Yes!!, you may have noticed I have been blogging about facebook a few times already, but what the heck.

I just thought I’d direct you to the following URL to give to all the juicy information about Facebook.

The full Facebook Biography – http://mashable.com/2006/08/25/facebook-profile/

That’s it, no more, rest easy…

Searching for the term “facebook popularity” in Google, I found many references on various sites of how popular Facebook has become, not just in the United States, but worldwide.

Facebook started off as a small online community project for Harvard University and grew into the biggest site in social networking after it was opened to the public in Sept. 2006.

When looking at WikiPedia’s page for Facebook at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook, it shows that as of July 2007, the website had the largest number of registered users among college-focused sites with over 34 million active members worldwide (also from non-collegiate networks).

In July 2007 it was ranked between top 10–13 web sites, and was the number one site for photos in the United States, ahead of public sites such as Flickr, with over 8.5 million photos uploaded daily.

It is also the sixth most visited site in the United States.

So, it is undeniably one of the bigger sites out there, larger than both Flikr and MySpace, but now, there is a different point of view…

A Recent study by a British researcher, Doctor Will Reader, from Sheffield Hallam University in northern England, claims that ‘Facebook is not for close friendships’…

He says that “Social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace are unlikely to help users build close new friendships. This is because people feel they need face-to-face contact in order to develop trust. Although the number of friends people have on these sites can be massive, the number of close friends is approximately the same as in the face-to-face real world contact,” he told the British Association Festival of Science in York, northern England.

He added that people see face-to-face contact as “absolutely imperative” in building close relationships and that it was “very easy to be deceptive” over the internet.

So there it is, another interesting fact on our ‘beloved’ Facebook.

Source: http://cooltech.iafrica.com/technews/546100.htm

OK, so everyone is talking about Facebook, even the longtail team are tracking and investigating the latest trends on it. Why, because it’s huge. Huge in the number of people using it, huge because it is the latest trend in social networking sites, huge because it’s bigger than Flikr and MySpace and huge because people have, and always will have, the need to connect with others.

Just a few simple facts about Facebook:

• Facebook has over 31 Million active users
• Facebook is growing at a rapid rate of around 100 000 new member signups per day
• Around 25,000 Facebook public profiles are indexed in Google and more will be indexed soon
• Facebook is enjoying an average of 3 percent weekly growth since Jan. 2007
• Active users have doubled since Facebook expanded registration in Sept. 2006
• The site receives over 15 billion page views per month
• It currently hosts over 1.7 Billion photos.

Facebook finance facts:

• Facebook received ‘three rounds’ of funding : $500,000 from Peter Thiel in the Summer 2004, $12.7 million from Accel Partners in April 2005 and $25 million from Greylock Partners
• In April 2006, revenue was rumored to be over $1.5 million per week
• The company already rejected a $975 million offer for the site
• Peter Thiel, a board member of Facebook, indicated that Facebook’s internal valuation is around $8 billion based on their projected revenues of $1 billion by 2015

Right, there you have the facts. Please tune in again tomorrow to find out why Facebook is so popular, or perhaps, less popular to some.

Source: MyBroadband

A few days ago I blogged about Facebook allowing search engines to index public member profiles. Today I found this update by means of video from WebProNews who caught up with a few Facebook users and got their thoughts on this controversial move by Facebook.

Watch the video and tell us what your thoughts are.

If I look at the previous posts made by my colleagues here at longtail, I too have to add my voice to the mix and will try to not write better posts than them… Nah, rest easy people, my writing skills are far less honed than yours. I *must* admit that I am constantly amazed at how well they write. Good job girls…. and guy.

As Sandra commented in her debut blog post, longtail is currently going through some changes, all good of course, and new additions to the team has been made again.

(Drum roll) – TADA!!, (stage curtains open…) – oh look, there’s Melt, he’s the new SEO, website, techie guy. Now at least the current “guy”, err, I meant Japie, does not have to be the only “guy” at the office.

That’s good news for Japie and all of you. Now, all the longtail guys and girls will bring you, and keep you, updated on the latest news and trends in eMarketing.

This brings me to the actual reason for me posting (it took me a long time too).

It seems Facebook is in the news everywhere and this morning is no different. In the last few days news began filtering through that Facebook will now open all user profiles to Search Engine indexing.

Facebook plans to open up its search functionality this week and they will begin letting Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, MSN and other search engines index public profile pages of their users.

You, as a Facebook user, have one month to opt-out of their opening to search engines by changing your user privacy settings.

Currently Facebook is not blocking spidering of their user profiles, but most public profiles (which feature the user name, image and basic info) are not accessible due to no sitemaps style communication between the company and search engines.

Facebook explains that “The Public Search Listing of a profile shows the profile picture thumbnail and links to interact with a user on Facebook. People will always have to log in or register to poke, message or add someone as a friend. A user can also restrict what information shows in their public listing by going to the search privacy page. For instance, if a user does not want their profile picture to be shown, they can uncheck that box under ‘What people can do with my search results’.”

There are currently just over 25,000 Facebook public profiles indexed in Google, mostly via external sites linking in to them.

This move by Facebook may scare some users who don’t want their profiles viewed in public but there are some restrictions: you must have your profile set to viewable by “everyone” in order to appear, and only your limited profile will be public. Additionally, only profiles of those over 18 years old will be shown. It’s also worth noting that some Facebook profiles have already been indexed by Google for a long time now, presumably due to users posting badges to them from other sites.

So, is yours public? How do you make it public? Easy, go to your Facebook account and click on privacy and edit the settings under “Search”.

To keep track on whether your profile is indexed by Google, type “Melt du Plooy site:facebook.com” into Google’s search box (you need to replace my name with yours to find out). You’ll see, mine is not listed. Is yours?.

That’s me for today, thanks for reading.

Amidst the news that many corporate are now starting to ban Facebook access from offices due to the fact that employees spend too much time on it, Facebook is growing at a rate of about 750.000 people per week world-wide. The South African network currently totals 221.539 people.

What corporate don’t realise however is that by banning Facebook it is just growing even faster – forbidden fruit always tastes better. And if they can’t access it from their office pc they are now starting to access it from their cellphones.

The Facebook site is optimised for viewing from a cellphone, which makes it easy to use. And when people update their status from their phone, it tells the friends that you are posting from a phone. It is creating huge interest on the possibilities of mobile websites.

If you can access Facebook from your cell, what else can you do?

By customizing Websites for handsets they give people the opportunity to access services they want at the touch of a button at anytime. And that means if you have a consumer facing business, you’d better take mobile websites seriously.

Sandra Olivier
sandra@longtail.co.za