DreamGrow Social Media

HUGE: Google Will Go For Social Media With GMail

Google is becoming irrelevant. Facebook is where people send increasing amounts of their online time. As we have pointed out earlier the main thing that is working for Google is search. Their social pushes with Orkut and Google Wave haven’t had much success.

Facebook on the other hand is having a search component missing from internet domination. Facebook’s search sucks. It is really really bad even finding their own pages and giving relevant results to users. This could be solved with Bing. Facebook’s part owner Microsoft could lend its declining to be used as a search engine inside the social network.

The Facebook’s interface update last week hints at this possibility as the search box was promoted to the prominent position in site’s header. Now Facebook has a lot going on for them and snatching search from Google doesn’t seem really far fetched. With its user-base over 400 million and growing at a rate almost 20 million a month Facebook is the biggest threat Google has ever faced.

Now Google is throwing it all in. Trying to convert GMail with its 150 million users to a social site seem to be their last countermeasure against Facebook. As they can’t break the user experience for the whole user-base the changes couldn’t be too great. The other obstacle, Mashsble points out, is that you probably have thousands of email addresses in GMail and only fraction of those are people you would like to share your status updates with.

So, we have to wait and see what the coming week reveals. Tuesday is the day if Mashable is correct. I have to admit that I am a bit skeptical and I think that Google’s chances against Facebook are really slim.

700 Million Facebook Users

In our 2010 trend post we predicted that Facebook will have 700 million users. Well, let’s look at some numbers.

According to checkfacebook.com 43.03% of US on-line users are on Facebook. In UK this percentage is 51.5, Canada 47,24%, Australia 42.88% and this data is three months old. Then there are countries like Chile where 66.54% of on-line users are on Facebook and Venezuela with 68.97%. Seems that Facebook penetration, in countries where it is the leading social network, moves towards 50 percent of internet users or even beyond that.

Currently there are about 1.733 billion internet user in the world. When Facebook gets half of that then their user base would balloon to 850 million. Amazingly there are still some countries that have some other social networking site dominating. As we wrote in our post World Map Of Social Networks. The keys to Facebook’s world domination lay in Brazil (Orkut), Russia (V Kontakte) and China (QQ).

I would say that using a single social networking site would be beneficial to all internet users. In smaller countries there is constant pressure from across the borders to leave the local socnet and join the global one? However in large countries you may now feel that the language restricts your social sphere. Still, if you subtract the users of Brazil, Russia and China from 1.7 billion, you are left with about 1.3 billion I internet users.

There are several factors that drive Facebook domination. The network effect will make the value of the environment to go up as more people use it. More people are inviting even more friends, using Facebook will be the norm. Business use will legalize social networking during working hours. Older people join to keep in touch with their young relatives but also form their own sub communities. Businesses promoting their Facebook presence bring in more users. Initial success of the early adopters will move Facebook to marketing mainstream, but at the same time this will decrease the effectiveness of the channel as breaking through the clutter will become harder.

But the basic drive is universal, people want to belong and talk to each other, to connect. Most of the social networks’ content is social chatter, nothing terribly important or of timeless value. But social chatter is what we do and the site that can best mediate it will take everything.

700 million users is 54.6 percent of internet users excluding China, Brazil, and Russia. Maybe note by the end of this year, but it’s entirely possible. Next, 1 Billion.

World Map Of Social Networks

Italian writer, blogger and photographer Vincenzo Cosenza has put together a visualization showing the most popular social networks around the world on a map, based on recent traffic data (December 2009).

As we can see from the map, Facebook is still strong and on the rise. It is dominating most of the western world, together with Africa, Middle-East and the Pacific region. With a user base of 350 million and growing, the map will probably look even greener next year.

Friendster…is…well…Friendster. Nothing to talk about here.

Although Facebook is also growing in Russia, it is still dominated by Odnoklassniki and V Kontakte. I personally don’t see this situation changing any time soon either. They both support cyrillic and are strongly oriented on the Russian-speaking community. They are also widely used among Russian inhabitants in other Eastern European countries.

Google’s Orkut is shrinking steadily, still dominating only in Brazil and Estonia. With Facebook’s user base having grown by 50% in both of these countries in one year, Orkut probably won’t be on the map at the end of 2010. Orkut also used to be big in India, but with Facebook growing by 150% in two consecutive years there, it has lost it’s dominant position.

Mixi is mainly dominant in Japan, with it’s main “advantage” being the possibility to stay totally anonymous – The people in Japan like to generally stay anonymous when surfing. Facebook’s privacy settings haven’t really been embraced there…

China’s QQ, when only usernames are concerned, is the biggest social network in the world. QQ today has over one billion usernames, but only one tenth of them are recurring visitors, topping at 91 million in Dec. 21. Without a doubt, QQ is the biggest player in China and will probably stay that way for a long time.

There are also a bunch of smaller players, being dominant in only one or two countries. But Facebook is changing that situation quite fast:

When compared to june 2009, Facebook has become dominant in 19 countries:

India, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Czech Republic, Cameroon, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Azerbaijan, Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Oman, Yemen, Quadeloupe and Martinique

So, China aside, Facebook is still growing fast. By the same time next year, we will probably see a map where Facebook is dominating most of the western hemisphere, together with the Middle-East and the Pacific. The only real players who are stopping Facebook from having a total “world dominance”, will probably be China’s QQ and V Kontakte in Russia.