Written on April 27, 2008 – 11:03 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
San Francisco was flooded by Finnish companies last week. They’ve teamed up to organize a meeting at the uber-hip restaurant Foreign Cinema to meet with well-known web professionals as Loic le Meur, Scott Rafer and Howard Rheingold. Boris and me were there and really enjoyed meeting all these ambitious entrepreneurs who prove that Finland’s technology industry consists of more than just Nokia. This week I’ll highlight some of the companies, starting with XIHA Life. This is the world’s first multilingual social network, targeted at people living outside their home country.
Howard Rheingold speeching during Finnish meet-up
Juhani Polkko, VP Business Development, told me users can select not only their native language, but as many languages as they understand or want to learn, and the content on the site is filtered based on the preferences. So imagine that you’re an English-speaking person from Germany and have a friend in France. When you check out his profile, you’ll only see the English content on his site. The French comments and messages have been filtered out.
I like the idea of their service, as learning other languages or keeping up with the ones you speak a bit are valuable assets. Moreover, the numbers of languages they offer is impressive (see below). Though I’m slightly disappointed Polkko and his team have built another social network. Why didn’t they create an overlay service on top of existing social networks?
Polkko: “We are initially building a niche social network and target the people who have the natural need to use multiple languages in their everyday life, like expatriates and exchange students. The next step is to create mash-ups for content from other social media websites and apply our language recognition and filtering algorithms. This is somewhat limited because you would need to build the algorithms inside other networks such as Facebook, but they can be applied to all the content which is available through open APIs and XML-feeds, or other content which the users own the rights to.”
So whether you like XIHA or not, these Finnish guys do offer us a glimpse of the possibilities when social networks adopt open standards. We could filter out content we don’t understand and use every network in our own language - without excluding other people. Let’s hope it’s not an utopia.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on April 11, 2008 – 1:28 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Everybody on the social web is always sharing what they’re up to. We’re answering the “what are you doing?” question on Twitter, telling LinkedIn connections what we’re working on or sharing some fun thoughts with Facebook friends. Sometimes we might even forget to enjoy the moment because we’re busy sharing (I always think this when I see people filming a concert with their camera phones).
So one of the consequences is the updates of the people we REALLY care about might get lost in the overabundance of status updates. I’m not only one who notices this, as there seems to be a trend going on that we want to divide our “friends” in groups. Two weeks ago I wrote about a service that tried to create groups in Twitter, yet they failed miserably. Now there’s a new tool, which makes it possible to create group pages to see what your friends, colleagues, heroes or whatever are doing. It’s called Crowd Status and developed by Darren Stuart.
My crowd, The Next Web editors, is currently concerned with the following things:
The tool is very basic now: it only works with Twitter and there are no widgets, Facebooks apps or whatsoever. Though it works fine if you just want so what a small group of selected people is doing. You could link to it from your Netvibes startpage or put public links on your blog. I’m not sure whether Stuart will develop it any further as he considers it to be a “personal project”. Yet the “definitely in Alpha” sign do gives me hope.
Written on March 27, 2008 – 11:00 am
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
Asi Sharabi has written his second report on Facebook Applications Trends. You can see my post regarding his first report here. I find Asi’s reports to be extremely interesting and useful. 
Any person/company that’s currently offering or plans to offer an application on Facebook, should definitely read both reports to get an idea on “what’s hot and what’s not” as far as apps go. In the first report Asi focused on the 100 most popular apps according to number of installs. This report focuses on the apps that have the highest number of active users. Looking at these apps allows us to truly understand what makes a sustainable Facebook app. All data in the post is taken from adonomics , an amazing site which provides all sorts of great statistics regarding Facebook applications.
Asi writes:
As some people have already noted there is a sense of ‘apps fatigue’ and this indeed reflected in the data. Still, according to recent report while there is for the first time a slow decrease in the apps fair, on average 51% Facebook users interacted with FB apps pages in January.”
Most of the prevalent, multi-million installs apps have fairly low percentage of active users. Evidently, it is one thing to create a ‘viral’ application and get loads of users to install it (which occasionally been achieved with some dirty tricks and is getting increasingly difficult), but it is a different thing altogether to create a sustainable application, i.e. application that’s not just a passing gimmick but one that offer lasting value that people keep using over time.
