July 7th, 2009 | by Stan Schroeder

Analytics company iStrategyLabs has examined the demographics stats from Facebook ()’s Social Ads platform, and they’ve reached some very interesting conclusions. Facebook’s userbase, as a whole, is getting much older very fast.

As you can see in the chart below, the overall number of users between 18 and 24 years of age has grown only 4.8% between the fourth of January and the fourth of July of 2009. In comparison, the number of users aged 25 – 34 has grown 60.8%; the number of users aged 35 to 54 has grown 190.2%, while the number of users older than 55 years has grown a tremendous 513.7%.

If the iStrategyLabs numbers are correct, Facebook, simply put, is not a young site anymore. Most of the users (20,3 million, or 28.2% overall) on the site belong to the 35 – 54 age group. Compare that to the age group that was once Facebook’s bread and butter – the 18 – 24 group – which is now in third place with 18 million (25.1%) users, behind the 25 – 34 year old group, which makes for 25.2% of Facebook’s user base with 18.1 million users. The number of users aged 55 and over has grown from negligible 950,000 to 5.9 million in mere six months.

Now, although it may seem like the number of young users has declined, this is not true. The overall number of users of all ages is growing. But they are growing at very different speeds, and therefore the percentages have changed significantly; on a site like Facebook, which lives on advertising, this is a big deal.

However, although the number of young users has increased, the number of high school and college students has declined by -16.5% and -21.7%, respectively. This can indicate several things: first, that the data that iStrategyLabs is incorrect or very rough (which is a possibility, since Facebook doesn’t guarantee that the data provided to advertisers is absolutely accurate); secondly, it’s possible that Facebook users simply don’t think that their education, or the school/college they’re in are very important so they’re simply not entering the data. It’s probably a little bit of both, but it’ll be interesting to see and compare Facebook’s own demographics data with these numbers.

In any case, these are significant changes. If you show the same ads to Facebook users now, they will react vastly differently than they would have half a year ago. If you’re an advertiser on Facebook, you should take these changes into account and react accordingly, because your campaign might not be as effective as it was a couple of months ago.

OTTAWA — Canada’s privacy watchdog says Internet phenomenon Facebook breaches the law by keeping users’ personal information indefinitely — even after members close their accounts.

Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart says the popular social networking site should hang on to the data only for as long as truly necessary.

In a report Thursday, Stoddart urged Facebook to remedy the problem, one of several serious privacy shortfalls she discovered.

Facebook, which has nearly 12 million Canadian users, allows people to keep in touch with friends and family by updating their personal pages with fresh messages and photos.

Stoddart said although Facebook provides information about its privacy practices, it is often confusing or incomplete.

“It’s clear that privacy issues are top of mind for Facebook, and yet we found serious privacy gaps in the way the site operates,” Stoddart said in a statement.

For example, the “account settings” page describes how to deactivate accounts but not how to delete them, which actually removes personal data from Facebook’s computer servers.

Stoddart wants Facebook to wipe the information in deactivated accounts after a reasonable length of time.

The report also raises concerns about the sharing of users’ personal information with the almost one million third-party developers around the globe who create Facebook applications such as games and quizzes.

Facebook lacks proper safeguards to prevent these developers from seeing users’ profile information, the investigation found.

Stoddart calls for more transparency to ensure the site’s Canadian users have knowledge they need to make meaningful decisions about how widely they share personal information.

The privacy commissioner will review Facebook’s actions after 30 days to gauge progress. She can take the case to the Federal Court of Canada to have her recommendations enforced.

She launched a probe of Facebook in response to a complaint last year from the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic.

The clinic, based at the University of Ottawa’s law faculty, alleged numerous violations by the high-profile site.

The Full Report can be found Here:

http://www.priv.gc.ca/cf-dc/2009/2009_008_0716_e.cfm

by Josh Catone

According to new data from Inside Facebook, users over the age of 55 haven’t been as actively using Facebook over the past two months after triple digit growth in that demographic earlier this year. The report has resulted in speculation that while older people are trying Facebook, they’re not sticking around.

Between November 2008 and February 2009, the baby boomer set (age 55-65) was one of the fastest growing segments on the social network, up 175.3% for females and 137.8% for males, according to the statistics. But that user boom was short-lived, and those users aren’t returning in the same numbers.

In April and May there were actually 650,000 less users over the age of 55 on Facebook than the previous two months — the only age demographic where the site experienced a decrease in users over that period. Facebook grew by over 4% each month over the past two months, according to the blog’s measurements, which are based on data from Facebook’s advertiser tools, but its inability to hold the attention of its older users is interesting.

I don’t want to generalize, but the problem might be — at least partially — a case of needing to better educate new users. My mother told me in March that she had joined Facebook. When I asked a couple of weeks ago why she still hadn’t sent me a friend request, she admitted that she just didn’t know how. In fact, she has barely used her Facebook account at all, and only joined to try to reconnect with a few high school friends.

