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腾讯正式发布 QQCampus

QQ Campus 是腾讯面向大学校园的社会化网络，类似于 Facebook 刚建立时候的模式。Campus 英文原意是"校园，大学教育"，是腾讯为在校及已毕业的大学生打造的精彩在线生活社区，在这里可以找到老同学结识新朋友、及时了解同学和朋友们的最新信 息、和朋友们分享大学生活。现在已经面向所有用户了，直接拿 QQ 号码就可以登录了。国内另一个同类网站校内网，去年十月份与国内另一家校园社会化网络 5Q 合并。

A third of employers are now blocking access to social networking sites according to a new report from Web security firm ScanSafe. Companies blocking such sites has risen 17 percent over the past year.

安全，生产力，技术限制，同时也要注意有益的一面

The report indicates that companies are more concerned about security and productivity issues with employees visiting social networks while at work.  ScanSafe says that Facebook usage grew by 270 percent in the last year and has 52 million users globally. MySpace still has the lead among social networking sites with 114 million users and LinkedIn is quickly gaining ground within the business community.

ScanSafe says that 32 percent of all its customers now block access to social networking sites, with MySpace, YouTube and Facebook the most commonly blocked sites, followed by LinkedIn.

Eldar Tuvey, CEO of ScanSafe said, ""Companies are increasingly concerned about keeping usage in check - not just for security reasons, but for productivity and bandwidth considerations as well. Where there are large numbers of users, there is sure to be malware and other risks, as popular sites attract not just legitimate users but attackers as well."

Even though productivity and security issues remain a concern for companies blocking access to social networks Tuvey says there are benefits as well. ""When it comes to social networking, as long as businesses have the right security processes in place and a clearly communicated acceptable usage policy for staff, employers should remain open-minded to sites that can be used for positive reasons, such as exchanging ideas, recruitment and networking."

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Facebook: What If More Is Less?

 In our recent post, MySpace: Hot or Not?, we took a look at the social networking giant to understand what's going on with the site. We found that while 'MySpace' is slowing down as a trend, the site is alive and kicking and people are actively communicating (although some communication is focused on fairly questionable topics). While doing research for that article, the difference in approach between MySpace and its major rival Facebook was particularly striking.

While Facebook built elegant infrastructure and a clean look, MySpace allowed people to create a seemingly incomprehensible zoo of information on their pages. But after a closer look, one begins to see why MySpace remains attractive to so many users.MySpace puts communication and self-expression at the forefront, with communication with your friends really being the point of each page. Facebook, meanwhile, showcases different applications installed by its users on their profiles pages, and pushes one of its primary communication features, the Wall, to the bottom of the page.

At the center of Facebook today is the news feed - a dynamic listing of the collective activity of all your friends. The news feed shows updates from your friends, prompting you to explore their profiles and the site. When someone adds an application or befriends someone new or posts a video or a picture, the news feed directs you to their profile page to check it out. It may seem like these features and their minimalist design make Facebook simpler and easier to use than MySpace, but is it?

Communication - The Very Point Of Social Networks

The primary goal of a social network is to connect people, to simplify their communication, and to help them stay in touch. Before the rise of social networking, online communication occured via email, chat and forums. The early social networks made their case by making communication easier. In particular, MySpace made it easy to communicate by leaving messages on people's profile pages. For many users, this was more convenient than sending email, but the reason this communication style really took off was because others could see the messages and become engaged - conversations between groups of users could emerge.

The communication on Facebook is not as simple. First, the message board is typically pushed way down a users' profile page, below tens of other applications. Just comparing the activity between random MySpace and Facebook profiles you see that MySpace members communicate with each other much more actively via messages. Second, Facebook has its own in-network private messaging system. The idea itself is fine, but it can't possibly compete with email. Fred Wilson writes about this problem:

"I see a different Facebook problem.Invite overload and application noise. I cannot keep track of all the invites I am getting, both the standard invites and the application invites. And what's worse, I can't keep track of all the applications that all of my friends are using."

