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Facebook is borrowing $100 million from venture loan firm TriplePoint to finance the expansion of its server farms, and other infrastructure expenses, Business Week’s Spencer E. Ante reports. Why this additional money? Because the site is still growing really fast. It now has 109.2 million monthly users worldwide, according to comScore numbers cited in the article — which is much higher than even the 70 million number currently listed on Facebook’s own site. The company needs to build out its infrastructure to cope with its nonstop growth.

Earlier this year, a leaked report said Facebook broke even in 2007 with revenues at $150 million — a number it is looking to more than double this year. Then, the company also expected to spend more than $200 million on capital expenditures (including servers), as well as nearly double the workforce to more than 1000 (the Business Week article, meanwhile, says the company expects to grow to only 700 to 800 employees).

This deal is Menlo Park, Calif.-based TriplePoint’s largest one to date. Besides loans, the company also leases infrastructure equipment and has provided more than $500 million in leases so far, to startups like YouTube (now part of Google) and widget-maker Slide. The company sells itself as giving entrepreneurs a better deal than other financing options: “Unlike many financing sources, we typically do not require security deposits, restrictive covenants, or rights to off-set cash,” its site claims. Facebook, for example, will have the option to replace or exchange its equipment.

Facebook has raised around $393 million, according to Crunchbase’s calculation, although the Business Week article pegs its total funding at $350 million.

[Photo, actually of the Dreamworks' server farm, via LinuxJournal.]

updated
We’re at the point that when either of the two social networking giants, MySpace and Facebook, does something, the other has to respond. Yesterday, MySpace unveiled its “Data Availability” initiative, allowing other sites around the Internet to utilize its users’ data to update profiles, photos, videos and other attributes. Today, according to a TechCrunch scoop, Facebook is following that up with “Facebook Connect”. Which does, wait for it — the exact same thing.

As Mike Arrington points out, Facebook Connect is basically an updated version of Facebook’s API for third party sites. These sites will now be able to use Facebook’s trusted identification methods, profile information (including pictures, videos, events and the like), friend lists and privacy settings. Just as with MySpace’s announcement, the idea is to make Facebook a central hub of users’ web experience.

Lest you think this wasn’t a game of one-upmanship: whereas MySpace announced Twitter as a launch partner for its initiative yesterday, Facebook is launching with Digg as a partner. The social news voting site is quite a bit larger than the micro-messaging Twitter.

Facebook Connect’s formal launch won’t happen for a couple of weeks. We’ll update when we know more.

update: Dave Morin, Facebook’s senior platform manager has posted on the Facebook Developers Blog with more details about Facebook Connect. Some of the details:

Today we are announcing Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect is the next iteration of Facebook Platform that allows users to “connect” their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site. This will now enable third party websites to implement and offer even more features of Facebook Platform off of Facebook – similar to features available to third party applications today on Facebook.

Here are just a few of the coming features of Facebook Connect:

Read the rest of this entry »

Mobile life is blooming. Some 47 mobile social network companies have emerged globally, to help cater to our need to message and communicate while on the go.

But what about the huge incumbents, like MySpace or Facebook? Will they thrive on the mobile web?

Well, the 47 mobile-only networks will probably tell you that mobile is a whole different animal, and downplay the threat of a switch by their millions of users to those big guys. But in reality, even though some mobile-only social networks have gotten big — Mocospace, for example, has 1 billion page views worldwide, most of it in the US — their computer-based rivals are catching up now that new wireless devices, such as the iPhone, are making it easier for internet apps to transition to mobile.

My goal for this article was to find the top ten most significant social mobile companies.

It was difficult reporting. With so many different players competing in the mobile social network space, we’re seeing a lot of different approaches and fragmentation. For my own thinking, I sketched out a diagram during lunch with an entrepreneur (see above for a cleaned up version of it). It’s partly based on generalizations, but it’ll give you an idea of what’s happening here in the U.S.

I’ve organized the mobile social companies into four groups. In addition to heavyweights MySpace and Facebook, I’ve picked eight companies — based on market share, differentiation through features, niche market and technology — that seem to be emerging as the most significant players.

[Disclosure: I consult for one of the companies named here, Peperoni.]

Group 1: The internet heavyweights – MySpace and Facebook
When I talked to MySpace and Facebook to see what kind of uptake they’d been seeing on their mobile sites (eg. m.myspace.com) I got quite a surprise. According to the user numbers they provided, both companies have already passed Mocospace.

