Facebook appears to have taken off in South Africa. It seems that it’s likely to be bigger than MXIT… I don’t know if it’s just within the broader network of people I know or what. The South Africa “network” is just over 52,000 users now. My University’s network is in the 7,000’s out of probably 20,000 or so students. That 7,000 should probably be added to the 52,000 though (along with some other Universities etc) as they aren’t the same users in most cases. Facebook generally makes you pick a network when you sign up and you have to manually add a secondary network if you really want.

There are literally thousands of groups out there, from “I flip my pillow over so I can feel the cold side when I’m sleeping” with over 100,000 members to “I fucking hate the animated meerkat from Vodacom.” with nearly 10,000 members (Hmmm marketers take a hint). There’s a group “Appreciation for Mr so-n-so” with 445 members for one of my school teachers. My high school group has nearly 700 members.

Mark Zuckerberg has clearly done something very right. Until now though he doesn’t seem to have capitalised on the situation. Sure there have been some pretty easily ignored ads on facebook but nothing major.

One of the newer features of Facebook, the Marketplace seems pretty cool. It’s easier to buy something from someone you know through a friend etc and it informs you of just that.

In terms of market research each network has a “statistics” page which is probably pretty useful to certain marketers, for example the South Africa page shows the top music as:

1. Snow Patrol
2. The Killers
3. Jack Johnson
4. My Chemical Romance
5. The Fray
6. Coldplay
7. U2
8. Rock
9. Muse
10. Linkin Park

Now that information is free and waiting for whoever cares to look. It does seem that Facebook is having the occasional paid for advert etc but they generally come from pretty big companies. I’m not one for “conspiracy theories” about Facebook and the CIA etc but you can’t deny that Facebook is probably the biggest treasure trove a marketer could ever hope for…

On the other hand another reason to not like Facebook is that its apparently the end of humanity.

Personally I have a Facebook account. Do I post much to it? Not really, as the article linked to above says you end up portraying a generic version of yourself. When I had a small circle of “actual” friends on there posting photos etc was pretty cool. Now though I have nearly 200 “friends”. I’ve also posted everything with “what if a potential employer were to see this”. In fact a few potential employers are on that “friend” list. Today I ended up drastically cutting access to my profile through my privacy settings. I figure if I can turn off pretty much everything for non friends, and then keep 20 or so people as my “actual friends” and the rest can all go onto the “limited profile” list, maybe then Facebook will be kinda fun again and I can actually share some stuff with my real friends.

Hmmm I see someone just shared a spoof site Quit Facebook. Hehe, so true… :p

The biggest reason I’d like Facebook to “succeed” is to completely kill Myspace. Myspace is most certainly a million times worse. It looks like millions of American teenagers were thrown into a time machine to 1995 and forced to make webpages, and the one who gets the most friends gets to see his family again…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 at 11:30 am and is filed under Social networking, Facebook, Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.