Facebook users are sharing five billion pieces of content a week, or five times as much as they were in July, according to new statistics the company released this month.
The big burst in sharing comes as Facebook has promoted share buttons and Connect, its effort to push a layer of social functionality across the web with partners like Digg and Hulu. As we’ve said before, Facebook is becoming more of a content portal in addition to serving as a social networking space.
After crossing the 400 million active user mark last week, the company has seen growth across the board for all types of content. Facebook users are also posting 60 million status updates a day or 50 percent more than they were in September. However, the overall percentage of Facebook’s user base posting status updates has actually fallen with 35 of the 400 million users publishing these per day. That’s unchanged from December, and only 5 million higher than the 30 million users posting status updates a day in July.
New photo uploads are at 3 billion per month, up from 1 billion in July. Growth may accelerate with Facebook’s new photo uploader, released on Friday. Events are unchanged from December at 3.5 million new ones each month.
Pages have also seen dramatic growth. There are nearly twice as many active Pages as Facebook reported in December when there were 1.6 million. A lot of that growth has come from local businesses, which accounted for 800,000 of those new pages. Twenty million people become fans of Facebook Pages each day, or up more than twofold since July.
With the exception of a few spots, Facebook is seeing growth across all kinds user-generated and professional content, meaning more valuable discovery, search and ad targeting.
Youth social networking researcher dana boyd has observed that many people presume the way they use social networks is the way everyone uses them. "I interviewed gay men who thought Friendster was a gay dating site because all they saw were other gay men," she says. "I interviewed teens who believed that everyone on MySpace was Christian because all of the profiles they saw contained biblical quotes. We all live in our own worlds with people who share our values and, with networked media, it's often hard to see beyond that."
Now picture our perspective leaving our own experiences, zooming out and up until we can see how all the different groups are interacting on a worldwide social network. That bird's-eye view could be both beautiful and horrible if the resolution was clear enough. That's what a Ramen-eating, ex-Apple engineer named Pete Warden is about to release to the public this week.
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This Wednesday, Warden will make Friend, Fan page and name data from hundreds of millions of Facebook users available to the academic research community. It's a move that Facebook has to have seen coming, a move that many in the data-centric community have been calling on the company itself to do for years, and an event that's been complicated by Facebook's recent privacy policy changes, which have muddied the waters of right and wrong but rendered even more data available for outside analysis.
If what people call Web 2.0 was all about creating new technologies that made it easy for everyday people to publish their thoughts, social connections and activities, then the next stage of innovation online may be services like recommendations, self and group awareness, and other features made possible by software developers building on top of the huge mass of data that Web 2.0 made public. It's a very exciting future, and Warden is about to fire one of the earliest big shots in that direction.
Warden studied Computer Vision in college in the U.K., then got into game development. After moving to L.A., he spent six years building graphics drivers for the original Playstation and the XBox. Then he started his own independent business, where, thankfully, he open-sourced much of his work (something he's still doing today).
When he found out that starting his own business wasn't going to work with his immigration status, he was very fortunate to have also caught Apple's eye with the software he had been releasing to the public. Apple bought his company in order to bring him on board. The proceeds of that small sale are now sustaining his next project after going independent again.
After spending five years at Apple struggling to navigate the maze of people and connections and types of expertise in order to get the information he needed, Warden decided to go independent and build a company that solved exactly that kind of problem. "I can't think of a better big company to work for, but it was still a big company," he says. "It was hard to find the right people to talk to, whether for particular expertise or for contacts at external companies." And so Warden left Apple to build a company that would use social graph analysis to solve problems like that. He called the company Mailana.
We've written here a number of times about Mailana's tool that analyzes the social graph of any Twitter user. Enter the username of someone on Twitter and Mailana will show you which 20 other people the user has exchanged the largest number of reciprocal public @ replies with. Find someone interesting or important? Mailana's Twitter analyzer will tell you who they most regularly interact with. See, for example, The Inner Circles of 10 Geek Rockstars on Twitter.
Now Warden is about to unveil a much larger project along the same vein. For the past six months he's been crawling public profile pages on Facebook. He now has more than 215 million of them indexed and updated about once a month. When he began he was using the Web crawling service 80legs, but over time he had to build his own crawling infrastructure.
