Recent traffic statistics at social networking site Facebook are impressive and we’re wondering if there’s a wider story here.
Facebook tells us the site is seeing about 1.5 billion page views a day, up from about 1 billion daily views last month — statistics that haven’t been released until now. That’s a huge jump.
First, myself and non-college friends appear to be getting more unsolicited invites from others — including those not in school — to connect on Facebook. Facebook is going mainstream.
But there’s an undercurrent of development happening, suggesting Facebook may be seeing serious momentum in other ways. It’s old news that Facebook opened its application programming interface last year, which lets software developers outside Facebook build other applications on top of Facebook’s platform and data. The open project is called the Facebook Platform. But Facebook’s growth over the past several months, and improvement to its API policy, deserve attention.
Imagine Facebook user profiles and networks everywhere. In a suite of office software. In an online classroom. In a family’s entertainment system. In whatever application developers choose to connect with.
There are critics of Facebook’s API. Various developer friends of mine complain that third-party sites can’t separately store Facebook user data accessed via Platform — unlike Flickr’s policy, for example, which lets you import and export everything. Facebook says user privacy is a reason for its limitations; retaining data may also be a way of protecting its competitive position. However, Facebook is still more more open than MySpace and Bebo, and it has generally won positive reviews. Even ostensibly critical reviews, ironically, serve to illustrate just how useful Facebook’s APIs are.
And it’s getting better. For example, Facebook this month turned on something called “infinite sessions.” When the API was first released, sites using it to make mashups were forced to have their users log back into Facebook every time they tried to use the mashup. Recently, infinite sessions lets users access the site’s data without having to sign into Facebook each time.
Facebook is growing among older demographics, too, giving it a competitive advantage in making Platform-connected applications relevant to a broad audience. These photos are courtesy of Dave McClure’s Flickr account, taken of presentation slides at an event last month at Facebook.
So far, over 100 apps have been built on Platform, with more than 4,500 members part of Facebook’s developer group.
Some examples:
Mosoto: allows Facebook users to interact through a real time chat client that analyzes similarities between users, and through a social media/file sharing system that connects users through their music, video, and pictures. Mosoto launched earlier this month and is entirely based on Platform.
Slide: a central place for people to assemble and host slideshows of their pictures that they can then display on pages within various social networks and blogs. Other companies allow Slide integration. But Facebook allows people to upload their entire photo albums to Slide, unlike Facebook’s biggest competitors, Bebo or MySpace. (Clarification: Users can upload Myspace and Bebo albums to Slide, just not as easily - Facebook allows users to dump all photos at once.)
Jobster: a startup job-placement rival to Monster, that has been talking with Facebook about some form of deeper partnership; right now, there’s a “Career Center” mashup (listed in the Platform product directory, at least) that links users to the main Jobster site.
Auctomatic: A startup that’s developing a utility for eBay sellers, is now looking at Facebook closer after initially getting frustrated by it. Cofounder Harjeet Taggar told me Facebook represents an ever growing distribution platform, and “can’t be ignored.”
Facebook is now at more than 20 million registered users, up from 7.5 million users last July, the company told me. (In coming months, Facebook told me, it will begin reporting the number of actual users, or those who have logged into the site in the previous 30 days.) As mentioned, it now has about 1.5 billion page views a day, up from 1 billion page views day last month, it told me. Finally, it has more than 1.3 billion photos on the site, more than the 1 billion last month.
Facebook occasionally likes to tell everyone it is revolutionary. Platform’s senior manager, Dave Morin, told me that Platform is comparable to operating systems like Windows or Mac OS X. Facebook’s ambitions are not limited to what it does on its own site — it wants to “connect the world’s people” by making itself the central directory for any software application.
[Author Eric Eldon thought he was going to become a professional journalist when he graduated from college two years ago. Instead, he is co-founder of Writewith, a company that makes online word processing work for groups. You can reach him at eric@writewith.com.]
Tags: co:Facebook21 Comments
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Dazed said:
i posted about him/ Facebook yesterday. Thanks Venture Beat i linked back to you http://startupdaze.com/post/441517
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RBA said:
Facebook’s growth is really remarkable, but at least today they’re still a US-only phenomenon, while most of the other top dogs in the SN space are making great progress there.
