Vincenzo Cosenza has mapped the most popular social networks by country, according to traffic data gathered on Alexa & Google Trends (June 2009). While Facebook’s growing dominance over MySpace in the US and other countries comes as no surprise, it is interesting to see the few smaller networks that most of us have probably never heard of that are country specific. It’s also important to note that that while Facebook is all the rage in the west, QQ (China) is still by far the largest social network in the world (300 million active accounts). As people continue to focus their time and energy on dominant networks, and the successful networks grow and take over, you’ll likely see many of these smaller social networks die out. It’ll be most interesting to see what happens if and when China becomes more open over time. We tend to forget about large networks like QQ and companies like BIDU that dominate the waking giant.
The Current Snapshot:
- Facebook is continues to dominate globe, especially in the west and other english-speaking regions, with more than 200 millions users.
- QQ, leader in China, is the largest social network of the world (300 millions active accounts)
- MySpace Still leads in Guam
- V Kontakte Still dominates Russian-speaking territories
- Orkut is strong in India and Brazil
- Hi5 is still leading in Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and other scattered countries such as Portugal, Mongolia, Romania
- Odnoklassniki is strong in some former territories of the Soviet Union
- Maktoob is the most important Arab community/portal
- Friendster is still rocking in the Philippines (remember Friendster?)
Let’s say you’ve recently moved to a new city. You’ve got a brand new apartment in an unfamiliar neighborhood and your friends and family are now hundreds of miles away.
A few weeks in, the rush of everything being new subsides and you start to feel lonely. No problem, you think. You make friends easily. It’s only a matter of time before you’ve got a bunch of great folks actively calling you to join them to hang out, right? All you have to do is muster the courage to get out of the house and meet people. The only question is, where do you go?
Assuming your goal is to meet people you’d actually want to get to know and build lasting relationships with, would you start by heading straight to the biggest, loudest night club in the city? Or would you head down to the neighborhood bar, cafe or coffee shop, where your neighbors were all hanging out after work? Given the choice between the two, my bet is that you’d chose the latter. So would I.
Starting a blog and being social online for the first time can feel a lot like a move to a new city. It’s lonely at the beginning and it takes a while to build a reputation and develop relationships with people who you like and respect, and who are genuinely interested in you and your content.
How you go about developing relationships online should closely mirror the way that you do it offline. You’ve got to go to a place where people share your passions and interests, introduce yourself and start a discussion. When deciding where to go, try to pick places the same way that you’d pick a place to hang out offline. Virtual spaces have distinct personalities and atmospheres all their own that reflect the collection of personalities of the community. Huge blogs like TechCrunch and Gizmodo will be just like a massive nightclub – tons of noise and lots of superficial interaction. On the other hand, smaller communities and personal blogs will feel more like a local watering hole – and with fewer people and less noise, you’re more likely to engage in higher quality discussions and build meaningful relationships quickly. If you find one of these spots where you meet people you like that feels like it’s got your kindof vibe, devote some time to visiting frequently and sticking around and interacting a lot when you do. You’ll find you have a lot more fun, build better relationships, and before long, it’ll be a spot where everybody knows your name.
Jesse Stay, Marshall Kirkpatrick and Dave Winer recently posted some interesting and insightful pieces on how Twitter is going after people who game Twitter to get more followers. There are some solid arguments made in each post in support of Twitter’s move, as well as on the dubious and controversial nature of Twitter’s suggested users list (SUL). When it comes to the issue of eliminating spam and improving usability, I fundamentally support what Twitter is doing. That said, Dave Winer makes some excellent points on Twitter’s SUL. The three posts in tandem are great reads if you want to understand the core issues and what’s going on. There are also many gems in the comments.
The iPhone 3.0 upgrade software was just released and, within minutes, #iPhone and #iTunes popup on the trending topics list as the iPhone community rushes to their computers to upgrade their phones. Between the time I ran the search and took this screenshot, there were over 1000 new twitter posts mentioning #iTunes – literally in the space of a minute. Hundreds of people are all having similar problems, asking questions, helping each other. Amazing. And Apple is no where to be seen in the stream. Lesson learned…get your community manager and techies monitoring Twitter when someone pushes the “RELEASE” button. Read More
Today an article I wrote for ReadWriteWeb went live titled “Did Mark Zuckerberg’s Inspiration For Facebook Come Before Harvard?‘. I think it’s a great question, one worth exploring far beyond the light coverage I gave it in the article because the answer can offer us important clues into why Facebook has been so successful.
