facebook

One of the flying legendary slogans from the technical department of Taika Technologies was to call just about anything other than a black&white VT100 terminal a "bunch of useless multi-media".

So, I'm offering you a bunch of useless multi-media ;-) in the form of Facebook video clips on the TV stuff done recently.

All clips are from the finnish telly. Unfortunately none of the clips have subtitles, it's all in the finnish language - except for the last clip where there's some english in Steve Lee's part.

Some clips have a bit de-synced audio track (audio is early or late, a few seconds at the worst). This is due to crappy code with Facebook's video importer: it messes up .mov format by de-syncing the audio..

Also since these are Facebook links, they all require you to have an account and login before you can actually see them. Otherwise clicking the link will just redirect you to the FB login page.

Stuff from "Good Morning Finland" (Huomenta Suomi) MTV3:

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=6285808654

From 11.10.2007, Taneli talking about www.Muxlim.com

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=30944844163

Taneli in "Good Morning Finland" 15 Oct 2008 chatting with Dr. Risto Penttilä about the economy, innovation, Internet business etc. Later Risto decided to enter into the political race for a seat in the European Parliament. And it happens that I have been somewhat involved in the online side of his campaign. Check out his blog from: http://www.ristoejpenttila.fi/

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=35234349163

Taneli talking about immigrants and how teh internets can help everyone adapt to society better.

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=78205479163

This time the topic was: entrepreneurship in the middle of the downturn. How come all the optimism? etc.

Other TV clips:

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=94782305439

Interview with Taneli Tikka & Stephen Lee, as well as footage from around the Muxlim office.

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=35833764163

Me and Steve in Finnish Broadcasting Company's Uutismixi, the news for the youth. Same story in a bit more relaxed style perhaps.

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=35030944163

Muxlim was on the main national news broadcast for the evening on 12.11.2008 This is the few minute clip from that. Myself and Steve Lee talking about Muxlim in Finnish and English, with some journalistic narrative and footage from around the office.

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There you have it. Does anybody know is there a FB to Youtube (or to Vimeo) exporter/importer? Would come in handy, and remove the requirement for FB login.

Also: Does anybody have any ideas how to avoid the FB video import audio messup?

Tiburon-TV published an editorial by Mr. Antti Vilpponen on the Nordic Startup Scene:

http://www.tiburon-tv.com/2009/02/23/the-nordic-startup-scene/

has a mention of me + an interview.

Also related stuff like an interview from Sampo Karjalainen (Habbo founder)

And Peter Vesterbacka (mobile monday founder)

...

Meanwhile on other news:

the Facebook network for Finland has now gone over 1 million members. That's pretty awesome growth during the past month or so.

I will probably blog about that in more detail later. Sort of big news.

My previous blog entry was about how to hack your brain, found here:

http://tane.li/2009/how-hack-your-brain

At the end of the entry I encouraged people to find even more effective brain hacks and suggested that if you copy the idea, please do tell where you got it from (and link to here, please).

This morning I noticed the first "copycat" add running in the finnish Facebook. Here's a screenshot:

Screenshot from Facebook; clicking the add opens the same page as it does when clicked from Facebook (it's a finnish language page).

I realize that by blogging about this I am in fact advertising them ;-) but I don't mind that much.

It's an add by www.wixawin.com from what I gather (with a very light glance) they seem to be a company not unlike the infamous Jamba! creating products and making money by people subscribing to mobile services as an ongoing subscription. I am sure they have their share of happy and satisfied customers (especially perhaps the people who win free stuff in their competitions). But they also have their opponents. If you put "wixawin.com scam" into Google it gives you this search result with almost 400 hits.

Their domain name gives the following info:

owner-contact: P-NZH86
owner-organization: Haagsma, N
owner-fname: N
owner-lname: Haagsma
owner-street: Postbus 76253
owner-city: Amsterdam
owner-zip: 1070 EG
owner-country: NL
owner-phone: +31201234567
owner-email: info@wixawin.com

RunToShop has been running the pictures in my previous post as advertising in Facebook for a while now. We frequently hear from people who have seen and noticed the adds and remember them very well. The memory imprint left behind by seeing a brainhack like that seems to be quite strong; people might hate it, feel disgusted by it, but they will remember it for sure ;-)

RunToShop just released our recommendation widget. The widget adds a "social layer" of recommendations and comments to any webstore. It can be installed very quickly and is free of charge. You can get the finnish language version (the only one available now, english coming later) from here:

http://www.runtoshop.fi/supplier

Lumene's webstore was one of the first to install the widget on all of their products; like this mineral makeup product here. (webstore and widget in finnish)

Also all RunToShop finnish recommendations can now be followed as a feed in Twitter through this account:

http://www.twitter.com/runtoshop_fi
(note: when publishing this post Twitter was down.. again)
....

Anyways; Glad to see the brain hack spreading around. It does work after all.

If you see any further adaptations of this brain hack, feel free to post a comment here in this post.

Mashable just came out with an interesting story that I'm blogging about because it's worth a read, and it is relevant to what I have been posting here about Facebook previously. Also its relevant to what is happening in the economy and with the US dollar right now.

Go read it:

http://mashable.com/2009/02/12/facebook-valuation-3/

(in the post Mashable is quoting Associated Press and links a bunch of documents that indicate FB's valuation to be 3.7 billion USD or less)

Earlier in July 24 2008 the PEDataCenter blog posted some juicy info on Facebook valuations as well:

http://pedatacenter.com/pedc/blog/view/10

The latest entry in their post gives Facebook a valuation of 7.75 USD per share in February 26 2008. and now the Mashable post has it at 8.88 USD per share. Not that much positive growth in a years time, don't you think?

