Gose Stories

Facebook is the primary social network on which consumer-focused companies maintain one or more profiles, cited by 83 percent of respondents compared with 45 percent for Twitter. Business-to-business companies maintain a presence on both social sites with 77 percent maintaining a profile on Facebook and 73 percent on Twitter.

Among those using social media for business purposes in their jobs, 62 percent visit company or brand profiles on social networking sites and 55 percent search for business information on these sites.

It's interesting that a higher percentage of B2B companies have a Twitter profile, compared to B2C companies. I would have flip-flopped the two.

LinkedIn had a chance to be THE place for businesses but just simply dropped the ball. That's my "expert" evaluation.

Facebook’s 300 million users collectively spend more than 8 billion minutes on the site each day, according to the social network’s VP of engineering, Mike Schroepfer. He offered up the number onstage at the Web 2.0 Summit Wednesday as proof of the infrastructure challenges the social network faces relative to other web sites. On a busy day, an eye-popping 1.2 million photos are served on Facebook each second, he added.

And the more than 15,000 sites that have integrated Facebook Connect mean the site has API demands it has to address, too. Facebook was accessed via its API 5 billion times yesterday alone, according to Schroepfer.

To accommodate all that data without damaging the user experience and stifling innovation, Schroepfer said Facebook has rewritten its memcache multiple times so that now deploys five times faster than before. But even though Facebook continues to augment its engineering team to keep up with its growing audience, he said there’s 1.2 million users per Facebook engineer. No wonder the company is looking to expand its staff by 40-50 percent this year.

 

8 billion minutes? Holy Cow!

Love the graphic.

According to a new survey of 1,400 CIOs of companies with 100 or more employees, 54% now completely block employees from accessing social networking sites at work.

Only 10% of those surveyed let employees use social networks however they please, while the remainder all impose at least some restrictions on usage, like limiting it to business purposes only.

I'm not surprised by this but it's disappointing. To me, it's always been a management issue -- not a technology one. It wasn't that long ago that only a few employees had email access. That changed over time and so will this.

Companies will find it hard to recruit new employees if they block too much access for invalid reasons.

If you get a chance, check out the latest statistics from InsideFacebook.com. Please keep in mind that these are only number for the United States. But there are some things that stand out:

 

Looking at percentages, the highest growth rate is coming from the over-45 demographic:

 

While the absolute number of members is smaller in that group, the growth rate is fascinating to watch. I would imagine this will eventually slow, as we've seen with the younger demographic, until it normalizes. In anecdotal conversations, I'm finding that many people from this demographic are using Facebook to connect with high school and college friends (especially as we move into reunion time), stay in touch with children and grandchildren, and even begin to use it for some business networking purposes.

 

Another worthwhile graph from the post breaks down current U.S. users by age:

 

If you bundle up the groups, you'll find that the 35 and older crowd makes up 38% of Facebook's population here in the U.S. Pretty cool when you consider that Facebook started about five years ago as a college-based tool.

 

And finally, looking at gender, we find that - in every single segment - there are more female users than male users of Facebook:

 

 

While we know that overall women use social networks more than men, I wonder how many of us are using that knowledge to effectively feed our marketing and communications programs? Seems like there's a good opportunity there.

 

Do any of these data strike you differently? Can you draw any conclusions or make inferences that I've missed? Let me know.

 

"OMG LOLZ brkin into sum1s house!"

That might've been the Facebook status update left by Jonathan G. Parker, 19, as he was inside the Martinsburg, West Virginia house he was robbing. Yes, you read that right. Parker was inside the house, checked his Facebook profile, and left his account open on the victim's computer before fleeing. He was wicked hard to catch.

I love people.

Six prison workers must wait until next week to find out if they will be sacked for criticising their bosses on Facebook.

The officers have each been sent a letter indicating the Corrective Services Department is considering sacking them for misconduct over comments they made on Facebook, which the department described as "bullying" and "harassment".

But the public sector union - which regards the sacking threat as an attempt to stifle dissent - has taken the matter to the Industrial Relations Commission.

It wants the IRC to put a hold on any sacking attempts and also to consider a change to the award safeguarding the rights of workers to speak freely outside work hours.

The contentious comments were made on a Facebook group titled "Suggestions to help Big RON save a few clams", which criticises State Government plans to privatise NSW prisons and suggests other ways that NSW Corrective Services Commissioner Ron Woodham could save money.

The page was set up in October last year when prison officers decided to vent their anger over government plans to privatise two of the state's prisons - one at Parklea and another at Cessnock in the Hunter Valley, Public Service Association senior industrial officer Stewart Little said.

"Talking on Facebook is the same as people talking in the pub letting off steam but the department is trying to say it's like going on ABC News at night.

"We say it's somewhere in between the two, but much closer to the lower end of the spectrum."

The Facebook group was popular with hundreds of prison officers, and its members colloquially referred to themselves as "clamsters", he said.

Among the comments posted on the group, members suggested the department could save money by sacking senior officials who they claimed added little value. Other comments also revealed areas of wastage within Corrective Services.

The union also argued it was inappropriate for Mr Woodham or his deputy to judge whether the six should be sacked - as the letter sent to the officers states - as he was the alleged victim of their comments, Mr Little said.

I have a feeling were going to start seeing more and more of these issues popping up. Internal communications taking place outside the workplace is not anything new. But it is new for employers to be able to track it.

Last week, we covered a new Facebook feature for Mac users: desktop notifications. Apparently, the feature is part of a new Google Labs-like part of Facebook called Facebook Prototypes.

The company posted a link on Twitter to what appears to be a screenshot of the new feature, which also features experimental products like “Similar Posts” and “Enhanced Event Emails.” You can sort prototypes by “most popular” (total installs), “new prototypes,” and “my prototypes.”

 

Facebook has taken some amazing strides forward with the "@" tagging and now this.

Look out, Facebook users: Here comes voice chat.

Sometime in the next few weeks, the social network's tens of millions of users will begin to be able to have high-quality voice conversations, even as its third-party developers are able to start including voice in their applications.

The new technology is not being offered by Facebook itself, however. Instead, it's from Vivox, a Boston-based company that provides the integrated voice service for virtual worlds like Second Life and EVE Online, and which already has more than 15 million users worldwide.

The service, which is currently in closed beta, will allow Facebook users to have high-fidelity conversations with anyone on their friends list. Each user, however, will have to download Vivox's plug-in. But once installed, the service works almost seamlessly with Facebook, and is intended for everything from one-to-one chat to large group discussions.

Further, even non-Facebook users will be able to participate, as Vivox plans to offer free dial-in numbers that will allow anyone to call into an existing conversation, much as is possible today with call-in phone conferences.

Could this trump Google Voice?