I actually read the FB case last week by accident. I was a bit disappointed that the question posted this week was on LinkedIn rather than FB. I had jotted down some thoughts about the case and didn't want to lose them.
1 - FB low Ad impression rate (50x less than google)
2 - Who does FB Connect create most value for? Users? Connected sites? Facebook?
3 - Stunning that MySpace had technical hurdles around the area of privacy.
I did some poking and found that the backend was run on MySQL at the time. FB is also run on MySQL. An interesting overview of their technical operating paradigms can be viewed here Att 4:30 he starts going into back-end design "philosophy"(simple joins, 2ndary indexes, 100 millisecs response time) and at 12min he talks about the "Long Tail" of database rows. At Oracle we've designed both simple and complex security models that scale with both MySQL and Oracle RDBMS. These designs are typically no more than 3 to 4 relational tables and can even be denormalized for scalable, highly efficient queries. I think Oracle can use some of their bold goals while FB can use some of Oracle's technical talent.
4 - a hodge podge of niche competitive sites (Dogster.com, etc)
5 - Immediate recognition of unpopular features (Zuckerburg's apologies worded "We screwed up."
6 - MSFT investment overvalued the company at $15B. MSFT had vested interest in an overvalued FB to the tune of $240M. Interesting that the valuation was 33% higher in October 2007 to $10B in summer of 2009.
7 - FB's desire for a unified computing platform is at odds with the Darwinian concept of best of breed applications. This desire has been persistent throughout the industry but really is practically impossible. Even the storied Wintel dominant platform is considered by many a thing of the past.
8 - Facebook Connect gets it "right" with an Opt-In model. I wish the No Call List (among many others) would default to the same.
9 - FBML - when you have your own "dialect" on the web, you know you've hit it big. http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fbml/
10 - Twitter's actual function (enabling service update from any cell phone) is a low-barrier to entry technology
11- The 94% of 800K users who didn't like FB redesign represented l.1% of the user base.
12 - what is the "active" user base? No exhibits state distribution of a usage histogram.
I agree Raj, would have been nice to have a FB question. But I just went ahead and wrote the case for it :)
ReplyDeleteThe 400 click throughs per 1 million ad stat was astonishing. Intuitively it seemed low and the Google comparison cemented it. Clearly FB was missing the boat on effective ads. It's hard to believe that the Google strategy of context sensitive made all of the difference. The ratio is just incredibly low. I wonder if they have since improved on that ratio.
I agree Kris. Looked for some more current stats but couldn't find anything. Though perhaps the CTR is not the right metric or model to use? What about possibly using CPS (click per share) http://mashable.com/2011/03/25/facebook-twitter-clicks-per-share/
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