MySpace’s Brandon Lucas, Senior Director of Mobile Business Development told me MySpace Mobile USA had 1.4 billion visits last month. That’s compared to 1 billion visits to Mocospace this March, according to Mocospace CEO Justin Siegel. A source at Facebook confirmed to me that Facebook Mobile has also passed Mocospace’s numbers in the USA, too, but didn’t give me specific numbers. Expect announcements on that in the coming weeks.

MySpace Mobile launched in December 2006, followed by Facebook Mobile a month later. The growth of MySpace Mobile and Facebook Mobile is mainly due to operator deals that put them “ondeck.” MySpace and Facebook are looking to close as many deals with operators as possible. For Myspace Mobile, the goal is to be available on-deck with “every major operator, everywhere,” Lucas says. As of now, MySpace Mobile has signed 23 carriers in 13 countries, and we expect the number to rise. M-Metrics told MySpace Mobile around three weeks ago that they are the fastest growing mobile site in the US, says Lucas.

The barrier to traffic growth, according to Lucas, is awareness. Expect more banner ads for MySpace Mobile on its web site very soon to raise awareness. MySpace is willing to split revenue with operators, he says. Despite the split, “mobile advertising has grown in the last six months to be a real business for us”, he adds. He sees MySpace as playing the same role on mobile devices as it does on the web. He wants MySpace to be a “mobile advertising driver” for the industry — and wants to lure the brands advertising on its online version to add mobile advertising too. He said MySpace Mobile “wants to build a business for everybody” and that “we will share insights for everybody to profit.”

I also asked Lucas to comment on a MySpace strategy statement I came across in Stuart Dredge’s recent article on social mobile networking in New Media Age: ”We expect that half of our total traffic will be coming from mobile devices within the next five years,” the article quoted a MySpace representative as saying. Brandon said that’s a January quote from MySpace CEO Chris De Wolfe and reaffirms that mobile is one of the Read the rest of this entry »

Updated

Facebook has reached an agreement with the attorneys general of 49 states whereby the social network will adopt more than 60 specific new measures to ensure that it keeps minors safe on its site.

Among other measures, requests by a user to change their own age will be scrutinized and recorded, and Facebook will only grant a single request by a user to change their own age above or below 18. So 16 year-olds who use Facebook will have more trouble pretending to 100. For more new measures, as well as those that the company already has in place, see below the article.

The announcement is quite a publicity coup for the attorneys general, as you can see from this list of articles that have been written about the news.

But the problem isn’t Facebook, or other social networks — it’s a lot bigger and more complex. Some children, for whatever reason, appreciate the attention of creepy older people they happen to meet online. A recent study showed most interaction between children and predators that ended in criminal activity happened with full knowledge of both parties about the other person’s age (older) and their intentions (sex). Among the findings, only five percent of perpetrators pretended to be teenagers. [Update: I’d like to hear from experts that show the threat of social networking, because here’s another article about experts saying the risk “of a child being forced into sex from an online predator is almost non-existent.”

This same group of attorneys has worked out a similar set of measures on MySpace, and it hopes to do the same for the entire web through better age identification technology, it says.

I totally agree that pedophilia is terrible and needs to be stopped, and I also recognize that social networks need to be responsible for the safety of their underage users. But Facebook has already been taking heat for this issue for years, and the company has already been proactive in implementing measures to prevent abuse. Examples: It already prominently displays a great deal of privacy information and it provides links all over its site to report objectionable material.

At this point, I question whether or not this new agreement will end up having any significant impact, or if it is rather only something that these attorneys general will point to as a “result” they got, the next time they go up for election. I’m not sure why the attorney general from Texas, Greg Abbott, didn’t sign on, but at least today he’s busy putting a repeat child abuser in jail and launching a web site to fight online identity theft.

Sample measures, including both measures that Facebook already has in place and that it plans to add, formally confirmed through the agreement:

- Age and identity identification tools

- Automatic warning messages when a child is in danger of giving personal information to an unknown adult

- Restricting the ability of users to change their listed ages

- Aggressive response to remove inappropriate content and groups from the site

- Safety and privacy guidelines that third party vendors and developers are required to adhere to as part of Facebook’s Terms of Service

- Immediate severance of links to pornographic websites

- Immediate removal of Facebook Groups dedicated to incest, pedophilia, cyber-bullying and other topics that violate Facebook’s Terms of Services

- Immediate investigation of Facebook users who violate the Terms of Service, and expulsion of those individuals that violate the safety or privacy of other users

- Prominent display of privacy information and safety tips

- Require users under 18 to affirm they have read Facebook’s safety tips when they sign up

- Review models for abuse reporting and perform a test using the New Jersey Attorney General’s abuse reporting icon

Big Facebook profile changes are coming, sure to impact developers — Facebook has been experimenting with a ground-up redesign of its user interface for months, that it hopes will improve communication among users. Now, the company is providing Facebook application developers with more details on the changes — and how those changes are going to affect applications. The new home page will have a tabbed interface for news feed, personal info, photos, and something tentatively called “boxes.” The “box” tab will house Facebook applications (see screenshot, above), although the apps will also appear in various forms within the other tabbed sections. Perhaps most significantly, the news feeds themselves will include a new range of ways for applications to share stories with Facebook users who haven’t already added the application. If you’re interested in the many, many changes happening, see this detailed post by Justin Smith of the blog Inside Facebook and application company Watercooler. The official preview site here.