I think that part of the reason why users are fatigued by Facebook apps is because there are very few apps that offer users real added value. Succeeding in getting people to install your app is great. But that’s only the first step. The real challenge lies in creating a sustainable application which people will actively use.
There are currently 20,861 applications on Facebook (140 apps are uploaded daily). Only about 170 apps have over 1 million users. About 800 have 100K to 1 million users, around 2200 have 10K – 100K users, around 4300 have 1K – 10k users, which leaves us with about 13,000+ apps with less than 1K users. (more…)
Written on March 19, 2008 – 9:44 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Rebecca Jennings, a Senior Analyst from Forrester Research, talked about Social Computing in Europe: Facts & Figures. She asked how well social computing is being adopted in Europe. Why is the adoption and use of social computing different from country to country?
She started of with some examples to show how important social computing gets. Of course she mentioned Lego, the toys company who really gets how you can use your engaged following. For example, they asked the community what kind of Lego thing they wanted to see. The crowd asked for a bit more challenging object to build. So Lego launched the Lego Imperial Start Destroyer, an expensive Starwars space ship (80 euros). It was sold out in five weeks.
So Forrester figured it might be about time to do some profiling. Here’s what they came up with:
- Creators (10%) - creates content, like blogs and Flickr pictures
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Critics (19%) - commenting and participating
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Collectors (9%) - Following RSS feeds and social bookmarking
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Joiners (13%) - Maintain profiles on social networks
- Spectators (40%) - Watch, listen, read
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Inactives (55%) - guess what: none of the above
The percentages refer to the whole European population. When you look at the numbers per country, the Dutch turn out to be the keenest creators - reason for us to start yelling (sorry about that Rebecca). So why is that? Jennings thinks it’s because Holland was pretty early with affordable broadband. Yet cultural reasons do matter as well. Germans for example, are less into sharing than their Dutch neighbors.
Jennings waving at the yelling Dutchmen
If you look at different age groups, you notice that social media is a way of life for young customers. Companies should jump into this trend. A good example according to Jennings is Spine Breakers from Penguin Publishing. It’s a writing community for writing youngsters. The team of Spine Breakers gives their young users what they want, and it a huge part of the content is generated due to that philosophy.
So profiling should be the foundation of a company’s computing strategy. Companies have to ask themselves: What do we want to achieve? Then strategy evolves next. This is becoming more important everyday. “It’s a long term phenomenon. As you know, since I’m preaching to the converted”. In 5 to 10 years, we’ll see ubiquitous social networks, based on developments like open technology, shared identities, an information flow and advertisers who embrace the social influence of the community. And, as Jennings noted, thanks to internet entrepreneurs like us.
Update: check out the graph Ton Wesseling from Dutch blog Marketingfacts made.
Written on March 18, 2008 – 10:43 am
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
Nick O’Neill from The Unofficial Facebook Blog has recently interviewed Mark Zuckerberg (in a slightly different manner than Sarah Lacy). Here’s what Mark had to say:
1) He believes the reaction to his interview with Sarah Lacy was overblown.
2) Mark claims that the 5,000 friend limit on Facebook is more of a technical limitation than anything else and even though users have been complaining about this, it is not something they plan on changing any time soon. However Nick adds:
“I received a different response from one Facebook employee later that night who claimed that it would only be a few lines of code to change. I’m sure there is more to it than that but it definitely is not a high priority at Facebook currently.”
3) Mark claims that Facebook does not want to compete with other application developers. However, this still didn’t stop them from sending out a message to thousands (if not millions) of college students recently telling them to install the March Madness application. Over the last few years, CBS and Facebook had worked together in creating and promoting this application. The fact that Facebook is not allowing other developers the same promotional capability for their applications is angering many developers and justly so. When asked about this controversial issue, Mark mentioned that this year they had actually messaged less users than in previous years.
(more…)
Written on March 18, 2008 – 9:58 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
A few weeks ago I wrote that Wordpress isn’t going to be the next social network, as some bloggers like Anne Zelenka claimed. I based this statement on several experiences with co-writers. Sometimes I work with people who are passionate about what they do and want to share their knowledge about a certain matter with the world. Rightfully so, they start blogging. And I’m there to help them out with the first steps of Wordpress.
Most of the times I tell them it’s not that hard to grasp since writing posts is the only thing they are planning to do. Yet when they have a first look at the Dashboard they generally say it doesn’t look simple at all. I get why they say that, since the overabundance of options on the ‘Write’ page can be overwhelming.
