this is a great area to take advantage of friend lists. By getting in the habit of grouping your friends, you can ensure that you are navigating Facebook safely through privacy settings that are attached to your friend lists.

9. Avoid Embarrassing Wall Posts

Just because you use Facebook for business doesn’t mean your friends do. That’s why once in a while a friend of yours will come post something embarrassing or not necessarily “work friendly” and it can end up having adverse effects. That’s why Facebook has provided you with the ability to customize your wall postings visibility. You can also control which friends can post on your wall. There are two places you can control these things.

Adjust Wall Posting Visibility

Within your profile page you can control who can view wall postings made by your friends. To do so, click on the “Settings” icon on the wall in your profile page. Next, find the box pictured in the image above and adjust the setting which says “Who can see posts made by friends?” I’d suggest using a strategy similar to the one outlined in the previous step regarding contact information.

Control Who Can Post to Your Wall

In addition to controlling who can view wall postings published by your friends, you also want to control which friends can post on your wall. Not everybody needs to do this, but occasionally you simply want to prevent some people from posting on your page. If you visit the Profile Privacy settings page, there is a section labeled “Wall Posts”.

From this area you can completely disable your friends’ ability to post on your wall. You can also select specific friend lists that can post on your wall. Personally, I don’t really care who can post on my wall but I can understand the need to control who can see those wall postings. If you want to limit who can post wall posts on your profile, this is where you can do it.

10. Keep Your Friendships Private

While it’s fun to show off that you have hundreds or thousands of friends on Facebook, some of your friends don’t want to live public lives. That’s why it’s often a good policy to turn off your friends’ visibility to others. I’ve had a number of individuals visit my profile and then selectively pick off friends that are relevant to them for marketing purposes, or other reasons.

Whatever the reason they are doing it, just know that they are … it’s part of what makes Facebook so addictive: the voyeuristic nature. Also, your friends are frequently visible to the public through search engines and exposing this information can ultimately present a security risk. To modify the visibility of your friends, visit the Profile Privacy page.

Navigate down to the setting which says “Friends” and then modify the setting to whatever is right for you.

Conclusion

These are just ten ways that you can protect your privacy on Facebook. While there are a few other small things to keep in mind, these ten settings are most important. Keep in mind that while you may have turned off the visibility of many profile sections, there is no way to prevent all photos or videos from being visible if friends of yours make the images visible.

The best way to prevent embarrassing items from showing up on Facebook in the future is to not make bad judgements in your personal life. We’re all human though and being completely paranoid about every choice you make is probably not the best way to live your life. Be aware of what privacy settings are available and be conscious of what your friends may be publishing about you.

While you may not want to configure all of the privacy settings outlined, simply knowing how to do so is a great step in the right direction. By following the 10 settings listed above you are well on your way to an embarrassment free future on Facebook!

Last week while at Davos, Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that the company currently has over 25 million people accessing the site via their mobile devices on a monthly basis. As of today, the company has over 4 million daily active users just between their top 3 mobile applications. According to our Facebook application statistics, Facebook for iPhone has approximately 1.64 million daily active users, Facebook for Blackberry has approximately 1.56 million daily active users, and the general mobile application has just under 1 million daily active users.

This doesn’t include all the users on Palm applications as well as general mobile users which are not technically required to add the mobile application to visit the site, which means there could easily be more than a million other daily mobile users. Additionally, Facebook has an iPhone compatible application which does not require any download by users. Not surprisingly, the Facebook mobile applications are currently the two most popular Facebook applications on the platform based on daily active users.



Mobile is poised to be the largest growth area for most social networks over the next few years as more users turn to their mobile devices for interactive content. It’s an explosive area which is highlighted by the Apple iPhone’s wild success. Developers have rushed to emerging mobile platforms to grab a piece of the mobile application landscape.

Given that mobile phones are inherently social devices, success on mobile platforms are similar to social platforms. This is why we’ve seen rapid growth from social games and other entertainment applications. Mobile applications are still a nascent industry yet developers continue to flock in droves as there has been a built in revenue model since the iPhone platform launched last summer.

Facebook continues to command a dominant share among mobile social networks and that share is growing on a daily basis. My guess is that much of our social activities will continue to shift toward mobile devices as it’s a natural extension of our existing communication activities. Are you a Facebook mobile user? Do you access the site more frequently from your mobile device or from your computer?

Purchase this report The Facebook Global Monitor - February 2009 Edition Buy PDF: $99 USD OR Buy 6 Month Subscription: $395 USD

The newly revised, expanded, and hot-off-the-press Facebook Global Monitor: Tracking Facebook in Global Markets - February 2009 Edition is now available!

The Facebook Global Monitor is a premium service and newsletter produced by Inside Facebook that provides vital data and insight to media industry executives, global marketing and communications firms, analysts, and developers for whom Facebook’s rapid international expansion poses significant opportunities or threats.

