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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Google - Competing with Microsoft Apps and Using Wikipedia as a News Service

Posted on June 26, 2009 by Peter Vogel

Google is always making news, but the report that the Google Apps have new features to compete with Microsoft Office is interesting as more users rely on free Google Apps. It’s hard to fathom that Wikipedia could be used as a news source, but Google is trying that out since so many users rely on Wikipedia as a source of reliable information. Without question Google continues to grow and evolve in interesting directions, clearly something we all have to watch.

Google vs. Microsoft (including Free Windows 7)

Notwithstanding the ongoing search engine wars between Google and the universe, Google Apps are apparently improving at time with Microsoft users are unhappy with the additional features in Office 2007 which causes new complications for users. Specifically the new features in Google spreadsheet are an improvement over Excel, and with the general unhappiness of Microsoft Vista clearly many users are awaiting Windows 7. So Microsoft’s original game-plan to move the PC world from XP to an new operating system, and of course related revenue from upgrades to the Office Suite, got a major stall since Vista has been such a major dud. So it’s not much of a surprise that Microsoft has revealed that users can get Windows 7 free or very low cost when released later this year if they buy a new computer now with the upgrade.

Wikipedia As A News Source?

Often Wikipedia shows up at the top of many Google searches and as result users tend to rely on Wikipedia has grown to over 2.9 articles. But recently Google News has also been including Wikipedia links so that users can read more about topics. Interestingly enough no one at Google asked Wikipedia and the folks at Wikipedia learned of the new Google News service use of Wikipedia by reading the Nieman Journalism Lab. With this evolution Google News has positioned the collaborative written source Wikipedia in direct competition with the New York Times, Washington Post, AOL, CNN, and other news sources.

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