But what really inspired me to post here so long after the article was written was the graph. The graph is completely meaningless, and Om, you should be ashamed for posting it. Facebook is primarily used by college students. Who gain access with an official school email address. Therefore students join Facebook when they get an email address: between May and July usually. More join as the school year approaches and they hear more about Facebook. Up at school, they discover it’s a useful tool for remembering people they meet, and the number of frequent users goes up. By December, everyone knows about Facebook and either has already joined, or will not join, therefore a peak as reached. People become less interested as the year drags on, they check less frequently, and the unique hits decrease. MySpace on the other hand would have a more constant growth as the graph showed. But saying Facebook isn’t increasing in size by showing November through February is just, well, stupid.

Another key reason is the manufactured goal of nearly every user to accumulate friends at not only their own school but at others. This is why, at least in my mind, sites like Friendster and even Facebook’s high school won’t reach the same level as college-based Facebook. When a student leaves highschool and enters into college, more often than not the student’s classmates disperse to a wide variety of other schools. The student then seeks to “collect” as many friends from other schools as possible, using their friend/school list as almost a trophy wall and expanding Facebook’s reach. When you look at high school Facebook, and even sites like Friendster, they don’t have this affect and often become stagnant, failing to spread from each social bubble to the next. For instance, in highschool, the large majority, if not all of a student’s friends are primarily only at their own high school. This stops the networking chain at that one school. A classic “skim” marketing approach and not-so-obvious strategy Facebook inadvertently or advertently used was also adding schools in a sequential fashion, as opposed to dumping them all into the system at once. I remember talking to several friends at schools not supported by Facebook at the time, and every single one had heard of Facebook and was dying to be a part of the site. This gave Facebook great momentum at these newly added schools.

I personally can’t wait to see how Facebook attemps to retain its graduating users. I see this as one of the primary ways Facebook can monetize its users. As many have brought up, while it just seems so lucrative, the college Facebook just doesn’t have the revenue-generating opportunies as one would hope, at least not yet. A point to make is that when a user visits Facebook, they come to stay at Facebook. Whether they are “stalking”/browsing, looking up classmates in classes, etc… they come to Facebook to stay there. Like Om mentioned, they train themselves to avoid any distractions (ads) to this process. I don’t think this can be changed anytime soon. This explains the extremely low results/responses in advertising on Facebook. When people visit sites like CollegeHumor.com, on the other hand, people are almost looking to find something else. They go to the site to find something funny or interesting, which may or may not be at the site they first went to, even if it means clicking on an advertisement.

In respects to the alumni offerings, Facebook has the advantage of a “recycling” userbase, with a large near-guaranteed group of new-users every year, without doubt (unless they are dethroned obviously). If they can maintain their current course, they can feed their LinkedIn-like alumni services and job hunting systems new users every year.

Sorry for the long comment! Just wanted to get everything down at once!

Bubble 2.0: Facebook, MySpace, Desperate Dinosaurs, Web 2.0 buzz machines, and gazillion other startups

http://www.neomarketing.tv/archives/bubble20partifacebookmyspacedesperatedinosaursweb20buzzmachinesandgazillionother_startups.php

The guy is talking about the dynamics of the “Bubble 2.0″. So a lot of discussion revolving around Web 2.0, what is hype, what is real, why the entry barriers to the social media space are very minimal, and how a popular service can quickly lose its “cool”… And all that…

I can’t say that I’m very knowledgeable about these stuff, but his discussion was quite intuitive, and definately worth to check out…

Alex - I don’t know the Alexa stats on LinkedIn, but for those of us who are on it and have effectively built out our networks … there is a high probability that we will find our next gigs trough the service.

I’m employed now at a new position that is 100x better than my old one, and LinkedIn was a pretty important part of landing the position.

I thought the point of LinkedIn and Tribe.net was leveraging your social nets for finding jobs, used couches, etc. I could see Facebook pulling off something like this w/ the post-graduation crowd.

Most people I know who graduate from college have about 25-50 random acquaintances that you are friendly with, but not quite tight enough to email out of the blue 4 years after graudation and say “know anyone who’s hiring? =)”. But if they are already on your Facebook, it wouldn’t be as big of a deal.

Already done with the high school students… and Facebook lost some “street cred” for that.

They have to be careful, though. Facebook was built on the “we can be members of this, and you can’t” mentality. If it loses it’s “elite” nature… it loses value.

To keep both, Om and Mathew happy, they can settle at an inbetween amount of $1.25 billion.

My site monitizes well over 10x more per pageview then myspace. The real question is what is facebook monitizating at? They must be making at least 3-5 times as much per pageview as myspace, mostly due to the fact their demographic actually has credit cards.

I am just saying $2 billion seems silly, and dismissing Alexa data is not prudent. Hell, all i suggested these guys take 3/4 of a billion and go enjoy life, come back and do it again. there is no such thing as a sure thing.