Hold on to those employees for dear life, Google, because Facebook just keeps getting more powerful by the second.
The world’s largest social network had over 151 million unique U.S. visitors in October, according to comScore data, an increase of 55 percent from the 97 million uniques tracked in October 2009.
And who’s surprised?
Facebook registered its 500 millionth member sometime over the summer and 50% of active users log on to the site on any given day.
Increase in mobile usage, especially of smartphones like iPhone and Android, probably helped Facebook’s phenomenal growth this year. Over 200 million people access the network via mobile platforms. A year ago, only 65 million people used Facebook on mobile.
Additionally, Zuckerberg attributes much of the site’s dramatic growth in the past year to the rapid rise of social gaming led by Zynga, Playdom, Playfish and Crowdstar, all developers on the Facebook platform. The same has been true on the iPhone and even on the PC, he noted; gaming is always the first vertical to tip.
So with MySpace out of the picture and Twitter growing comfortably on its own turf, Google, the king of search, is left looking like Facebook’s primary competitor. The tension between the two only looks more intense when one considers how close Microsoft and Facebook have become as of late.
Facebook actually surpassed Google, in terms of visitors, in March of this year, according to data from analytics company Hitwise. (The graph in that article speaks volumes.)
Basically, it comes down to social. Zuckerberg predicts that we are advancing toward a time where every aspect of the Web will be social, and the companies that don’t embrace social will fail. Of course he’s biased, but the Web seems to agree with him. The open social graph and Instant Personalization launched less than a year ago, flooding websites with Like buttons, and already the features are permanent fixtures of early every important service on the Web.
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Steven Loeb
Startup/Business
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Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests.
Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.
Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes.
We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.
There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.
In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet.
At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.
Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.
What's next for Twitter?
We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users.
We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.
Startup/Business
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Playfish is a social games company that creates games for people to play together.
Founded in October 2007 by casual and mobile games veterans and backed by $3M in seed funding, we believe games are more fun when played with friends and family. So we are working on combining the best elements of casual games, social networks, MMOGs and virtual worlds to create entirely new, more social ways of enjoying great games together.
Traditional computer games focus on standalone game play on consoles, your PC or on your mobile. Games that do allow you to play together with others online normally require you to buy the game, go online and try and find like-minded new friends who are also playing the game. This is something that usually only the most dedicated gamers are prepared to do.
Our social games are different. Social games allow you to play together with real-world friends and family using the infrastructure built by social networks. This is in some ways a return to the roots of games. You play with the same people you would play cards, board games or go bowling with in the real world. Sharing the game experience with friends makes it more compelling and fun.
At Playfish we believe social games are a big part of the future of the video games industry, and are working hard to be the leading company in this emerging sector.
Playfish is headquartered in London, UK with offices in Beijing, China and Tromsø, Norway.
Startup/Business
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Zynga is the largest social gaming company with 8.5 million daily users and 45 million monthly users. Zynga’s games are available on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, Yahoo! and the iPhone, and include Texas Hold’Em Poker, Mafia Wars, YoVille, Vampires, Street Racing, Scramble and Word Twist. The company is funded by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, IVP, Union Square Ventures, Foundry Group, Avalon Ventures, Pilot Group, Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel. Zynga is headquartered at the Chip Factory in San Francisco. For more information, please visit www.zynga.com.
