A little over six months ago, we performed a comparison of the top users on Facebook and Twitter and the number of fans and followers on each. Six months later, the top Twitter users have experienced a 500 percent growth in their follower base whereas Facebook fans have grown by approximately 200 percent. Facebook however has a much greater overlap, a continuing trend that we saw a few months ago. Below, are charts of the top 50 users on each site and the number of followers or fans on the competing site.
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Last week we finished up the 30 Days to 3,000 Fans program and while some people may or may not have reached the 3,000 fan target, the real question is: does the number of fans really matter? Last night I was watching a video of Seth Godin where he says “it’s worthless to have lots and lots of friends on Facebook.” With so many people selling the importance of having fans, followers, and friends though, how could Seth Godin, a thought leader in marketing, make such an assertion?
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To describe Zynga as a powerful influence on the Facebook developer platform would be an understatement. The company has achieved levels never thought possible. Farmville, the company’s leading application has reached levels that no other developer has ever come close to. In other words, the company is in a league of its own. With over 126 million monthly active users, the company accounts for the sum total of the next three largest developers: Playfish, RockYou, and Causes. So how did the company get to be so large?
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Robert Scoble wrote a late night post over the weekend which suggests Twitter is worth between $5 and $10 billion dollars based on a sampling of businesses in approximately 8 cities. What sort of math was used to deduce this valuation? Absolutely none, but if you want to purchase shares at such a ridiculous valuation, Howard Lindzon will sell shares to you. Scoble’s post simultaneously hypes the already bloated Twitter bubble while making jabs at Facebook.
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This afternoon Twitter announced that geolocation data would now be added to users’ tweets. It’s something that Facebook has actually been discussing for some time off and on but adding such a feature to all feed stories isn’t the easiest process. In the meantime Facebook is still trying to adjust their platform to provide greater access to information. It’s essentially the “out opening” of Twitter, a similar strategy that Google attempted, starting with OpenSocial.
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There’s been a bunch of coverage of the iLike acquisition deal over the past 24 hours including those that call this a massive blow Facebook. The primary “losers” in this supposed $20 million MySpace acquisition is iLike, who has been struggling to find a breakthrough business model. There’s also an underlying story about how the Partovi brothers and Mark Zuckerberg grew apart since the early launch of the platform.
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Over the past few years Facebook has grown from a tool for connecting with others to a tool for sharing information with others. This new model is helping Facebook to collect more relevant information about consumers and is slowly changing the advertising world forever. We are in the midst of a shift toward monitoring our digital footprints and Facebook is currently taking the lead in what appears to be a battle for our commercial identities.
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When I read yesterday that the Wall Street Journal is creating a new “LinkedIn Killer” yesterday, I immediately thought about how likely it is that the company botches things up. When was the last time that you’ve visited a content site and were prompted to enter your contact information in order to “connect with the community” and then proceeded to fill out all your information? In theory it makes a lot of sense but no media company that I know of has gotten it right yet.
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The past two years have been an interesting ride as the Facebook Platform has become more restricted in order to protect the user’s experience. When Facebook first opened up there were countless ad networks and developers looking to seize the opportunity to make millions. Many have generated large sums of cash and a few continue to be extremely profitable to this day but what has been most interesting is watching Facebook carefully navigate the gray policy areas.
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Over the past two weeks I’ve been going through the process of simplifying and organizing my life so that it’s more manageable. While the “work/life balance” (or whatever you’d like to call it) issue always arises, I personally believe it’s important to keep yourself organized. One area where many people are disorganized is there Facebook contacts. I’ve personally boiled down my personal organization to a few items: email, calendar, tasks, documents, and contacts. Facebook should be efficient at effectively managing my contacts/relationships (something I expounded on earlier this week).
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