Facebook Update - 350 Million Friends and Growing Quickly

Posted on December 7, 2009 by Peter Vogel

In 3 months Facebook grew another 16.7% to 350 friends worldwide which has led Facebook to create a simpler privacy policy to allow users to control who sees “each individual piece of content you create or upload.” All the more amazing since Facebook grew 200% between August 2008 and August 2009. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s recent blog that stating among other things that 50% of Facebook friends are member of regional networks, and today there are networks for the entire countries of India and China. The new plan is to remove these regional networks and hopefully create a simpler network and improve its privacy policy.

Facebook Statistics Are Amazing

The current Facebook statistics are pretty incredible and particularly that 35 million (10%) of the Facebook friends update their status every day:

• 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
• More than 35 million users update their status each day
• More than 55 million status updates posted each day
• More than 2.5 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
• More than 3.5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week
• More than 3.5 million events created each month
• More than 1.6 million active Pages on Facebook
• More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook
• Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans

So is it any wonder that Facebook needs to be vigilant in managing personal information of its friends and users. Time will tell how Facebook’s privacy policy works out.

Google Searches for 2009 - Facebook is Number 2!

As 2009 ends Computerworld announced the top search engine hits for the year and of course Michael Jackson was number one, but Google’s number two search of the year was Facebook! Also on Google’s top 10 list of searches was “Twitter, Windows 7 and Tuenti, which is a Madrid-based, invitation only social networking site that some call the Spanish Facebook.” AOL and Yahoo! also listed Michael Jackson as the top searched name, but from the lists varied widely- “AOL and Yahoo! lists popular search terms like '70s icon Farrah Fawcett, who also died this year, socialite Kim Kardashian, singer Rihanna and actress Megan Fox.” Interesting message about the search engine wars that Google, AOL, and Yahoo! would be so different.

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SEARCH ENGINE WARS!!! - Microsoft, Yahoo! and Wolfram|Alpha vs. Google

Posted on May 23, 2009 by Peter Vogel

There are reports that Microsoft’s new search engine known as Kumo is about to be released (ultimately it may be called “Bing”) which will replace “Live Search.” Apparently Microsoft leaked copies of Kumo recently and from all reviews there’s nothing too radical, but what is radical is the Wolfram|Alpha search engine which was seen on TV news last week. The Wolfram|Alpha search engine provides users very different information, however since it is so radically different it remains to be seen how successful its approach will be.

Update on Search Engine Rankings

comScore just released its new search engine rankings without much surprise- Google increased slightly from 63.7% to 64.2% of all Internet searches between March and April 2009 while Yahoo!, Microsoft, Ask, and AOL were relatively flat. Since Microsoft (20.4%) and Yahoo! (8.2%) searches combine for 28.6% of all Internet searches, there has been renewed speculation that Microsoft and Yahoo! will form an alliance to try to get a larger market share and be more competitive with Google.

Microsoft vs. Google- Search Engines and Browsers

From earlier blogs you will recall that Google is complaining about Microsoft’s deployment of Internet Explorer in the EU as anticompetitive. Interestingly part of Microsoft’s defense is apparently that by expanding competition in the browser market in the EU will only encourage more Google Internet searches which will be anticompetitive to Microsoft. So it will be interesting to see how Microsoft’s deployment of Kumo may allow Google to argue to the EU that Microsoft’s defense should fail since Microsoft is aggressively competing with Google in the search engine market.

What do you think? I welcome comments.
 

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Google's Future - Outage, Self-Defense, and More Services

Posted on May 17, 2009 by Peter Vogel

Since Google accounts for more than 63% of all Internet searches, it’s no wonder that Google’s stock fell last week when Google users had significant problems when Google’s servers were overloaded and Google services were operating at a crawl. Google claims that there were problems in 3 of their Asian data centers (out more than 30 data centers worldwide) which affected about 14% of Google’s users. Many Internet users rely on Google for services beyond searches, including gmail, Google Apps, and Google Latitude to name a few. Google’s server failures meant many users could not conduct business during this outage period.

Protecting Privacy Google

A recent article in Computerworld gives Google users 6 tips about protecting privacy:

1. Know your privacy rights: Use the Google Privacy Center.
2. Protect your content on the services you use.
3. Turn off the suggestion feature in the Chrome browser.
4. Turn off Web History.
5. Opt out of interest-based ad serving.
6. Add SSL to Gmail.

However, since most Internet users do not take the time to review privacy policies it’s unlikely that this advice will be heeded by many Google users.

More Google

Google announced a number of new services for desktops and mobile phones which includes search capabilities in multiple contexts so that when searching from a cell phone, Google will take into account the GPS location and what other mobile users have searched in that locale. Also Google will offer a new tweak to search on Search Options that allows a user to drill by topics, time, or images. About to make its debut is a much hyped search engine known as Wolfram Alpha.

Google Too Successful?

A big question may now be has Google been too successful? As Google offers these new features to sell ever more ads space, surely Google hopes to draw more users. Without question the recent system slow-down is an ominous sign of potential bad news on the horizon. No doubt Google’s search engine competitors like Yahoo!, Microsoft, and AOL are watching with great interest to see if they can capture Google users who may abandon Google if the system outages become a pattern.
 

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