In Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Singapore, Facebook is the number one website. In the USA and 20 other countries, it’s number 2. Facebook now has over 300 million users. It’s nearly the third largest market in the world.
I often find people asking me whether I think Facebook is just another flash in the pan. Friendster patented the social networking concept but have largely faded away. Having purchased Myspace for $580 million in 2006, Newscorp investors have already seen huge returns from a $900 million ad deal with Google. MySpace is now fading off to it’s own niche as a platform for music and other performance arts.
Without doubt, Facebook’s strength is in its reliance on the ‘friend network’. We trust our offline friends and contacts. The friend network helps the site to grow and it’s gravity is not stopping with consistent growth outside of North America. Just have a look at the graph from Alexa.
MySpace is the red line headed south to join Friendster, Bebo and Orkut.
The scale and reach of Facebook blew my mind the first time I typed ‘facebook.com’ into Alexa.com. Nearly 29% of all Internet traffic goes to Facebook. That grew at 25% last QUARTER!
From Facebook’s developer roadmap that the company plans to implement in Q2 2010:
“The Open Graph API will allow any page on the Web to have all the features of a Facebook Page – users will be able to become a Fan of the page, it will show up on that user’s profile and in search results, and that page will be able to publish stories to the stream of its fans.”
Facebook is positioning itself to become the center of the individual’s (online) universe – if it’s not already. At least for the foreseeable future, it looks like Facebook is here to stay.
