Facebook | Media Culpa

Facebook not quite dead yet

Swedish media recently proclaimed that Facebook’s days of glory were over (although that particular article misinterpreted some facts from an article in the Guardian). Now it seems that those assumptions might have been a bit premature. TechCrunch writes that Facebook has caught up with the leading social networking site MySpace in terms of unique monthly worldwide visitors, according to data by Comscore. Both sites now have about 115 million visitors each per month.

In February, Adam Erlandsson at Svenska Dagbladet, wrote: “who knows, in six months me might be looking back at the beginning of 2008 as the start of the death of Facebook. But at the moment there are absolutely no proof that that is the case.” Well put. And four months later the signs point in the opposite direction.

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Poke is “peta” when Facebook goes Swedish

Facebook will soon release a version in Norwegian (via NRK beta). The social networking site has been translated by members to Norwegian and is currently in a voting stage where users are choosing the best options for different translations. Facebook is also soon to be released in Swedish, according to the Translation application on the site.

“Poke” is currently “peta” in Swedish and “prik” in Danish. In Norwegian it is still called “poke” although “pirk” and “dytt” are possible alternatives. Other suggestions for poke in Swedish are “puffa” and “knuffa” and users will decide which translation that will win.

1,207 members are currently registered as translators for Norwegian and 480 for Swedish.

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Official Scrabble Facebook application launched

Two guys in India developed an online version of Scrabble under the name Scrabulous, which has become incredibly popular. There are currently 629,000 daily users of the application on Facebook. The problem was that it did not have the proper authorization from the copyright holders (Hasbro and Mattel for the board game and Electronic Arts and RealNetworks for digital rights). After a period of lawsuit threats and talks about a deal, RealNetworks has now announced its own Scrabble application for Facebook: “Scrabble by Mattel“. It will only be available to Facebook users outside the US and Canada, although the company will not monitor users’ locations.

The new app has been online for a few weeks and has so far attracted 2,400 daily users. Although still in beta, it has also been critized for not working as well as Scrabulous.

Not surprisingly, many users are commenting on the application page about bugs and suggestions for improvements. Many are also outraged about the fact that users in North America don’t have access to the new app.

RealNetworks should do a better job explaining that they don’t have the rights to make that possible at the moment and they should also actively answer questions and monitor the debate. One could easily have anticipated that some negative feedback would appear during the initial phase and that the future success of the app depends on how you handle this feedback.

Via Marketing Pilgrim.

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Is Fredrik Reinfeldt anti-Facebook?

Fredrik Reinfeldt, the Swedish Prime Minister, held a speech on February 26, 2008 to students at the The London School of Economics and Political Science. The theme was “The New Swedish Model: A Reform Agenda for Growth and the Environment”. When I read through the speech I was somewhat baffled by the following comment in the introduction:

“It is a pleasure to be here at LSE. Anybody who wants to study globalisation should start at this institution. I believe you have the highest proportion of international students in the world.

And you are smart.

I am told that you borrow four times as many books as the average UK student. Obviously you do not spend too much time on

Facebook
YouTube
MySpace”

So, books=smart and social networks=not as smart? Books are obviously important in education, that’s a no-brainer, but social networks aren’t necessarily just a distraction. They are great tools if you want to build a network of contacts, participate in a community and explore new technologies, business models and ideas. In a networked world you have to be connected.

If Sweden is going to stay competetive in an increasingly integrated world economy we need to participate where new ideas emerge. I believe that Sweden is a net exporter of both music and film and I can see no reason why we should not be able to have the same position in the social media space.

In Reinfeldt’s own words: “Sweden must therefore be a country that better accommodates those who dare to take risks, develop their ideas and spread their wings to become self-employed.”

Some of the smartest people I know are participating in this new arena, and of course, I think they’ve read a few books too. Besides, remember that Facebook initially was restricted to students of Harvard and soon expanded to all Ivy League schools including MIT and Boston University.

Maybe I am excessively positive, but I’ll take that chance. Social networks can of course be huge productivity thiefs, but it’s more complicated than that. Instead of assuming that social networks are just a form of procrastination, we should encourage Swedes to participate in this new landscape so that we will become the most networked people on the planet. If we do that, I am sure many great new companies will emerge.

Footnote: The LSE network at Facebook has 19,698 members. I haven’t found the total number of students (or alumni) at the school, but it sure sounds a lot to me.

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Now you can “anklopfen” on Facebook

While traditional media gloatingly proclaim the death of Facebook, the social networking giant does what it can to get closer to users. Yesterday a German version of the site was launched and it was done through a crowd-sourcing initiative in which 1,000 members helped translate the site in just two weeks.

“Users who added the Facebook translation application were allowed to submit translations inline while browsing the site. Facebook users then approved all translations through a voting system. For example, users agreed on ‘anklopfen’ to describe the Facebook-coined term ‘poke’.”

According to the press release, the person who was the most frequent translator was responsible for more than 1000 of the winning sentences. Over 40 contributors translated 100 sentences or more.

Oh, and by the way, there is an error in the article at IDG.se about Facebook stats. The article claims that 400,000 UK members left the site the last two months while in reality the only known fact is that it had 400,000 less unique visitors in the UK in January.

Lunarstorm lost half of its visitors in one year

Ekonominyheterna.se reported in November last year that the Swedish online community Lunarstorm suffered from the success of Facebook, MySpace and other social networks. In November, the number of unique visitors to Lunarstorm had dropped by a massive 42%, down to 617,000 weekly visitors.

And the drop continues. Now we can see that the traffic has dropped by 50% compared to the same week last year. A year ago Lunarstorm had 989,733 weekly visitors (unique web browsers) and last week the number was down to 490,289 which is just above a 50% decline.

According to Ekonominyheterna, visits to Lunarstorm peaked in March 2006 with 1.6 million visitors.

Footnote: Stats from KIA-index.

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