Following our posts last month on Facebook’s 2008 international growth by country and trends in 2008 social networking growth, comScore released additional data today on year-over-year social networking growth since June of 2007. Here are the highlights:
- Social networking continues to explode worldwide
- Facebook and hi5 are leading the international growth
- Facebook is growing everywhere
Facebook launched a new kind of ad unit today that has the potential to drive much more engagement than 
any ad product on the site ever before has: embedded multimedia with comments visible to users’ entire friend list.
Facebook has created new home page advertising inventory with its upcoming redesign. However, this is the first time we’ve seen Facebook fill the sponsored home page slot with this kind of unit. The behavior:
1. Clicking on the ad image opens a video player in-line
2. Comments on the video are visible to your entire friend list.
The comments around the ad dramatically increase engagement with the unit, as the highly visible comments provide an opportunity for users to simultaneously draw attention to the ad by drawing attention to themselves. While this could backfire if comments degrading the advertiser are abundant (I saw a few “LAME!” comments about Tropic Thunder today), the ad comments powerfully take advantage of Facebook’s social dynamics to draw attention to an ad in a way that is impossible without the social graph. When is the last time you heard 9 friends talk about an online ad in the same day?
Ad comments are an interesting step forward in the evolution of “Social Ads.” While this kind of ad may not work as well outside of a few advertiser verticals, I expect that early advertisers will be pleased with its performance.
Friendster, which has risen to become the largest social network in Asia after its precipitous fall in North America years ago, is today announcing support for OpenSocial 0.7 as part of the Friendster Developer Program.
The Friendster app platform actually launched in late 2007 - it was the second social network to launch a platform after Facebook. Since then, thousands of developers have joined the Friendster Developer Program and about 500 apps have been released on the Friendster platform. Friendster told us today that 10 million unique users have installed at least 1 application so far, and half a million apps are installed every day. Of those who have installed applications, the average is between 2-3 apps installed per person.
Friendster’s Jeff Roberto says that the company will continue to support existing APIs as it adds OpenSocial support. “We plan to support both. This is really an extension of the Friendster Developer Program to developers of OpenSocial applications, who should now be able to run their apps on Friendster out of the box. We’re the only place that app developers can reach 55 million unique users in Asia on a single social network. And we have very low overlap with other social networks.”
Friendster’s platform as an open revenue model, meaning developers are free to monetize their apps however they like. One unique aspect to monetizing on the Friendster platform is that ads on the profile page are permitted - unlike other social networks.
“Friendster’s launch is another major milestone in the adoption and deployment of OpenSocial throughout the social web and around the world. We’re particularly excited that OpenSocial is helping Friendster bring new social applications to users in Asia, and we look forward to seeing users embrace these apps,” said David Glazer, director of engineering at Google.
Roberto says that while the company is not ready to announce specific dates yet, Friendster does plan on supporting the OpenSocial 0.8 spec. OpenSocial 0.8 adds REST API support - like the Facebook Platform does - something OpenSocial developers have been clamoring for for months.
Google really really really wants to be a social network; or at least try to get into the middle of the space.
Google’s first attempt: Vaporware OpenSocial. Launched with much fanfare it hs proven a point of frustration and disappointment to the application developer community (it’s target audience).
Google’s second attempt. Google Profiles: Weak. In what
If you decide to set up a Google Profile. Be aware of where your data just might end up being visible online. Like Google Maps for example. While I can see the advantages of this data being shared; I wonder if the users are aware of the consequences of this data being brought to the
MySpace announced today that its own developer platform is coming on Feb. 5. It’s now taking applications for developers to hoping to get in at the ground level:
The MySpace Developer Site is coming soon!
The MySpace Developer site will empower you to:
* Learn & Play with the MySpace Developer Platform and
Google OpenSocial Interview with Platform Developer Advocate Patrick Chanezon. Google rarely does video interviews so I was very excited to have the opportunity to capture this interview with Patrick.
Too bad I didn’t keep the camera running for the next 1.5 hours while we continued to chat about all the opportunities for businesses, brands
Google announced today in conjunction with Yahoo! and MySpace, the formation of the OpenSocial Foundation, a non-profit entity, “dedicated to the sustainable and open development of the OpenSocial initiative and related intellectual property.” It’s a shrewd move by the three that leaves Facebook in an even lonelier place inside its walled garden.
In its prospectus,
Google Campfire Monday: Launching Google Friend Connect? We have been hearing some rumblings that Google has some big announcement around a product set of API’s for use with Open Social that is supposedly called “Friend Connect”. In theory it might allow Google Open Social developers to have access to profile information and allow those data