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.
Developers waiting for their chance to implement OpenSocial 0.8 on a major social networking platform now have the chance on hi5. hi5 announced last week that developers can begin beta testing their OpenSocial 0.8 apps in the hi5 developers sandbox.
The feature most developers will be interested in 0.8 is the addition of a REST based API. This will allow OpenSocial applications to be architected more similarly to the way many Facebook applications are. The main drawback of doing everything the OpenSocial 0.7 (and before) way is that building everything in JavaScript just gets quite complicated and expensive.
Congrats to the hi5 Platform team on being one of the first to implement the OpenSocial 0.8 spec!
Hi5 Developer Platform Goes Live. Social Network Hi5 has ;launched their application platform today. If you have an application on facebook I suggest you go take a look and do what you need to do quickly to get your app oonto hi5. There are currently over 7000 developers registered on hi5.
I strongly suggest you