Facebook’s growth continued at a torrid pace in February. 73% of Facebook’s growth came internationally, and there were well over 100 million users active on Facebook in the last month from outside the US. For further background, take a look at how Facebook grew in some countries around the world last year like Italy, Spain, France, Switzerland, Argentina, and Indonesia.

For those interested in learning more, click the purchase link above. The price is $99 per issue, or $395 for a six month subscription. Future monthly updates will be delivered directly to your inbox. As always, please make suggestions if you’d like to see more attention paid to any topic. (Custom reports are also available.) You can reach us at mail AT insidefacebook DOT com with questions at any time.

Each month, the Facebook Global Monitor provides the latest comprehensive data on the expansion of Facebook’s audience in nearly 100 global markets. In addition, the Monitor provides alerts on breakout and cooling markets, as well as our latest in-house projections on Facebook’s growth in each country 30 days, 90 days, and 12 months into the future.

See the full table of contents of the first newsletter below. All reports are based on primary research by Inside Facebook using data from Facebook, and each section is designed to elucidate key actionable trends.

We believe big opportunities exist for developers and marketers to reach and engage the Facebook audience in these rapidly emerging and expanding markets. Cheers to continued growth in 2009!

The Facebook Global Monitor

Tracking Facebook in Global Markets

February 2009

Contents

I. Introduction: 2008 - The Year That Facebook Went Global

II. Global Market Report

1. Audience Size Today

2. Fastest Growing Audience

• Last 12 months


• Last 90 days


• Last 30 days

3. Market Penetration Today

4. Largest Market Penetration Increases

• Last 12 months


• Last 90 days


• Last 30 days

III. Emerging Market Analysis

1. Growth Projections

• Next 30 days


• Next 90 days


• Next 12 months

2. Technical Alerts

• Breakout Markets: Last 90 Days


• Cooling Markets: Last 90 Days

IV. Regional Summaries

1. Africa

2. Asia / Pacific

3. Europe

4. North America

5. South America

V. Country Updates

1. Argentina

2. Australia

3. Austria

4. Bahamas

5. Bahrain

6. Bangladesh

7. Belgium

8. Bolivia

9. Bosnia & Herzegovina

10. Brazil

11. Bulgaria

12. Canada

13. Chile

14. China

15. Colombia

16. Costa Rica

17. Croatia

18. Cyprus

19. Czech Republic

20. Denmark

21. Dominican Republic

22. Ecuador

23. Egypt

24. El Salvador

25. Finland

26. France

27. Germany

28. Ghana

29. Greece

30. Guatemala

31. Honduras

32. Hong Kong

33. Hungary

34. Iceland

35. India

36. Indonesia

37. Ireland

38. Israel

39. Italy

40. Jamaica

41. Japan

42. Jordan

43. Kenya

44. Kuwait

45. Lebanon

46. Lithuania

47. Luxembourg

48. Macedonia

49. Malaysia

50. Maldives

51. Malta

52. Mauritius

53. Mexico

54. Morocco

55. Netherlands

56. New Zealand

57. Nicaragua

58. Nigeria

59. Norway

60. Oman

61. Pakistan

62. Palestine

63. Panama

64. Paraguay

65. Peru

66. Philippines

67. Poland

68. Portugal

69. Puerto Rico

70. Qatar

71. Romania

72. Russia

73. Saudi Arabia

74. Serbia

75. Singapore

76. Slovakia

77. Slovenia

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78. South Africa

79. South Korea

80. Spain

81. Sri Lanka

82. Sweden

83. Switzerland

84. Taiwan

85. Thailand

86. Trinidad and Tobago

87. Tunisia

88. Turkey

89. Ukraine

90. United Arab Emirates

91. United Kingdom

92. United States

93. Uruguay

94. Venezuela

95. Vietnam

Footnotes & Methodology

Facebook, which has been testing giving its Gifts application more prominence on friends’ profiles before their birthdays recently, has just launched another new Gifts feature: scheduled birthday gifts.

With scheduled gifts, you can buy Facebook gifts for your friends whose birthdays are coming up ahead of time - but Facebook won’t actually “deliver” the gift to your friend’s wall until their actual birthday.

Interestingly, however, other friends will be able to see that you are giving a birthday gift before the recipient’s birthday - perhaps a move by Facebook to subtly increase the social pressure on others to give a Facebook Gift as well.

Virtual gifts are an increasingly important revenue stream for Facebook. After doing an estimated $30-40 million in virtual gifts last year, the company changed its currency system from dollars to virtual credits in November. Given all the work the company has done to push birthday virtual gift giving, Facebook’s virtual gifts revenues should substantially increase this year.

Several Facebook application developers are focued on the birthday gifting market as well, including SocialCalendar (in depth profile), with over 2 million monthly active users, and Birthday Calendar, which sports over 10 million monthly active users.