Meanwhile, Facebook is seeing an overall drop in the number of new applications that grow quickly, and a probably-related drop in the number of developers working on the platform — even as the site continues to grow around the world. So these profile changes are part of a far-reaching initiative by Facebook to make the site more usable; the company has previously, for example, placed ever-more restrictive measures on app developers, to try to curb abusive practices like spam-emailing users. All in all, these changes will likely benefit Facebook users, the company, and the higher-quality applications, as another top Facebook app developer, Jesse Farmer notes here. The open question about the profile redesign is how Facebook is going to manage explaining the changes to its users.

News Corp. earnings report: MySpace, FIM miss revenue targets — News Corp. executives admitted yesterday that they weren’t monetizing MySpace and other social networking properties like they’d aimed to — bringing in $900 million in revenue versus $1 billion. Surprisingly, quarterly revenue actually declined from $233 million to $210 million. A number of pundits have jumped on this news to surmise that social networks may never monetize very well, as you can read over on Techmeme. But overall, monetization has actually been improving across a number of fronts at MySpace, as Silicon Alley Insider details, even if it’s not as fast as News Corp. chief executive Rupert Murdoch wanted. For example, MySpace is actually earning 49 percent more money per-user compared to last year even as the user base continues to grow, partially through efforts like better-targeted ads. And many forget that monetizing social networks is not just about banner ads. We’ve covered companies that are creating new ways of doing things like distributing music or creating sports communities — companies that are helping to drive ticket sales for live events, apparel sales and other non-banner-ad forms of making money. Basically, social networks are in the process of becoming businesses and there are lots of unexplored opportunities. Here’s another one: Online video, which benefit greatly through being distributed on social networks, also have the opportunity to make money, as blog HipMojo notes.

Fuel cells coming soon to your GPS device? — MTI Micro has introduced a methanol-based fuel cell prototype, essentially a new and longer-lasting form of battery, for GPS devices.

Comcast may introduce a new fee system targeting people who habitually download large files — More here.

Email organizer Zaplets technology bought by email startup Xobni — Zaplets was developed in 2000 to turn long strings of back-and-forth emails into single emails, with the most recent information being displayed most prominently on each message (which sounds not unlike Gmail to me). Zaplets’ parent company, FireDrop had raised more than $100 million, with venture investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. It went bust, some of the patents ended up with an “enterprise process management” company called MetricStream — and have now been bought by email analysis startup Xobni. Zaplets’s problem was that it was ahead of its time, Xobni chief executive Jeff Bonforte tells Techcrunch. So, look for Zaplet technology in Xobni.

MeeVee bought, finally — The Burlingame, Calif. company offers a sort-of TV Guide-style site for online videos. But gaining only around 1.1 million monthly active users after raising $27 million since it was founded in 2000, MeeVee decided last month to try to sell. It has reportedly succeeded, selling to Live Universe for an undisclosed price.

FriendFeed has garnered a lot of popularity within the tech community for its ability to aggregate information across a wide range of social networks, and layer a new conversation on top of that. Minggl is a new service attempting to do something similar, only via the browser rather than a web page.

I sat down with Minggl founder Dewey Gaedcke and marketing director Brian Buser to go over the service and have them show me what it was all about.

Minggl exists as a browser plug-in for both Firefox and Internet Explorer. Thanks to this, it’s always running (as long as you want it to be) while your browser is open. Say you want to track what your contacts are doing. To do this on FriendFeed you would have to have window with the site open and switch back to check it constantly. With Minggl you simply browse the web as you normally would as notifications appear on your toolbar as your contacts update various services

But Minggl does a lot more than this. It also allows you to merge your friends together from different online networks and tag those friends so you can easily search for and find just who you are looking for. Say you have a group of friends you go hiking with. Simply tag anyone with “hiking” from across any network you have set up on Minggl, and they will show up in your sidebar upon a search.

The service also has a “status blaster” which allows you to update your status across all the sites that use such functionality, like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. You can also do group messaging on networks from within Minggl. That feature is interesting because it points to one of the bigger differences that separates Minggl from other services, including FriendFeed.