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Alea Suisse said:
Yeah, I agree, FB’s growth is incredible. I always use Facebook to keep in touch with my friends and http://www.Cavenger.com for entertainment.
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eser.org said:
Not only is Facebook is an amazing platform for social networking, but Facebook is also increasingly an important platform for software services. Specifically, I am impressed by Facebook’s decision to contribute to the open-source community their enhancements to Memcached. I am sure that facebook has expended valuable resources enhancing Memcached, and I think it’s great that Facebook has decided make those enhancements available to everyone — no strings attached.
We’re using Facebook’s Memcached code at http://www.eser.org and we’re looking at tying into their API. I think the characterization of facebook as a platform play is very prescient.
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Cain said:
Actually, facebook isn’t entirely US-only. It’s still English only, but in his talk at Startup School last weekend, Mark Zuckerberg said that a substantial proportion of growth is in non-US markets.
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More Sperm said:
I am impressed by Facebook’s decision to contribute to the open-source community their enhancements to Memcached.
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lee said:
can you explained the math behind the daily page views - the site has 20 million registered users lets even assume they all come back every day - at 1.5 billion page views daily that would mean an average of 75 page views a day which in an of itself is seems very high - assume 10 million visit a day 50% of the audience then you have a staggering 150 page view per day per person - these numbers seem way out of wack
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Pete Cashmore said:
Thanks for referencing Mashable. This is an awesome overview - best post I’ve read today. Great job digging into the stats, Eric.
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Alan said:
As far as I can tell, the UK has gone nuts for Facebook in the last 6 months. Dunno if there are any stats to confirm this.
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CaptainTO said:
Hmm… a mysterious spike over the last month. The exact same time they were hosting the world’s largest March Madness pool with over 1.5 Million entrants checking their stats daily was occurring.
Nah, probably no coincidence.
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Bruce Boughton said:
Facebook is definitely not US only. As Alan rightly says, Facebook is *hot* in the UK. I’m a third year student and I don’t know anyone at uni who *doesn’t* have Facebook. There’s a major migration from MySpace.
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Phil Butler said:
The open source aspect is exciting, and I think, the way the Web is going. 1.5 billion page views is nothing short of astounding!
Thanks for the great article Eric!
Always,
Phil -
Jill Walker said:
In Norway Facebook has taken off amazingly over the last couple of months. Barely any of my students had even heard about it at the start of semester; now they’re all online. Admittedly I teach blogging/social networks etc so the dozen or so in my class heard about it from me, but all THEIR friends have been inviting them too - according to Alexa it was the 18th most popular site in Norway on March 28, and today it’s crept up to the 16th most popular… The growth is amazingly fast! NONE of my students (well, except the exchange students) had heard of this in early February!
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Michelle said:
Facebook is exploding in Canada too! (At least in Ontario!) Although it seems to be mostly university/college aged students who are using it but I’ve seen a increase of “30somethings” getting hooked into the fad.
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Noah said:
In its early days, Facebook faced an extremely threatening lawsuit from ConnectU, a very similar social network which - like Facebook - shares its roots back to Harvard, and as a result almost got shutdown. The founders of ConnectU alleged that Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg stole source code while he was in their employment. Zuckerberg denied the allegation and the lawsuit was dismissed.
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Ved said:
Why facebook is popular among older users I think is due its clean, simple and elegant user interface.
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Scot Smith said:
Interesting article, thanks for the read.
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kk said:
Does anyone know who now reps facebook for advertisers?
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Sandi said:
US only - not so. I’m researching Facebook for a paper for grad school and just read that 28% are from outside the USA. (www.fastcompany.com)
My theory is that international students will bring it home and soon it will be world-wide. -
John booher said:
Indiana University School of Informatics Students research the integration of public transit options into facebook to create sustainable impact on congestion and environment. Taking social networking to shift perception of public transit into a social activity.
This was presented during the student design competition at CHI 2007 Conference. Read more about this on http://www.booherdesign.com
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angeline said:
well with facebook taking such stand on the internet, what is the fate of smaller creative sites like http://www.zooqoo.com ?