The reasons for using Facebook are different for older users than they are for younger age groups. Young people use Facebook as a means of daily communication, while many older users (in my anecdotal experience) seem to use Facebook as a replacement for email to keep in touch with family and old friends. For that reason, use of the site for people over 55 might be more reactive; that is, those users won’t log in every day, but only when they receive an alert informing them of something new to look at. Perhaps that means we’ll see a spike in usage among older users around holidays and other times when family and friends are likely to reach out and send messages or photos.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, hidesy

February 9, 2009 – 1:15 pm PDT – by Jennifer Van Grove

If you thought Tweetups were viral and picking up steam, you’ll never believe what one Facebook member was able to accomplish with a simple idea, a Facebook group, and proactive friends and friends of friends.

On January 15, T-Mobile filmed a commercial with people dancing at the Liverpool Street Station in London. After watching the ad on television, Facebook member, Crazzy Eve, created the group “Liverpool Street Station Silent Dance” to organize something similar for friends.

Here’s the choreographed dancing that inspired it all:

In an interview with CNN, Crazzy Eve said, “I was watching TV and the T-Mobile advertisement came up and I thought, hm, let’s get my friends down to Liverpool Street and do a little dance.”

In true viral fashion, the group grew astronomically as he invited his friends, who then invited their friends, and so on. Video and photo footage from the “silent” dance can be found across the Web, including the actual Facebook group and YouTube. The clip below captures the enormity and intense energy of the event.

The group, which now boasts over 14,000 members, completely took over the same Liverpool station on Friday night in a not-so-silent countdown to 7pm and subsequent dance mob of remarkable size.

February 5, 2009 – 5:19 pm PDT – by Adam Ostrow

Facebook announced this afternoon that it’s joining the OpenID Foundation – an interesting move considering that Facebook Connect, the company’s identity platform for third-party websites, has so far looked like more of a competitor to OpenID than an ally.

In a blog post, Facebook writes “We’re happy to announce today that we are formalizing our support of the OpenID Foundation by officially joining the board. It is our hope that we can take the success of Facebook Connect and work together with the community to build easy-to-use, safe, open and secure distributed identity frameworks for use across the Web.” However, the company stops short of announcing plans to either become an identity provider for OpenID, or, allowing people to use OpenID to login to Facebook.

What this move seems to be about, at least in the way that Facebook and the OpenID Foundation are spinning things, is improving the user experience of OpenID. In another blog post, Chris Messina, who is involved with the OpenID Foundation, writes, ”Although Facebook has not announced any plans for implementing OpenID specificly, their commitment to help improve the user experience suggests to me that it’s only a matter of time before all of the major social networks, in some way, support OpenID. If there were any lingering doubts about the competition between Facebook Connect and OpenID, hopefully the outcome of a success collaboration will put them to rest.”

To be honest, I still have doubts. The Facebook Connect experience is simply better than that offered by OpenID, and from a competitive standpoint, Facebook has an opportunity to be the standard identity provider for other websites. While goodwill can created by joining the OpenID Foundation and sharing what the industry likes to call “best practices,” at this point, Facebook actually implementing OpenID would be a far bigger boon to OpenID than it would be to Facebook, and hence, I don’t see it happening any time soon.

Thousands of users have joined fan pages devoted to top Mafia bosses on the social networking site Facebook, the Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica reported Tuesday. A page devoted to Salvatore “Totò” Riina, the “boss of bosses,” who is serving 12 life sentences, has more than 2,228 fans, some of whom wished him a merry Christmas. Other fans called for the “immediate beatification” of Bernardo Provenzano, who was imprisoned in 2006. Relatives of Mafia victims expressed outrage.

If you could search your friends’ thoughts, interests, and activities, would that be a better search experience? In many cases, it would be. Searching for restaurants, books, or movies, would turn up recommendations from people you actually know. If you are researching a trip to Florence, Italy, you might discover ten friends who have been there already, and could ask for advice on what to do. These scenarios have been the dream of social search for a few years, with both startups and search engines taking a stab at it. But so far it’s been a failed dream.

Yahoo’s experiment with social search, Yahoo 360 MyWeb, never took off. is being shut down. It was a rudimentary social search in that relevant bookmarks from friends showed up as search results. And search has never been Facebook’s strong suit. It handed search over to Microsoft, but the search experience on the site is poor. It is difficult to search much deeper than your friends’ names. You need to go to an advanced profile search page to filter through their interests, activities, or other profile categories, for instance. And forget about searching your news feed.