Why The Tech Community Is Wrong For Facebook

Fred's frustration with Facebook is also indicative of another problem that exists today on Facebook - its mixed audience. Facebook was originally built for college students to stay in touch. After it opened up to outside users and later launched its platform, the entire tech community rushed to join in.

When you and I connected on LinkedIn, we did that for business reasons, we are not friends, we are co-workers or business associates. Taking this relationship and moving it to Facebook as is just doesn't make sense. So there's a problem there.

My sister, who is a student at Syracuse, was one of the early Facebook users, and uses the site to socialize with people she is friends with. But I am getting invites from the same people that I am connected to on LinkedIn. This is confusing and is actually the precise cause of Fred's frustration. Because the news feed is the stream of activity from all your "friends" you get bombarded with irrelevant information. You do not care about these people's pictures, videos and which applications they've added.

LinkedIn should still be the choice for our business connections. It is clean, simple and focused on the business vertical. If we want to "follow" what our business acquaintances are up to, there is Twitter. Twitter is actually a perfect example of a social network at its best, because it enables a new, improved way for people to communicate. Facebook can not replace LinkedIn and Twitter for the tech community, precisely because it is not focused on professional networking and instant communication. So, we all should stop pretending -mixing business and pleasure is not a good idea anyway.

Challenges Associated With Facebook Applications

Facebook has now thousands of applications available. The current top application on the site is Slide's Top Friends, with 2.5M active users.

The rationale behind the rush to build Facebook applications is that new applications have a potential to spread virally across Facebook's already mammoth user base. By leveraging the network effect, brand new applications have the chance to rapidly propagate through Facebook and gain hundreds of thousands of users in a very short period of time. While this is certainly possible, there is a big flaw in this argument. Lets take a look at the chart of some of the currently popular applications:

We sampled the number of active users from the 75 most used applications. From top to bottom, we observed a huge disparity in usage. The top application has 60 times more users than the least popular application. You quickly recognize that behind this picture is a famous power law, more commonly known as the 80/20 rule. If we were to plot all Facebook applications we would get a huge long tail of applications with just a couple thousand or a couple hundred users.

The laws of economics are behind this trend - supply and demand. Of course it is true that if a lot of my friends are checking out Flixster I am also going to check it out, but on the other hand, how many things can I possibly add to my profile? The sheer volume of applications makes it impossible to try them all. People who do risk cluttering their profiles to the point that no one, including themselves, can find anything. So while the network effect is certainly powerful, the spacial constraints and the laws of economics are pulling the other way.

Information Overload

Everything that we discussed, from profile complexity to the news feed to applications are indicative of a well known problem - Information Overload. There is just too much going on. The news feed filtering is weak, the applications that enter Facebook are not filtered and the fact that people can re-arrange their profiles each and every way seems flexible and cool but makes it hard to understand whats going on.

Of course, Facebook is being hailed as a great social platform (one that it seems even Google fears), but choice is typically good in moderation. A great recent example of a closed company that delivers outstanding end user products is Apple. Apple keeps options in its products to an elegant minimum. Could Facebook do a bit more filtering for us? That might make the site more useful. Why can't there be a relevancy algorithm that cleans up the mini feed? Why can't there be fewer applications that do the same thing? Maybe there should be a standard profile view, which would arrange things on people's profiles in the way that I like - that would surely make it easier to comprehend things. And most importantly, maybe Facebook should refocus on what social networks are about - communication.But it is not clear that cleaning up is a priority. More likely, right now there is big pressure on Facebook to monetize. And that leads to an agonizing search for how to make money. Being married and a father of three, I am flattered to get things like this in my profile:

A helping hand is always nice, especially when it comes to meeting woman, but seriously, this seems so out of place on Facebook to me. There appears to be a lot of irrelevant content spread throughout the site. And it is dangerous, because ultimately, when the content is not relevant, people leave.

Conclusion

Facebook is certainly a great platform and a unique piece of the web infrastructure, but like all platforms, it suffers from clutter and too much choice. It is the choice and variety of applications and the information being pushed at us that makes it overwhelming. The next phase should be cleaning up and making things easy to use. Most importantly, Facebook needs to make it easier to communicate, which could be as simple as making the Wall more prominent.