Where FriendFeed uses sites’ APIs to pull in information from other networks, Minggl actually logs you in to the services in the background to pull information. Because of this, Gaedcke explains, Minggl has access to MySpace and LinkedIn and also the data on Facebook, such as the News Feed, that they won’t send out via API. You are constantly logged in to these sites, but you can still set the interval with which Minggl checks for updates.

Getting the information from these social networks was crucial for Minggl because it is “more friend-centric than news-centric,” Gaedcke notes.

Right now Minngl works with the Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twtter. The service also just launched integration with the popular social news voting site Digg to pull in the stories users submit and vote on.

The service doesn’t plan on stopping with those. Gaedcke and Buser said that it’s relatively easy to add more services to the toolbar, so we should expect the likes of YouTube, Flickr, Yelp and others soon. Also in the pipeline are some very cool and interesting features that they are hesitant to share at this time, but they gave me a sneak peak, and I can certainly vouch for them being potentially controversial — and popular, if executed right.

Minggl does have limited advertisements in the activity stream sidebar right now, but it is more focused on building up a loyal user base than monetizing right now

Another competitor for Minggl would have to be the social network-infused browser Flock. Flock might do things a little prettier, but it also requires that you download and use an entirely new browser. With Minggl, you can stick with either Firefox or Internet Explorer. Then there are newer services like MySocial 24×7 which takes FriendFeed’s services and ports them into your browser.

With Yahoo in Microsoft’s rearview (for at least a couple months until it doubles back), the acquisition gaze shifts forward. We laid out a few names over the weekend. One of them: Facebook. Now word is already coming in that the social networking site may be bubbling to the top of Microsoft’s list, according to BoomTown’s Kara Swisher.

There isn’t too much to go on yet. In fact, Swisher only mentions this possibility briefly in her larger post about Microsoft’s “Project Granola” (the nickname for Microsoft’s online strategy post-Yahoo), which may be the most bland nickname ever (both in name and in taste). Swisher reports that Microsoft’s bankers are putting out subtle signals at this point that the software giant would perhaps like to buy a larger stake in the company (Microsoft already owns 1.6 percent) — like all of it.

Some Microsoft execs are also said to be tossing out the idea to Facebook execs. “We just want to gauge their interest, more than any real effort,” a source tells Swisher. This sounds a lot like, “we don’t want to get publicly burned again if we’re barking up the wrong tree.”

Rumors swirled last year about Microsoft buying Facebook prior to what ended up being a $240 million investment. Naturally, Google was said to be the other party in pursuit of a stake in the social networking company, but lost out when Microsoft’s deal put Facebook’s total value at $15 billion. Microsoft does have significantly more than that laying around now thanks to the failed Yahoo bid. It would probably use it, but Facebook is still thought to have its loftier IPO goals. As such, these rumors are likely to stay rumors, but don’t expect them to go away until Microsoft makes that next big purchase we all know is coming.

[photo: flickr/Zesmerelda]

The number of posts, signups, comment threads, active users, and highly active users on Facebook’s official developers’ forum have all fallen by between 25-50 percent from January to April, according to a detailed report put together by prominent Facebook developer Jesse Farmer. So has the usage of those applications. The graph above shows the number of users that a given group of apps gains after launching — the rate of user gain has been dropping with each consecutive group of aps.

Developers are expanding to other social network platforms, Facebook app companies are consolidating and Facebook itself is sending signals to developers that it wants to “regain control over some, if not all” aspects of application development, the report maintains.

Facebook has decreased its direct participation in the developer community, Farmer points out. And its application policies increasingly restrict how applications can do things like message users, something that has been happening since the platform launched, but that has grown more restrictive in recent months. Proposed profile interface changes would also give users decreased application access.

Competition within the Facebook developer community has also led to mergers and acquisitions among the largest developers, especially deals done by social gaming sites Zynga and Social Gaming Network Among other things, the leading application companies, which include Slide, Rockyou, iLike, and Flixster are able to use their sheer number of active users to advertise new applications and new features. Consolidated, powerful companies kill the little guys on Facebook, just like what happens in the corporate world.


At the same time, platforms on rival social networks including MySpace, hi5, Friendster and Bebo have been attracting developers. Even the leading Facebook app companies on Facebook have been looking at other social network platforms to expand, and they’ve typically been given early access to beta platforms over the course of the past year, as those platforms have launched. In some sense, then, the promise of the Open Social standard — that everyone but Facebook is trying to make itself compliant with — may be coming true. Open Social is a set of standards that could one day let application developers create a single application that can be implemented across any Open Social “container” social network. It’s all still a work in progress, but the key thing is that Facebook mobilized its largest competitors to emulate it, to compete through offering their own developer platforms. So the competition that Facebook inspired is now having an effect.