When I talked to him this afternoon, he had already begun uploading 100 GB of user data onto his server to make it available for academic research starting on Wednesday. Warden says he's removed identifying profile URLs but kept names, locations, Fan page lists and partial Friends lists. All those fields of data are just waiting to be analyzed and cross referenced. That's one very rich resource.
Yesterday Warden posted some of his own initial observations from the data on his personal blog. Those included:
These observations are interesting, but they are only the beginning of what's possible. Name, location, friends and interests are great data points to analyze. Warden has written a program that will estimate gender as well, based on names. All these data points can be cross-referenced with outside data, too. Members of Facebook's own staff did this kind of analysis when they compared user last names to U.S. Census data, which allowed them to estimate changes in Facebook's racial composition over time based on the likelihood of people with particular last names to report a particular racial backgrounds.
"I'm mostly thinking 'What do I try first?'," Warden says. "There's so many interesting ways to slice the data - especially as I'm starting to get changes over time. I'm also trying to map out political networks in aggregate; how polarized the fans of particular politicians are - so how likely a Sarah Palin fan is to have any friends who are fans of Obama, and how that varies with location too. One of my favorite results is that Texans are more likely to be fans of the Dallas Cowboys than God."
Warden says he hasn't talked to anyone from Facebook since he started crawling the site, but he did get an email from someone on the security team asking him to take down instructions he'd posted that exposed a security hole that made harvesting peoples' email addresses easy. So the company is paying attention. "I'd love to see them put me out of business by putting decent data out there," Warden says. He says his Amazon Web Services bill was over $5,000 last month.
Why is he indexing all this content and why is he going to hand it over to the academic world later this week? "I am fascinated by how we can build tools to understand our world and connect people based on all the data we're just littering the Internet with," Warden says.
"Nobody thinks about how much valuable information they're generating just by friending people and fanning pages. It's like we're constantly voting in a hundred different ways every day. And I'm a starry-eyed believer that we'll be able to change the world for the better using that neglected information. It's like an x-ray for the whole country - we can see all sorts of hidden details of who we're friends with, where we live, what we like."
For a great example of the kind of social impact that data analysis can make, Warden points to some of the fascinating ways that GIS data is illuminating the intersection of race and public services. Data has shed light on social injustices for decades, and measurable information about the interactions of hundreds of millions of people every day on Facebook offers opportunities to discover both good and bad news about the contemporary human condition.
Warden says he's not yet been able to interest any investors in his ideas for businesses based on this data, so his girlfriend Liz Baumann, a former insurance actuary, stepped in to help and is now running much of the crawling. He says he's now focused on "working on ways of presenting all this information in a form that answers questions for people willing to pay." His first experiment along those lines is the very interesting FanPageAnalytics.com.
What does Pete Warden hope for from this week's public release of all this Facebook data? "Hopefully I'll get to see a bunch of interesting [academic research] papers come out of it, worst case. And I'd like to be the guy people turn to when they need stuff like this."
Already well-respected among a fringe group of bleeding-edge geeks, we hope that Warden's work on social graph analysis will end up impacting a far larger number of people than may ever know his name.
Discuss
Orkut. Used it? I did back in 2002, but since then? No one I know uses it.
Jaiku. Used it? I did back in 2006, but since then? No one I know uses it.
Dodgeball. Used it? I did back in 2006, but since then? No one I know uses it.
These are just a few of the failures Google has had trying to figure out the social space.
Tomorrow they’ve invited a ton of journalists to see a new social effort. The headline on top of Techmeme screams “Twitter killer.”
Um, I’ve learned in life that past behavior is the best predictor of future results.
So, why is Google going to succeed THIS time when its past experiences into social networking have failed and failed miserably?
I’ve identified a few:
1. This time they built everything in house. All the efforts above were purchased companies that were bolted onto existing infrastructure. This time? Look at the foundational pieces that Google has put in place. Google Profiles lets you enter the social networks you’re on. Check out mine, I’ve told it more already about myself than I’ve told Facebook. Then take a look at Google’s Social Circles. Social Circles is a clue that Google is studying ALL social networks, not just Facebook and Twitter. Some of my friends’ entries there have hundreds of websites and social networks listed there. It’ll be very interesting to see what Google does with those tomorrow. Hopefully a feed like FriendFeed had, along with real time search that’s filterable.