Please let us know how you and your friends are using Facebook. What do you like and what do you want to see improved? Leave comments below.

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Ning will cross a sizeable milestone this weekend: 100,000 user created social networks on the platform (including this one). That’s up from just 30,000 in February when they launched a new version of the service. The company is also saying that page views have been growing 40% month over month over the summer.

Ning recently raised a $44 million round of financing after two undisclosed rounds directly from co-founder Marc Andreessen. The company certainly finds itself in the right place at the right time. Everyone wants a social network of their own, and Ning is here to give them one.

The company sure has come a long way since I pronounced them dead in early 2006. Sometimes I like it when I’m wrong.

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Friendster is back, at least in Asia.

The social network that was the coolest thing on the block until MySpace came around has been slowly regaining its reputation and users over the years, and now boasts 50 million registered user and 27.4 million monthly unique visitors. The only problem (if you call it a problem) is that, like Orkut, most of those users are outside of the U.S. Specifically, they’re in the Asia/Pacific region - 24 million of the total 27.4 million unique monthly visitors come from there, as do 35 million of the 50 million registered users.

So it’s no surprise that the social network is playing to its strengths and launching its first non-English version, in traditional Chinese. This isn’t a separate website or URL; users simply click to Chinese to have the content localized to that language. User generated stuff remains in the original language.

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Facebook To Launch Friend Grouping. Competition Can Suck.

So Facebook will finally allow users to group friends and control information flow based on friend type. For guys like Robert Scoble, who have 5,000 friends (the limit), this may be a way to finally sort through the real friends from the fans. It’s a much needed feature that people have been requesting for a long time.

It also shows the steady maturity of Facebook from a college network to a full on world network, where friendships, business contacts, family and other types of relationships need to be more fully described.And this is also as much about privacy as it is about organization - users will be able to limit the information that certain friend groups receive.

A few existing applications are going to be affected, like Slide’s Top Friends application, the most popular third party app on Facebook. Lots of other applications will likely need to be tweaked to work properly when this launches (so many of them access the friends list). And this will shut down at least one “startup” we’ve been tracking that was creating this exact feature as an application. At least they can quit now and stop putting good time and money after bad.

Building Facebook applications is a big dice roll. If it’s too popular or too obvious of an idea (even if it hasn’t been done yet), Facebook is just as likely to compete with you as pay a few bucks and just buy you (they are probably more likely to compete with you than buy you, actually).

Some developers will probably wonder if getting a cash grant from Facebook’s just-announced fbFund will lessen the likelihood of direct competition from the company. Only time will tell.

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Hi5 Going the Facebook Route (along with everyone else)

Hi5 is the latest in a growing line of social networks with plans to offer a developer platform. While Hi5 already incorporated a widget gallery for select widgets from approved developers consisting of Slide and RockYou, this looks to be an official announcement for its upcoming developer platform.

Hi5 had also already announced on its blog the release of its API, which seemed to offer some additional tools for the developer community. According to VentureBeat, the full platform will be available to developers within the next 12 months.

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O’Reilly Releases Report on Facebook’s Developer’s Platform

大突破在于如何发现现存数据中的价值

另外一个就是Facebook App如何和F8平台互相利用

O’Reilly has released a report on the Facebook Application platform, reviewing its strategic moves of opening its social network to anyone, and then opening up its developer platform on top of that. The result has been massive growth, and OReilly’s report discusses the point of revenue. Has all this success turned to profit?

It’s pretty widely known that Facebook hasn’t managed to monetize its social network as well as MySpace (is it because of the audience? site design?), yet Facebook still gets the big buyout offers and astronomical valuations. O’Reilly’s report also looks at the best practices of marketing with Facebook apps, identifies the top 200 apps along with plots for their growth rates, and looks at the overall trends taking place in the social network ecosystem.

He seems to think that the big breakthrough here is in finding the meaning in existing data (in other words, how can the hottest social network make more money?). I’m sure a lot of people will be willing to purchase this report, which costs about $150 and comes with two updates (you can get it here). With 5,000 Facebook apps and a new onslaught of advertising networks made just for Facebook apps, the interest is still growing. Quickly.

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