Facebook’s platform has the network effect going for it of having been the first and still the largest. But the company will have to decide how badly it wants those developers. If Farmer is correct, Facebook’s treatment of developers suggest much larger issues for the entire concept of social network platforms. As developers have long recognized, it’s never been totally clear what Facebook would or wouldn’t build itself. How will MySpace and the others behave towards developers now?

And so what is an application developer or company supposed to do? “It’s better to branch out into other social networks or to piggy-back on Facebook as a means to establish your own, more independent social network,” he says. “This is what the top companies like Slide, RockYou, Zynga, and SGN are doing, and what many of the independent Facebook developers I’ve talked with want to do.”

Netscape, Opsware and Ning founder Marc Andreessen may soon join Facebook’s board of directors. He’s already verbally accepted the position, Kara Swisher hears.

One obvious question here — and I have an email out to Andreessen for comment — is that Ning’s do-it-yourself social network creator tool is based on the opposite premise from Facebook. Otherwise, as Swisher points out, the two are a nice fit.

Vision-wise, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook is trying to get you, your friends and everyone else to use its site. It grows through network effects, where one friend invites their friends to join — and this invite process continues, the company hopes, until the whole world is on it. Its “social graph” of relationships between its millions of users and information about them is being used by Facebook to launch new features, like “People You May Know” where Facebook recommends users add each other as friends based on friends and other things you have in common. It is this network of relationships that allow third party applications on the site to grow quickly and engage, in some cases, millions of users.

On the flip side, also-Palo-Alto, Calif-based Ning (which has just raised $60 million ) wants anyone create their own social network — each social network is typically completely disconnected from the others, except for basic features like giving a user a Ning ID that they can use across Ning-based networks.

If Swisher is correct, then I have to wonder if there is going to be any sort of relationship that emerges between the two companies. Facebook is looking at ways its users (and developers) can put Facebook data on other sites. Maybe we’ll see a way to create a Ning network based only on your Facebook friends from college? All of this is speculation, and anyway, Andreessen and Facebook have yet to confirm the move.

And if it’s an issue of personality, here’s why Swisher thinks the two are a good fit: She thinks they’re each the “Golden Geek” of their generations. In fact, she originally thought Andreessen would make a great chief operating officer for the company when it was looking for a new one, several months back.

From their arrogant innocence to their visionary qualities to their enfant-terrible charm, it is almost as if [Zuckerberg and Andreessen] were separated at birth. But now Andreessen is all grown up and much, much matured from when I covered him. He has become all calm and sage and he even does a very decent blog. Plus, he has also started and run a number of start-ups after Netscape, giving him deeper managerial experience over the last dozen years. And, best of all, Andreessen knows the pressure of being the best-thing-since-sliced-bread in the tech sector, and its inevitable downside too. Overall, a real mentor and partner for Zuckerberg, making a perfect pair of Golden Geeks.

Facebook’s board is currently comprised of Zuckerberg (who owns the single largest amount of Facebook equity), the company’s first investor and hedge fund manager Peter Thiel and Accel Partner’s Jim Breyer. Greylock Partner David Sze also has observer status on the board.

For more on Andreessen and Ning, check out our coverage of when he spoke at the Web 2.0 Expo last month (pictured).

Here’s the latest action:

Another Google exec heads to Facebook – Elliot Schrage, Google’s vice president of global communications and public affairs will become the vice president of communications and public policy at Facebook, BoomTown’s Kara Swisher has learned. “This is a really important role for us and one that we’ve been trying to find the right person for a while. Elliot’s role will be critical to helping us scale based on our culture that values transparency, openness, and honest internal communications,” Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a memo to employees.

Schrage becomes the latest in a string of Googlers who have left for Facebook. As one commenter joked on FriendFeed earlier: “Facebook now imports Google execs…” Valleywag caught wind of Schrage’s interview at Facebook first.

Mosso to add more storage to the cloud — The cloud computing division of hosting provider RackSpace will be launching a new online storage service called CloudFS later this year, according to CNET. Developers will have access to almost limitless amounts of storage at the cost of 15 cents per gigabyte. This will compete against similar services from Amazon and eventually Google.

AP launches news site geared towards iPhone — The Associated Press and the 100+ newspapers it services will allow owners of the device to type in their zip code and get personalized news. Apple gave the service pointers about how to best build such a site. So you know the integration is good.