If fact if you look at data from the Federal Reserve:

http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h3/current/h3.htm

...they have been printing so much US dollars out of thin air, and granting so much loans lately that it is arguable that the US dollar has lost so much of its value that the valuation (or rather; true value) of FB is actually far less now than it was a year ago.

The FED just 2 days ago unveiled a 1 trillion dollar program to print more US dollars out of thin air and give them out as credit:

http://money.cnn.com/2009/02/10/news/companies/consumer_loans/index.htm

What happens to value of money when more money suddenly appears out of thin air? It dilutes like the entrepreneur who takes onboard 4 VCs at once..

Facebook being valued at 3.7 billion USD is perhaps secondary news to the fact that 3.7 billion USD isn't quite what it used to be, and with more money being printed out of nothing the trend is likely to continue towards perhaps even a total value collapse of the dollar. Which would certainly bode interesting times to us all, and to Facebook's survival as well.

.. I suggest that you stay on top of this and keep an eye on what happens with the dollar. It certainly doesn't look all that rosy right now, and there's a sense of huge looming risks in the air.

One e-newsletter on this that I can honestly endorse would be this one:

http://www.frontlinethoughts.com/gateway.asp

Subscribe to that, and especially read the latest issue from Feb 6.

You know me as a strong advocate (and ex-CEO) of www.irc.fi - IRC-Galleria who has long held the top spot in the finnish youth Internet world and still remains as one of the most active social media sites on the net.

I blogged a detailed entry on their recent-enough statistics in November here:

http://tane.li/2008/irc-galleria-remains-most-active-social-media-net

and more recently compared them to Facebook's Finland network here:

http://tane.li/2009/facebook-finland-network-revealed-irc-galleria-compa...

This time however I have to objectively look at some data and ask the questions:

* Has the growth of IRC-Galleria hit a wall?
* Has it reached its saturation point in Finland?
* Are they suffering from Facebook's success in Finland?
* Is the focus on foreign expansion leaving the domestic site/service lost at sea?

Please note that I haven't been with the company for quite some time now, so I will have to speculate a bit on this.

On 18th of October IRC-Galleria had a big party to celebrate 500K registered + active users. That's only about 3 months 2 weeks ago.

Now they have a userbase of 506484 users. Growing by 6 thousand users in 3.5 months is about less than 2000 users a month - a very dismal figure for a service that has become accustomed to seeing that amount of growth in a week or so.

It seems that IRC-Galleria's growth has slumped by roughly 75% and is currently as little as one fourth of what it used to be - in fact what it has been pretty much throughout the history of the successful site.

Old ancient data that I have shows IRC-Galleria having 283509 users on December 14, 2005.. which would suggest a growth rate of more than 200 (about 207-210) users per day up until they hit 500K in October 2008. Naturally the curve isn't entirely flat like that; towards the more recent years daily user growth has been quite a bit more than that.

The current growth rate ever since hitting 500k has been no more than about 60 users per day or so.

And it looks like it might be slowing down further.

IRC-Galleria's user counter only counts the registered and active users. When people leave the service they almost certainly delete their accounts. Because the whole concept is being built in a way that requires you to be active. Having an inactive account in there is out of the question for many people. Thus every day hundreds of people come in and hundreds get removed from the number, the grand daily total showing currently as modest growth of 60 or so net users per day.

Altogether there has been something like over 2 million accounts created throughout the service's lifetime. Which means that user churn is rather high and some people frequently switch accounts, never complete their registering etc etc. the usual stuff.

Why are the numbers growing so slowly? There might be couple of reasons:

- They have really hit the saturation point. Which I think is rather unlikely. There should be room to go upwards to 750K or ever 1M registered users by making the concept more appealing to older (in this case 30-something) people.

- They are focusing so much on conquering the foreign markets that their primary source of revenue; the domestic service, is left to drift lost at sea. Things such as this are known to happen to companies, and if they do have this going on they would not be the first to make this mistake. Hard to speculate further without much visibility.

- Are people leaving for Facebook? This seems entirely plausible; Facebook has grown "like crazy" in Finland with the kind of numbers IRC-Galleria has never seen. It is somewhat likely that especially the "older" folks in the service are starting to be come less active and switching the primary portion of their usage into Facebook. As far as I know this wasn't yet the case in early fall, but things might have changed over the past few months - as everybody seems to suddenly rush into Facebook. My 18 year old sister is in there. So is my 50+ year old mum. Similar situations seem to be the norm nowdays, with entire families and possibly generations of Finns having their stuff up in Facebook.

Wonder how many of them realize that Facebook has background ties to the CIA (through their venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel) (further reading on that can be found all over the place, for example here.)

Yet still; IRC-Galleria is a giant in the local youth Internet and the activity levels are way high up there far above Facebook.

That's the double-sided sword right there; if your concept requires everyone to be very active, it is very hard to turn it around if people start abandoning it en masse (for any reason) or some other place has more contemporary sex appeal of the hour.

IRC-Galleria got started in December of 2000.. in "Internet years" the service is pretty ancient and not much of the similar sites from 'back in the day' are around anymore. "oh where are the snows of yesteryear?" (some old medival lament).

The only way to survive in a changing world is to change yourself. Perhaps that's what IRC-Galleria needs to face - or we might start to see those tiny growth numbers turn towards the negative territory..

Neil Gaiman was once asked to summarize his truly marvelous and epic masterpiece story The Sandman in once sentence (it is 10+ books long). He said;

"The Lord of Dreams learns that one must change or die, and makes his decision."