Yet social search done right could become very valuable for Facebook. And it would be even more valuable for Google. (They already know how to make money from search). It is also an opportunity for Microsoft Live Search, but they are not really inspiring much confidence so far. So let’s set aside for a moment the unlikelihood of any Google-Facebook deal or partnership (given Microsoft’s investment in Facebook), and let’s imagine how the two could help each other.

Even if Facebook/Microsoft figures out social search, it is more useful on Google, which is where most of us do our searching. To get a glimpse at what this might look like, you can try Sidestripe, which is both an add-on widget for Google search and a Facebook app. Sidestripe is like Glue for search (Glue is a browser add-on that shows you whether anyone in your social networks has expressed interest in the book, movie, restaurant, product, or other things mentioned on whatever page you happen to be browsing). Similarly, sidestripe indexes all your friends on Facebook and parts of their profiles (where they work, their interests, etc). When you do a search on Google, a box with Sidestripe results appears after the third natural result, giving you a sense of whether any of your friends might be experts on the topic. For instance, when I do a search for “Google” it turns up Facebook friends who work at Google or are somehow affiliated with Google, and looks like this:

A search for “biking” turns up friends who are interested in biking. You can also add your own knowledge to any search result, and it will appear as a subsequent result (although it does not let you add links, which I consider a major bug). Or if you still can’t find what you are looking for from either Google or Sidestripe, you can ask all of your friends a question from inside the Sidestripe box on Google about the topic you are trying to learn about and that question shows up in all of your friends’ feeds. Any answers then become indexed and searchable.

Sidestripe is barely out of alpha and still frustrating to use because more often than not the Sidestripe box remains empty. When there are results, they are interesting. It is hit or miss. As more people use Sidestripe, this should improve. But I think a big part of the problem is that it does not fully index my social graph, and certainly does not return results from my News feed.

Yet making Facebook’s News feed searchable (on Google) would go a long way towards realizing the dream of social search. The Facebook feed already aggregates what my friends are doing not just on Facebook but all across the Web (Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, etc.). It’s like Friendfeed in this respect, but with many more users.

The trick to making all of this seemingly random data useful in search is to come up with a social algorithm that can rank it all accordingly. For instance, when I search for Florence, Italy, friends who have lived in Florence, Italy should show up, but so should friends who have recently taken pictures there or Tweeted about Florence, and maybe in that order. This kind of ranking is a hard problem to solve, and it is what Google is good at.

Imagine instead of Sidestripe, the option to add Facebook Connect to Google search, which would then turn on social search in results (these should only appear when there actually are social results to show). They could keep the Q&A capability in there as well. It would add an entirely new dimension to search.

Of course, Google has its own Friend Connect program, and wants to monetize it with Friendsense. But just as search is not Facebook’s strong suit, social networking isn’t Google’s. All my contacts are on Facebook. They are the ones I want to search. And everything I’ve described above is a big opportunity for Microsoft, if they can pull it off.

But the best results, IMHO, would come form a combination of Facebook and Google.

Facebook long ago passed MySpace in global visitors and time spent on the site, but now it appears to be gaining ground on Google.

A couple days ago, Facebook released some new statistics on user growth and engagement on the site. It now has more than 140 million active users, 70 percent of whom are outside the U.S. The number of active users added each month seems to be accelerating, only half are in college, and the fastest-growing demographic is 25 years and older.

There are now 52,000 apps on Facebook, created by 660,000 developers. That’s a serious platform. Some of the user engagement stats were also particularly interesting:

User Engagement

* Average user has 100 friends on the site
* 2.6 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
* More than 13 million users update their statuses at least once each day

Applications

* More than 700 million photos uploaded to the site each month
* More than 4 million videos uploaded each month
* More than 15 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each month

How does this level of engagement compare to other large sites? These are global numbers so let’s start there, with minutes spent on the site, which is the way comScore measures engagement. According to the most recent global data from comScore, which is for October, people spent 33.9 billion minutes on Facebook (up 19 percent from September), compared to 41.6 billion minutes on Google (up 3.6 percent) and 18.5 billion on MySpace (down 2.5 percent). Yahoo is still heads and shoulders above everybody else with 120 billion minutes. And in terms of actual visitors, Google still has nearly four times as many monthly visitors worldwide as Facebook.

In the U.S., the gap between Facebook and Google in terms of time spent is much closer. ComScore has November data for the U.S., and it estimates people spent 8 billion minutes on Facebook during that month, versus 8.5 billion minutes for Google. MySpace was about double with 16.4 billion (it also had more visitors than Facebook in the U.S., with 75.5 million vs. 50.5 million).

Some might argue that it makes no sense to measure engagement for Google, since it’s stated goal has always been to send people away from its site as fast as possible. But that’s only for search, and even there Google wants to send you away only to draw you back. With its apps and other sites (Gmail, Google Docs, Youtube, Orkut, Google Docs), engagement is most definitely the name of the game, so it is a fair comparison.