Sun gives developers OpenSolaris, wants apps in return — Sun Microsystems gave away OpenSolaris, the open source version of its operating system, at the CommunityOne developers conference on Monday. Sun hopes open source will help it regain relevance in the within the community, according to CNET. The main rival here it thought to be Linux.

Nine Inch Nails keep the free music coming — The rock band has a new album, The Slip, which is it giving away entirely for free on its website. There is no catch, it’s simply a gift for the fans, frontman Trent Reznor explains. Users can choose between a variety of formats and quality. This follows the band giving away the first part of its Ghosts I-IV album and other bands such as Radiohead and Coldplay giving their music away for free over the Internet. The album can also be streamed right from the social music site iLike.

LiveProcess Corp. takes a $3.62 million series A — The Verona, N.J.-based company is a provider of an online application to manage a hospital’s disaster preparedness plans and response. No institutional investors were disclosed, according to PEHub. The company says it’s the only disaster preparedness software endorsed by the American Hospital Association.

EA fires back at Activision — The world’s two leading video game publishers continue to go at it. Activision’s chief executive said that EA “did a very good job of taking the soul out of a lot of the studios it acquired.” EA’s response in an interview with Newsweek’s LevelUp blog: “The truth is, everyone laughed.”

TomCruise.com launches — And thank God. The actor is celebrating the 25th anniversary of his first starring role in Risky Business. Luckily the site has nothing to do with Scientology and everything to do with movies (though there is an interview with Oprah where he discusses the controversial religion). This site can be my wingman anytime.

Okay, the title may be a slight exaggeration, but the data from a new study by the social contact search site Rapleaf is nonetheless interesting.

In what they claim is the largest social network study ever done, Rapleaf looked at the social connections of both men and women. All told, they collected data from over 30 million people on sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Flickr, Hi5 and others.

Interestingly, when you focus on users with fewer connections (well, relatively speaking — we’re talking about one group of people with between 1 and 100 connections, and another with between 100 and 1,000), women tend to have more friends than men. However, when you get to a really large number of connections (1,000 to 10,000, and also 10,000+), men have more friends. Since it’s highly unlikely that someone (here’s looking at you Robert Scoble) actually knows 10,000 or more people well enough to consider them friends, this data would seem to suggest that men are simply using these networks more for business rather than personal usage.

Here’s some of the key data (find the full data here):

Of the people with at least 1 friend, 53.57% are female and 46.43% are male.

Social Networkers (1-100 friends):

- Around 80% of the sample set

- Women have on average 62 friends

- Men have on average 57 friends

- Women are more likely to be Social Networkers

Connectors (100-1,000 friends)

- Around 19% of the sample set

- Women have on average 185 friends

- Men have on average 172 friends

- Women are more likely to be Connectors

Super Connectors (1,000-10,000 friends):

- 0.66% of the sample set

- Women have on average 1,837 friends

- Men have on average 1,944 friends

- Men are more like to be Super Connectors

Uber Connectors (10,000+ friends)

- 0.02% of the sample set

- Women have on average 24,077 friends

- Men have on average 24,584 friends

- Men are more likely to be Uber Connectors

updated three times

Xiaonei, the company that likes to call itself the “Facebook of China” has raised a whopping $430 million from financial backers, VentureBeat has learned from the company’s investors.

The backing gives it a larger financial warchest than Facebook itself, and sets the scene for a showdown with the American company. Facebook has just started to get serious about entering the huge, fast-growing Chinese market.

The backing of Xiaonei could be a statement that the company intends to fend off China from Facebook’s advances. Xiaonei’s site sports the soothing blue border colors almost identical to Facebook’s; its thus not entirely surprising that Xiaonei would also copy Facebook’s ambitious fundraising strategy.

Recently, Facebook took $100 million (in two tranches) from Hong Kong business mogul Li Ka-Shing, in what is widely considered a strategic move to get help to enter that market. Facebook hasn’t entered China yet. But Ka-Shing’s company, Hutchison Whampoa Ltd, runs everything from major port facilities to mobile, location-based 3G services in China and other countries — all of which could be attractive to Facebook in China’s vibrant mobile market.

Xiaonei is owned by Oak Pacific Interactive (OPI), a holding company with a number of online communities.

The lead investor in this latest round is SOFTBANK Corp.

The huge investment in OPI translates into about 35 percent of the company, according to its investors, meaning the overall company is now worth more than $1 billion on paper. But that’s still far less than Facebook’s value — which is $15 billion, at least based on the value Microsoft gave it when the giant backed Facebook last year.

Facebook has raised $378 million in total over several rounds, including from venture firm Accel Partners, which has also invested in OPI.