Facebook is drastically changing the way we communicate and live our lives. Understanding where it came from, and how and why it grew so fast, is an important part of the story – one we should devote cultural and anthropological research to. If you think Facebook is just some “Internet thing” that kids do (and a lot of adults surprisingly still do), then you’re completely disillusioned and you need to get your head out of the sand. The reality is that there is a whole generation of kids moving into their teens right now who will never know what it’s like to live in a world without the Internet and social networking…their rise marks the end of an era. And you know what they all have in common? Facebook. We’ve got to wrap our heads around how it affects our psychology, our culture, and how we can best use it to create and strengthen (not dehumanize) our communities and our relationships etc. I think that telling a more complete story of Facebook’s history is a critical piece of the “community 2.0″ puzzle. Read More
Note: This article I wrote was originally published on ReadWriteWeb and syndicated to the New York Times on May 10th, 2009. I have posting it here and closed comments, but I have participated heavily in the discussions on the original ReadWriteWeb posting and posted additional thoughts and clarifications on the matter on this blog. Please follow the links to ReadWriteWeb and to my follow up post to view the full discussion.
By now we are all familiar with Mark Zuckerberg’s success story. The explosive international growth of Facebook to over 200 million users continues to land the young Founder and CEO in top news stories worldwide. Recently, Time Magazine named Zuckerberg one of The World’s Most Influential People of 2008, and Fast Company named Facebook number 15 in it’s list of “The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies” for 2009. At just 23 years of age, Zuckerberg even briefly made Forbe’s 400 richest Americans list, temporarily giving him the title of World’s Youngest Billionaire.
Interestingly, the stories we hear these days about Mark in popular media tend to follow a common sensationalist pattern: “Supersmart kid invents a tech phenomenon from his Harvard dorm room, drops out, and changes the world”. It’s a classically framed, Bill Gates-esque story of success focusing on intelligence and ambition. What’s most intriguing about the Zuckerberg story we all know, however, isn’t that he dropped out of Harvard and became a billionaire at 23. It’s that prior to February 4th 2004, the day he launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room, we hear very little about Mark or the inspiration behind Facebook at all.
It’s likely that the reason we hear so little about Zuckerberg’s pre-launch vision for Facebook (originally called thefacebook.com) is because he has been the target of controversy for the true origins of his business in the past. In 2007, several of Zuckerberg’s classmates came forward and claimed rights to the Facebook idea after reports surfaced that Yahoo had offered Zuckerberg $900 million for Facebook just two years after the founding of the company. Even though the suit against Zuckerberg was settled last year, given the nature of the proceedings, it seems unlikely that we’ll ever get an official answer from Zuckerberg himself about the true origins of his inspiration. But maybe we don’t need one afterall?
It turns out that Zuckerberg’s academic history may offer us a great deal of insight into where the inspiration for Facebook came from, and why it was so wildly successful when it first launched. I’d argue that although February 4th marked a major milestone in Facebook’s history, the story of Mark Zuckerberg’s rise to fame actually starts years before he stepped foot on the Harvard campus, and is much more complex and interesting than it initially appears.
Pre-Zuckerberg: Tracing The Roots of Facebook Culture
It might surprise you to hear that while Harvard may have been fertile ground for the initial launch of Facebook, the seeds for the concept were likely picked up by Zuckerberg in high school. You never hear about Zuckerberg’s alma mater Phillips Exeter Academy in the stories because Harvard was where the intial action took place (and the Harvard name, to some extent, validates Mark’s smarts and makes for a more sensational story). The truth is that the time Zuckerberg spent at Phillips Exeter Academy from 2000 to 2002 likely had more influence on the name and initial concept for Facebook than any of his classmates at Harvard.
Phillips Exeter Academy (also known simply as “Exeter”) is a private boarding school for grades 9-12, located in Exeter, New Hampshire. The prestigious “prep” school is a member of the Ten Schools Admission Organization, that includes famous boarding schools such as Phillips Andover, Deerfield Academy, St. Paul’s, and Choate Rosemary Hall (my alma mater). Like each one of “The Big Ten”, Exeter has a tight-knit boarding community that live on campus full-time. Student’s refer to themselves as “Exonians” and have a strong sense of group identity and community that’s rooted in a rich culture of customs and tradition.
