#8 Atomic

Facebook has updated Facebook Groups and added some features.
As Knot , software engineering intern, said on Facebook Blog, they’re transforming Groups to make it easier to communicate with other members and create a smoother experience. However, you have to wait for their global launching because currently, they’re testing it with small percentage of people.

Here is the updated features list:

1. Design has been revamped. Groups will have a Wall.
2. Added feed of group activities to News Feed (previously only appeared in the group).
3. Stay connected with Groups content from your ‘home’. You can ‘follow’ only to most interesting and relevant content from group instead of all Groups’ content.
4. Groups and pages look the same, although Groups are for fostering member-to-member collaboration and Pages to broadcast messages to fans.
5. Form Group to any kind in your real life: book clubs, sports teams, churches, etc. (It might same with Directory ?!)

Related link:

• Giving Groups a Stronger Voice

As reported by CNET, Facebook confirmed on Monday afternoon that there have been problems that saw log-in credentials turned down, status messages eaten up, and other various unpleasant occurrences over the course of the past few days. And the bad news is, they hasn’t yet disclosed the source of the problem and of course need more time to fix and resolve these issues.

Related links:

• Facebook confirms site instability
• Twitter crippled by denial-of-service attack

Now, i understand why there is so many offices and schools restrict Facebook on their network.

Please look at Nielsen’s table below. Although only gain #4 of biggest site with unique audience, Facebook is on the top

rank of Internet’s ultimate time waster.  Averagely, user spent 5 hours, 46 minutes and 4 seconds per month. It’s 2

hours longer than Yahoo’s users that only have 3:14:30.

I’m not really surprised with this thing because as we know Facebook is growing community with lots of applications and thousands user-generated contents.  But, the fact that visitor only spent 1:17:20 on Youtube, it was really made me shocked!

The other thing that i interested is about Google.

They’ve got 149.673.000 unique visitor (#1 position) but only 1:53:21 for time per person that spent on it. However, it’s good indicator for Google because of their philosophy, “may be the only people in the world who can say our goal is to have people leave our homepage as quickly as possible.”

Related links:

• People Spend 3x More Time on Facebook Than Google
• Our Philosophy (Google)

Prototypes

Facebook has launched ‘Prototypes’.
Prototypes are product experiments built by Facebook engineers.
You, as user, being invited by Facebook to become user-tester for “next Facebook applications”, as the same way with Google created Google Labs and letting people to test and try their ‘beta version’ applications.
Prototype is quite interesting especially for user who love to keep update with ‘the newest ones’ from Facebook.

But as Lee said, Facebook product designer, on Facebook Blog, Facebook will not test every new product in Prototype before launch and we need to keep in our mind that prototypes are prototypes. Those are not “final released” nor “ready to installed” products. So all may have some kinks to work out and buggy.

I think, releasing Prototypes is a very good idea since Facebook can’t be counted as social media for end user only but more than “framework” for hundreds of applications.

Anyway…
Here are the steps to access Prototype:

1. Click this URL, to go to Application Directory
2. Filter by Prototypes (on left sidebar) or click this URL
3. Choose one of prototypes that listed there, activate or download.

Related link:

• Testing 1-2-3: Announcing Facebook Prototypes

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, reported on Facebook Blog that Facebook now serves about 300 million people across the world and… that’s huge!  He said that the challenges now is how to make Facebook perform faster and more efficiently as their grow, how to build new and better things to make connecting with the people about as easy and rewarding as possible.

One thing that really surprised me is about ratio of Facebook users and Facebook engineer is very contrast, one engineer is responsible for more than one million users which is means, only 300 engineers in Facebook developer teams!
Here is Facebook statistic summary:

General Growth

• More than 300 million active users
• 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
• The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older

User Engagement

• Average user has 120 friends on the site
• More than 6 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
• More than 40 million users update their statuses at least once each day
• More than 10 million users become fans of Pages each day

Applications

• More than 2 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
• More than 14 million videos uploaded each month
• More than 2 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each week
• More than 3 million events created each month
• More than 45 million active user groups exist on the site

International Growth

• More than 65 translations available on the site
• About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States

Platform

• More than one million developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries
• Every month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applications
• More than 350,000 active applications currently on Facebook Platform
• More than 250 applications have more than one million monthly active users
• More than 15,000 websites, devices and applications have implemented Facebook Connect since its general availability in December 2008

Mobile

• There are more than 65 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
• People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are almost 50% more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
• There are more than 180 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products

And, click here to see the list of Top 20 fastest growing countries by users in Facebook (July 2009)

Related links:

• 300 Million and On
• Facebook Statistic
• Facebook usage statistics – Top 20 fastest growing countries by users

Credit photo: here.

After a long battle against pancreatic cancer, finally Actor who played as Sam Wheat in 1990 romantic drama movie, Ghost, Patrick Swayze dies at 57. That’s entertainment big lost after Farrah Fawcett and of course, Michael Jackson, i think.

I really interested in how many links/pages that created from “web 2.0 media” just in about five hours after his death.
Using Specific Data Range from Google Search Result (qdr:d24 or qdr:d), here is the list (created at 3:46pm Tuesday (EST)):

1. about 38.200 from twitter.com
2. about 36.900 from blogspot.com
3. about 16,200 from wordpress.com
4. about 9230 from facebook.com
5. about 7120 from youtube.com
6. about 968 from digg.com
7. about 93 from myspace.com
8. about 82 from flickr.com
9. about 61 from tumblr.com
10. about 11 from plurk.com
11. about 0 from friendster.com <— errrrr.. friendster? what eh?

Related link:

• Hack URL and Get Your Own Date Range Search Result

Credit Photo: from here.