While the investment was made into OPI, the money will mainly be used to helping expand Xiaonei.com, the company said. Xiaonei is China’s largest social-networking site. Two other groups, SBI and JOHO Capital, participated in the funding.

Xiaonei.com’s features include include multiplayer gaming and wireless services for mobile users. In the college market, Xiaonei.com claims a dominant market share, but hasn’t released any specific user data [update: Xiaonei had "22 million registered users and 12.7 million daily users by March," reports Communication Information, cited via Pacific Epoch. Xiaonei had 280 million page views in March, according to the report. Thanks to Christian, from comments.]

It’s true, though, that in China, there are few Facebook-like sites. Most social sites are like MySpace, where people are freer to use false identities. OPI also owns and operates Mop.com, the largest entertainment portal, and Donews.com, one of the leading IT blogging services in China.

Oak Pacific also announced that Masayoshi Son, chief executive of SOFTBANK Corp. will join the board.

Existing investors of OPI include General Atlantic, DCM, Technology Crossover Ventures, and Legend Capital. OPI had already raised $48 million from those investors two years ago.

Update: I just talked with David Chao, a partner at venture firm DCM and early investor in OPI, and one of its six board members. When I asked him about the Facebook clone-like blue color, Chao said he thinks the blue “looks like IBM to me.” He added that most sites these days are either blue, green or orange.

Chao was on the board two years ago when it decided to acquire Xiaonei, at the time a small startup. OPI invested heavily into the company, to make it a Facebook-like site. When combined with the traffic of OPI’s other property, Mop (which is more like a MySpace), they make up China’s fourth most visited site in China.

Notably, Chao said the company is cash flow-positive, meaning it didn’t really need to raise money. But Chao said that, after some debate, the company decided to “put the pedal to the metal, and really dominate the market,” he said.

As for Facebook, Chao said he doesn’t see the companies competing closely short-term, because Facebook isn’t even present in China. He noted most strong Chinese companies are home grown, from Alibaba, to 51Job, Baidu, Ctrip and Sina. “There might be an exception, but history tells us there’s not going to be too much to worry about an outside, non-Chinese born company taking a big chunk of the Chinese market.”

Update II: Reuters and WSJ are reporting the investment was only $96 million, but they seem to have gotten it wrong. There was also a reference to warrants, which is also wrong. Here’s what I think happened: They must have taken an Nikkei article about the investment (which referred to yen) and converted to dollars mistakenly. The Nikkei article refers the company’s draw of $100 million, as the first tranche of the total round. But the $100 million was assumed a 100 yen rate - so it ended up as 100 oku yen in the Nikkei article then it got recalculated at 105 yen to a dollar and ended up with 96 million. In the same article it clearly states total round will be 400 mil (oku) - so it got converted twice wrongly.

ソフトバンク、中国ネット大手を傘下に――最大市場に攻勢

ソフトバンクは中国のインターネット大手、オーク・パシフィック・インタラクティブ（ＯＰＩ、北京市）を傘下に収めることで同社と合意した。約400億円で株式の40％を取得、経営権を握る。急成長する中国ネット市場で携帯電話経由の情報提供など新サービスの拠点とする。中国のネット人口は今年、2億2000万人超と米国を抜き世界最大に浮上する。国内大手のミクシィや米グーグルなど米国勢も事業展開を加速しており、巨大市場を巡る攻防が激化する。

ソフトバンクはＯＰＩ株式の約14％を約100億円で取得。20数％分の新株予約権も得た。最終的に総額400億円を投じて出資比率を約40％に高める。同社創業者のジョー・チェン最高経営責任者（ＣＥＯ）を上回る筆頭株主となり、孫正義ソフトバンク社長は取締役に就任する見通し。

[4月30日/日本経済新聞　朝刊]

Update III. Furthermore, there were no warrants, as discussed by some sources. Next, the amount discussed in Nikkei article was $400 million, but that’s just the Softbank portion. It didn’t count the $30 million contributed by Joho and SBI.

Finally, there are no milestones - the pulling down of the first $100 million (instead of the full amount of $430M) is just cash timing that is best for both sides - nothing to read between the lines.

Facebook — and bear with me, because I’ve somehow already written three Facebook-related stories today — is launching an interesting new service for measuring what’s popular with its 70 million unique visitors, worldwide. It’s called Lexicon (here), and it analyzes popular words that appear in semi-public “walls” (also known as message boards), on personal profile pages, group pages and event pages.

The chart collects words from across millions of wall posts each day and displays changes in word frequency on graphs, like the one below for the cult-hit movie Juno, above.

The company thinks this will be a valuable service because walls are places people pick up on what others are saying, and in turn use those same words on other blogs.

