Silicon Alley Insider wrote yesterday that the estimated revenues from the Facebook gifts are 50-60 million US$. It is really amazing that the Facebook gifts revenues getting higher and higher every time someone doing a new estimation. Unfortunately the latest estimation is also still unconfirmed.
In January 2008, the first estimation was about 15 million US$. In September, just two months ago, the revenues were estimated around 40 million US$. Now, it is 50-60 million US$.
I wonder, when Facebook will finally confirm these estimations and how high this estimation will increase in the future.
Good news for Friendster, great news for Facebook:
In a move signifying the influence of the Facebook platform in the social web, Friendster has announced that it has deployed supporter for the Facebook platform. Developers can now choose between the Facebook Platform, OpenSocial, or Friendster’s API to launch applications on the platform. Whether or not Facebook developers will actually choose to launch on Friendster is unknown but it just became a whole lot easier.
Sorry Facebook guys, but establishing a headquarter in Dublin is not enough to conquer Europe and the Middle East and Africa:
This morning the Irish Times reported that Facebook has confirmed its plans to establish one of its international headquarters in Dublin. The headquarters will be responsible for activities taking place within the company “across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.†Last week I wrote about Facebook hiring people in India, Hong Kong, Syndney, and the U.K.
Europe is a diverse social network market and Germany in particular is a complicated one with strong competitors. If you want to succeed in Germany you have to open a headquarter in Germany. Take MySpace for example, they have a headquarter in Berlin, a very beautiful by the way.
So Facebook come to Germany! My suggestion for your headquarter is Munich – you will like it! And have a good time!
After several tries on Facebook and Google searches I found this blog post (which I shortened):
When Facebook announced the Fan pages, there were a number of mixed reviews. Some where hailing it and its integration to the new advertising platform and some hated it – claiming it was turning Facebook into Myspace. Whatever your stance is, here are 6 reasons you need to make a Facebook page for your website or company now.
Facebook may be the world’s largest and fastest growing social network, but apparently Germany remains a tough market to crack for the company. The site is just ranked 19th on Alexa’s Top 100 list for this country, ten positions behind StudiVZ, its local clone. While Facebook currently has a German user base of 800,000 (according to the site’s ad placement tool), StudiVZ boasts a membership of over 10 million, making it the largest social network in the German-speaking world. Facebook has been available in German since March of this year and reportedly grew by just 200,000 members since then. Comscore numbers suggest that number might be higher (see below).
The startup Smaboo is launching Facebook’s first offline campaign in Germany: they are looking for Facebook Ambassadors from Berlin or Munich. There will be also a battle between the two groups. Here is the information:
Berlin oder München? Hole die Facebook Party in deine Stadt!
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Los gehts am 15.Oktober!Â
Was erwartet dich nach dem offiziellen Recruiting?
1. Eine spannende smaboo-Kampagne für das weltweit größte Social Network!
2. Ein Kickoff Event für die ersten 200 Botschafter aus Berlin und München Anfang Oktober (mit Special Guest).
3. Das ultimative Berlin-München Städte Battle auf Facebook – in der Gewinner-Stadt gibts eine rauschende Party.
4. Die Chance auf einen Besuch und vielleicht sogar ein Praktikum bei Facebook in Kalifornien.
5. Coole Gadgets als wöchentliche Sachpreise (iPhone, Wii, u.ä.)
Marko, the Head of Marketing of Smaboo, invited us as a campaign partner. If you are interested in becoming a Facebook Ambassador drop me a line per email to martin.szugat _at_ snipclip.com or as a comment. And have a good time!
The Allfacebook blog reports about the aversion against Facebooks new design:
The backlash against Facebook has continued to spread ad Facebook rolls out the new site design. One group, “1,000,000 AGAINST THE NEW FACEBOOK LAYOUT!†has surged and will most likely surpass two million users later today. Another group, “Petition Against the ‘New Facebook’†has over 1.35 million members. It’s not just the group members that don’t like the new profile.
Wow, that is a large number of people who dislike the new design. I’m not sure whether it is good. My colleague Matthias likes it and he argues that it is more intuitive. For me it is just not cool enough – in fact it is boring. But this is how Facebook works: it is boring, because it is designed for ease of use. Now, it is even more boring, i.e. more easy to use.
Facebook resembles the Windows desktop and becomes more and more a social network-enabled webtop instead of a social network with web applications. However, where or what is the “Apple-style” webtop? MySpace? No, too chaotic. Is this is a market-gap?
Btw:Â do you like the new design of Facebook?
Whether or not, you probably have to life with it. Nevertheless, have a good time!
It is a visual social network, i.e. people don’t have profile pages but real homes. Igor, the founder, told me, that Flamap is in fact a platform. Any company can build their branded Flamap and replace the buildings for example with trees, cars or what ever.
Try it out yourself: it’s still in beta but already open to the public. And have a good time!
Did you know that Facebook provides an Outlook import of your contacts? I did not, so I tried today, but it didn’t work or I don’t know if it worked. It just said it imported my contacts but there no new contacts. Did anyone else tested this feature yet?
Next question: what are your strategies to keep your social graphs and address books synchronized? For example I use the XING Outlook plugin to import all my XING contacts to Outlook. Via a hosted Exchange server the contacts are transfered to my mobile phone.
