Facebook is growing internationally

Facebook is growing fast not only in the United States but also in other countries. Not too long ago, Facebook was lagging behind other social networking sites in non-US countries. In the past 12 months, Facebook has grown eightfold in Brazil with 500 millions users, and it has as many users as Orkut's in India. According to Mark Zuckerberg, it's almost guarantee for Facebook to hit 1 billion users (i.e., ~1/7th of the world population in 2010).

Some analysts believe that Facebook is a threat to Google. Both companies rely on ads as a main source of income. While Google can learn a lot of about users' interests from search queries, but Facebook has far more usable personal data. Because Facebook can place more effective ads than Google, eventually Facebook will absorb some market shares from Google.

It will be interesting to see what comes out of these two companies in the next couple years.

Source: Facebook Makes Headway Around the World -- The New York Times

Facebook the new eBay

Recently I discovered few friend pages on Facebook that are dedicated to selling fashion apparel. It's not a new concept, but I think it works well. Instead of selling products to people you don't know on eBay, sell them to people you know on Facebook.

Those friend pages that I have seen so far are created by small business owners in Hong Kong, selling imported Korean and Japanese fashion apparel. They post photos of clothes that they sell on Facebook. If friends are interested to buy, they send Facebook messages to inquire about price, size and delivery location. If the sellers operate a physical store front, they inform potential buyers about the store location and invite them to the store for fitting and more shopping.

I think selling products on Facebook gives the seller few advantages:

1. Trust is built-in to the social network. Your friends probably feel very comfortable buying products from you because they know you. If the product is bad, they know whom to call.
2. Facebook is an excellent platform for word of mouth marketing -- Alice tells Bob, and Bob tells Charlie and David, etc.
3. Receive instant customer feedback through wall posts. For example, if friends tell you that they like the same dress but in color red, you know immediate to stock up red dresses next time when you go shopping for inventory. Reliable customer feedback reduces a lot of guess works for you.

If selling products on Facebook starts to become a trend, I wonder what strategies will Facebook implement in order to profit from this market? An obvious model is to create a Facebook online store front for selling goods and profit from sells transactions.

Rules for protecting privacy in Facebook

I value my online privacy. Recently I joined Facebook, an online social networking application. While I enjoy using it to social with my friends in different corners of the world, but also I'm concerned about my privacy in Facebook. In this blog I will summarize some general rules that Facebook users can adopt to protect their online privacy.

What to protect

Privacy protection is about control, controlling who gets to see what information. There are two kinds of information that we should control. The first kind is personal information that can be used by people to commit crimes, e.g. identify theft. The second kind is information that can potentially damage the reputation of a person or can create a false impression about a person in minds of other people.

Information of the first kind is easy to identify, which includes a person's date of birth, social security number, current and past resident addresses, and mother's maiden name. Information of the second kind is a bit harder to identify because it is rather subjective. Here are some obvious examples. If a person is a CEO of a company, wild party photos of that person can easily damage his/her professional reputation. If a person is seeking a career in the child care profession, rumors about that person frequently smokes marijuana can create a false image about his/her characters in the minds of potential employers.

How personal information flows in Facebook

Personal information published in Facebook flows in three different directions. (1) It flows from the person who published the information to friends in the social network. When you post a new item or write a new wall message in your Facebook profile, information flows from your profile to the eyes of your friends. (2) Information can flow in an inverse direction. When you are tagged in a friend's video, information (the video and information about you being in the video) flows from your friend's profile to you. (3) Information that is not explicitly protected flows freely throughout "networks", circles of social contacts from high schools, colleges or work. If I join the UMBC network, unless I explicitly protect my profile, all my information by default is readable by anyone in the UMBC network even they are not my friends.