2. Employees on board. In 1996 whenever I talked with a Google employee about social stuff like Twitter or Facebook they’d turn their noses and say something derogatory. “That’s lame,” is what I heard over and over. It was clear that the rank and file Google employee just didn’t think Twitter or Facebook would ever challenge Google in any real way. I haven’t heard that attitude for quite a while now. You just have to look at Compete.com for why.
3. Mobile has made social more important. Look at the average mobile phone ad in the United States. A good percentage of them mention both Twitter and Facebook. Google can’t ignore this fact, especially now that Google is pushing Android on small devices and Chrome OS on bigger ones. Google knows that carriers see social networks as important things to push, so if Google can bring something new and interesting that will get people and brands to even talk about switching from Facebook or Twitter, it will be interesting to watch. Look for Google Contacts to add much better integration with all of the social networks that Google’s Social Circles algorithms are collecting. Yes, Palm got there first, but Palm doesn’t really matter, so look for Google to exploit that fact with really deep integration with contacts.
4. Twitter looks attackable. For the past few months we’ve all been watching Twitter’s engagement, traffic, and new feature releases. So far Twitter just hasn’t stepped up to the plate and lifted the drawbridge off of the moat surrounding their castle. Yes, Twitter is the best place now to find real time news, look at my list of world news brands for a great example of that. It’s also the best place to follow companies in real time, look at Dominic Jones’ list of 499 public companies for a great example of that. But look deeper and you’ll see a limping Twitter. Engagement just hasn’t taken off for a whole lot of reasons (let’s be honest, most people come to Twitter looking for celebrities, but look at Listorious’ list of Twittering celebrities done by Pete Cashmore and you’ll just see mostly lame tweets that don’t hook users much at all). I can see a whole lot of ways to beat Twitter, and if me and others, like Dave Winer can see ways that Twitter is beatable, then so can the engineers at Google.
5. Normal users are hungry. Normal users I talk to have now figured out Facebook. Most have played with Twitter and found it lacking, they tell me, but they are interested in other uses of social networking now. The market is primed for a new service to come along that shows us something new. Will Google deliver that tomorrow? Well, we only have a few hours to wait. But there is a latent unsatisfied interest, especially because Facebook has made its privacy stance confusing with its founder saying that we are in a post privacy world.
6. Location-based services are gathering attention. Well, at least they are being adopted by early adopters and, thanks to deals with TV networks and others, Foursquare, at least, is starting to move out of the early-adopter echo chamber and into the mainstream. Even Yelp has copied Foursquare’s “check in” metaphor and has primed the market for Google to come in and demonstrate some real leadership here. Interesting to note that Google Latitude has largely failed too when compared to the smaller upstarts. Will Google turn around its failures here?
7. Google HAS won in video and done fairly well in blogging. YouTube is a huge adoption success, even if it hasn’t yet made Google much money. That said, most of my friends are noticing that more and more users are coming into YouTube (indeed, even I’ve switched much of my video publishing to my channel there and I’m seeing strong subscriber and engagement growth). While services like Redux or Tweetmeme show you just videos that have been shared on Twitter and Facebook, look for Google to build on this strength.
8. Google has the best email and collaboration suite users. Whenever I speak at a conference of early adopters most people say they are now using Google Mail. That’s huge because these early adopters are the types that are willing to try new things and, better yet, are willing to tell their friends how cool they are. Look at how Google Wave — despite a crappy user interface — became very popular very quickly. Why? Because of this army of early adopters. See, email users are NOT all equal. Next time you are on a plane, look around you. Is the guy who is using Outlook 2003 using anything else that’s bleeding edge? Not very likely. Now look at the Gmail users, they are more likely to have a bleeding edge mobile phone, they are more likely to have a Windows 7 or Macintosh laptop. They are more likely to try things. They are more valuable because of that and is why Yahoo or Microsoft never were really able to capitalize on their hundreds of millions of email customers. Plus, look how Google integrated Docs and Spreadsheets into Gmail. Look for them to do the same thing with their social network efforts. It’ll be nuanced and addictive. If I were Gist or Xobni you bet I’d be worried about what’s coming tomorrow.
Anyway, this is all a long way of me saying that don’t expect Google to keep failing at this social networking thing. Its past behavior is NOT a predictor of what’s coming tomorrow.