Many people already use Google Trends, which lets you see the popularity of Google search terms, to track what’s popular. If you care about what Facebook users care about, add this to your analytics arsenal.

I don’t usually write about Facebook applications — there are tens of thousands of them, and few gain or maintain significant traction. But, Social Change is worth a mention because it has an interesting business model. Built by Dank Apps, Social Change is a set of vertical applications based around certain causes, like curing breast cancer or AIDS, or stopping climate change.

These applications generate advertising money that is then donated to the cause in question. New York-based Dank Apps, of course, is a for-profit business and its bigger plan for making money is directing users of Social Change applications to another application, Lotto. More on that in a second.

After users add one of the applications, they can gain “karma points” by inviting friends, sending gifts, and other actions on the app — really, anything that keeps the user active. Dank Apps donates a couple cents to a charity every time an application is installed, then donates more money based on how lucrative the application is, with “karma points” roughly translating to the amount that Dank Apps donates.

The apps are focused on verticals that are attractive to higher-end advertisers and brand sponsors and so generate relatively high CPM advertising. Because the apps are places where users can both talk about causes and make money for the causes, the usage rates are relatively high (although the apps themselves just launched, and only have a handful of users).

As Nick O’Neill of All Facebook points out, others have tried variations of this strategy without success but were more complicated; one erstwhile competitor required a download toolbar, for example.

Lotto, Dank Apps’ other Facebook application is already cash-flow positive. Instead of a real-life lottery, where you pay to play, you invite your friends and take other actions in order to earn tickets (not unlike Social Change’s “karma points”). But Lotto only has a few thousand active users because, as Dank Apps founder Jason Beckerman tells me, it’s difficult for users to understand that it’s free just through receiving an invite. By advertising Lotto through its other applications, Beckerman hopes to see a significant new wave of users eventually playing Lotto.

Update with a response from FriendFeed’s Paul Buchheit, below the article

Facebook has just launched a new feature that lets you add actions from other sites to the mini-feed of actions on your profile, including sites like local review site Yelp, photo site Picasa, and others.

This capability, of course, is vaguely similar to what FriendFeed offers. FriendFeed lets you import actions from other sites onto its own, then track what your friends are up to around the web and discuss everything all in one place.

The problem is, Facebook is about a lot of things that distract users away from tracking what their friends are up to around the web. Distractions include: Posting messages on your friends’ walls, sending them private messages, “poking” them, playing applications with people, checking out friends’ photo albums, etc.

Facebook doesn’t have an effective way to let people easily converse about what they’re up to around the web, so I don’t think this new feature is going to mean serious competition with Friendfeed, at least for Friendfeed’s core user base. More on that in a minute.

This Facebook move reminds me of when Facebook decided to offer a somewhat similar feature to messaging service Twitter last year, which it called “status updates.” Twitter lets you post short messages about what you’re up to, reply to others’ messages, share links, etc. It’s a sort of abbreviated, instantaneous — yet asynchronous — conversation with other Twitter users. Facebook’s updates feature, on the other hand, doesn’t offer the same dynamic. Instead, it’s more just a way for you to say what you’re up to, that others might see as they look at their news feed (which, incidentally, seems to be broken today), or as they look at your Facebook profile.

Twitter has been growing by leaps and bounds, and seems to be more popular than much-larger Facebook within the tech world. However, lots of people use both, even using Twitter’s Facebook application to post tweets (Twitter messages), and importing tweets into their Facebook statuses.

Here’s how this second point connects back to Friendfeed. I’ve noticed that most of my Facebook friends under the age of 26 or so don’t use Twitter — unless they’re in the tech world. But they do use Facebook’s status updates pretty religiously.

Twitter has a large niche carved out for itself, a fairly differentiated service, and solid growth. But Facebook may be pre-empting Twitter’s ability to reach college kids and other heavy Facebook users.

In the same way, Friendfeed has been growing fast in the tech world — from what I can tell — and is a valuable place for keeping track of friends. It may be that Facebook users will be satisfied enough with Facebook’s overlapping feature being released today, that they won’t feel the need to also use Friendfeed. It doesn’t mean Friendfeed is doomed, it just might reduce its potential to grow big.

Update: Friendfeed’s Paul Buchheit responds

We’ve known about this feature for a while — they pre-announced it a couple of months ago. It’s also possible to import content from these sites using third-party apps, such as http://apps.facebook.com/mypicasawebalbums/

FriendFeed is creating an interesting and enjoyable place to share and discuss things with friends — the aggregation aspect is more of an implementation detail. As you mentioned in your article, the actual experience of using FriendFeed is very different from Facebook, and I think they have very different strengths and purposes and for the most part are headed in different directions.