An Exonian himself for two years, Zuckerberg had a unique opportunity to observe and participate in the social culture and rhythms ingrained in Exeter’s boarding lifestyle. Every year, the school says goodbye to a few hundred students, and welcomes a few hundred more. Zuckerberg enrolled as a boarder at Exeter in the fall of his junior year and, like every other new and returning student, along with his dorm room keys and class schedule, received his own copy of Exeter’s student directory “The Photo Address Book”, which the students affectionately referred to as (you guessed it) “The Facebook”.
I had the opportunity to interview several of Zuckerberg’s piers this week, and they all confirmed what David W. Farrant (Class of ‘00) had to say…
“The front cover says “The Photo Address Book”, but we all called it “The Facebook” all the time because “The Photo Address Book” was such a mouthful. Everybody called it that.”
“Facebook” photo directories were (and still are) a huge part of students’ social experience and culture at prep schools like Exeter. Every school in the big ten has one that they print and distribute to students annually. When students arrive on campus each fall, the rhythm of their social lives are heavily driven by the dormitories they live in, their class year (seniority) and their proximity to friends in other houses. Because students aren’t allowed cell phones on campus, and there’s so much flux in living accommodations each year (houses and phone numbers change annually) these “Facebooks” are an extremely valuable information resource for students.
Of course, not only do students need the directory to find and contact their piers, the books become part of the culture of bonding between classmates and friends as students use it to see where their piers live, who’s hot and who’s not, who lives with who, and who the new kids are. Sounds an awful lot like how people use Facebook online now, right? What I’m describing, of course, is an early, pre-Internet social culture facilitated by a photo directory that was used and enjoyed by students long before Zuckerberg even made it to high school – it was a culture he happened upon and got to participate in by a stroke of pure luck and glorious opportunity.
But the story doesn’t end there. In Zuckerberg’s senior year, the student council, headed by student body president Kris Tillery, successfully lobbied for the administration to have the schools IT Department put the full contents of Exeter’s Photo Address Book online, and before Zuckerberg graduated, it was up under the URL http://student.exeter.edu/facebook, matching the student’s pet name for the directory and effectively shortening the URL to something useful (Tillery was unavailable for comment). During my interviews, some of Zuckerberg’s piers pointed me to this screen shot of the original website that was hosted on the school’s .edu domain that was (and still is) posted in a public Facebook group “Exonians” in 2006. Some of the Facebook comments attached to the screen shot (dating back to 2007) refer to the screen shot as “the original Facebook” and to The Photo Address Book as “the physical Facebook”.
Of course, the school’s student.exeter.edu/facebook website is no longer online, and none of the interviewees were able to confirm whether Zuckerberg himself was involved in, or responsible for, the student council initiative that got the directory online in the first place. What we can confirm is that students thought that the directory they all used would be useful enough online to get the student council involved in an effort to lobby the administration, that the online directory was created during Zuckerberg’s senior year and that he was likely aware of its existence.
Getting A More Complete View Of The Facebook Success Story…
Now that Facebook.com has graduated from its academic roots and been released to the world for free, its continued growth has many experts saying that it will likely be the dominant social platform for the foreseeable future. At 200 million users (and counting), it’s tough to argue that Facebook won’t have considerable influence in the ways we all connect and communicate in the future, both locally and across borders. While we may never know the true origins of Mark Zuckerberg’s inspiration for Facebook, taking a deeper look at the social culture of the prep school he attended, and his experiences as a boarding student there, may offer us insight into where the explosion of a global Facebook culture may have started, why it was so successful when it was first launched at an Ivy League school and how luck and opportunity may have played a large part in influencing the deep thinking that led one of the world’s youngest visionaries to start coding in his Harvard dorm room.
If you’re a heavy Twitter user like me, you may be familiar with the awkward, tense feeling that can grip you when a non-Twittering friend or co-worker decides that enough is enough and it’s time to confront you about your “habit” (Twintervention?). Regardless of the events that lead up to said awkward moment, the blank, confused-slash-condescending look that says “Whyyyyy do you do this?!” is often the same. It’s happened to all of us at least once, hasn’t it? This situation doesn’t get my knickers in a twist anymore. I’ve armed myself with a canned answer. “I’m accelerating serendipity!” I’ll say with a boyish grin, and then wait for a response. On a few occasions, I’ve been able to turn this traditionally “ack” moment into a productive discussion. Let me explain… Read More