Luckily Matt Mullenweg’s team is smart enough to interview Wordpress users and you can tell by looking at the first sneak peek screenshots of the new Wordpress, version 2.5:
The new write screen (..) displays the most common fields in a way that makes posting incredibly easy. Additional options are hidden away until you need them. The new Write screen anticipates the natural flow of the way you write, and is smart enough to remember the way you left it so that your preferred writing environment is always quickly available. The new visual editor even has a handy full-screen mode to help block out distractions while composing your newest post.
They’ve not just gave the Write screen a visual update, it’s the whole Dashboard that looks better. When those new users I was talking about open the Dashboard of the new Wordpress, they just see four tabs:
So Mullenweg might catch up and actually have a Dashboard that might be understandable for people who hardly get Microsoft Office. If he can do that, I’ll change my mind about Wordpress as the next social network. immediately. After a few days of feedback, Mullenweg will set a final release date. Just like him, I can’t wait!
Written on March 3, 2008 – 5:05 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
As the major social networks are working their way into Europe, interesting news about localization features keep popping up my feed reader and mail inbox. The two major headlines today: Facebook launches a German version and LinkedIn is partnering up with a big French job listing service.
The one million German speaking Facebook users now have access to an interface in their own language. I’m sure they appreciate that, since the German voice-over business has been a booming industry since the rise of television. With that in mind, it’s not surprising that 2000 German users voluntarily fixed the translating job in less than two weeks.
It’s only the third language version of Facebook. The choice for a German version is kind of weird if you consider the fact that Germany or other German speaking countries are not listed in the top 10 countries for Facebook users. After the United States, Britain is number two with 8 million active users and Canada is third with 7 million users. Turkey is fourth, followed by Australia, France and Sweden. So if you just consider the user numbers, Turkey would have been a more logical choice. Yet Germans have more money to spend, and in that light, a French version will probably be next.
In that country, LinkedIn did a pretty good job expanding their market reach. TechCrunch reports that they partnered up with Apec.fr, a job listing site that claims they have about 1.2 million unique monthly visitors, 600,000 registered users and 35,000 registered companies. Those users can now register for LinkedIn and start using the service without leaving the French interface of Apec. If I were working at European LinkedIn competitors Viadeo and Xing, I’d be scared.
The way LinkedIn and Facebook approach Europe - just offer language support - is pretty effective. One of Europe’s largest social networks Netlog can certainly confirm that. They hired two two Turkish students to translate the service for a 1000 dollars. It took the students a week, four months later the Turkish version had 2.5 million users.
Yet I prefer the MySpace approach. They are already based in France, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and soon in Russia and Turkey. When they launch, they install a local team who knows what’s hot and what’s not in the country and throw a great party. I’d thought I would never say this about a company owned by Murdoch but here we go: It feels like MySpace respects the cultural differences more and really wants to make an effort. I hope it will pay off.
Read this post by Patrick de Laive about possible Facebook acquisitions in Europe.
Written on March 2, 2008 – 3:36 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Last week we gave away 250 private beta invites for Blippr, a service that allows you to collect, organize and share your books, games, music, movies and tv shows. It’s definitely a nice service for people with a broad range of interests. Yet not everybody is interested in books AND music AND movies. For those people, there are specialized services, and an example is social network for gamers Vigster.com.
The London-based start-up showed a demo during Minibar, chaired by Mike Butcher form TechCrunch UK - and launched this week in public beta. Users can build and catalogue their games, create virtual game shelves to show off their games collection and do the regular social network thing: connecting, sharing and having heated discussions about game characters, scenarios and whatnot.
The interface is rather sober - not what you would expect from a gaming service - and focused too much on selling games. For instance, if you go to the screenshots gallery and click on one you like, you end up on a page that puts the ‘buy this game’-line right in your face. You have to scroll down to find a thumbnail version of the screenshot, that opens on a new blank page. There are officiously some missed opportunities there.
I think the way to build a strong community is to get users to love your service. Offer them the same features Vigster has now, but present them in a good-looking, game-like and usable interface. Show users that you love them as well by welcoming them in a warm way - learn from Flickr - and leave the Google Ads for later.
But most of all, let them know you love games too. I’m sure the guys from Vigster have a passion for games, but I can’t tell by looking at their service.
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