facebook application development

Compete.com has come out with their April traffic statistics, and it appears that Facebook has experienced its biggest month yet. With over 135 million unique visitors in the U.S., Facebook grew over 2.5 percent last month domestically and overall visits increased a whopping 15.7 percent, signaling that overall usage among users is increasing as well. While May’s statistics will be the ones to refute whether or not Facebook traffic stalled, April appears to have been another big month.

Twitter, the second most buzzed about social platform right now, doesn’t appear to be as large of a threat as it once was. However as many have noted before, unique visitor traffic to Twitter.com is not the best sign of how successful the company is performing. Instead, the absolute volume of tweets coming through the Twitter Platform is what’s most important.

Facebook is nearing 500 million active users, and while the total number of visitors to the site has easily surpassed that threshold, it’s difficult to track what percentage have registered. While all signs point to a June announcement from Facebook for the 500 million user threshold, we’ll have to wait on the company to make any official announcements.

For now, all the metrics we have access to suggest that Facebook is experiencing continued growth and Compete.com supports a similar conclusion.

The BBC has concluded that based on the numbers presented by Spot On Public Relations about the growth of Facebook use in Arab countries, Facebook now outstrips the total number of newspaper copies in the region. While it has been well established that the newspaper industry is dying, it’s important to note the growing influence of Facebook in other regions around the world.

The numbers are relatively significant: there are >15 million Arab usersand only 14 million newspaper copies in the region which come in Arabic, English, and French, according to the BBC. While the number of newspaper readers is surprisingly low, it highlights how Facebook is experiencing a growing influence in the region.

As we’ve highlighted over the past couple years, this has created some tension between the governments and Facebook. Most recently, Facebook was banned in Pakistan due to a group called “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!” While we’d assume that Pakistan will eventually provide access to the site again at some point, it highlights how Facebook needs to manage cultural differences if it is going to truly unite the global social graph.

Despite controversy, Facebook continues to expand their reach and this latest statistics highlights that.

Did you know that if Facebook was a country, it would now be the third largest country in the world? It passed the U.S. earlier this year and is now eclipsed only by China and India in terms of raw population. That mind-boggling statistic — along with a few dozen more — are showcased in the video below, demonstrating social media’s explosive growth in recent years.

The video, produced by Socialnomics author Erik Qualman, is a follow-up piece to his original social media stats video from last summer. While some of the stats are similar to last year’s version, others are updated with new figures and some appear for the first time. Information about the sources for all the statistics are available on Qualman’s blog. A few of the highlights include:

• More than half of the world’s population is under 30.
• Facebook tops Google for weekly U.S. Internet traffic.
• Ashton Kutcher and Britney Spears have more Twitter followers than the populations of Sweden, Israel, Switzerland, Ireland, Norway and Panama.
• 50% of mobile Internet traffic in the UK is on Facebook.
• During the 4+ minutes it takes to watch the video, more than 100 hours’ worth of video will be uploaded to YouTube.
• Amazon sold more electronic books for the Kindle than physical books on Christmas.
• If you were paid $1 for each posted Wikipedia article, you’d make $1,712.32 per hour.

Have a look at the new video below and let us know what you think. Were you surprised by any of the included stats?

[via Crowdspring]

Tags: amazon, apple, Erik Qualman, facebook, Google, Kindle, linkedin, social media, socialnomics, statistics, stats, twitter, video, wikipedia, youtube

This evening Facebook posted an update to the official Facebook Page stating that over 50,000 websites have already added the Like button and/or other social plugins since they first launched last week. It’s a significant milestone for one week as it has taken years to reach hundreds of thousands of applications. Apparently many developers and website owners are dedicated to integrating Facebook features into their own sites.

Fortunately, none of the new features that websites are implementing are related to Facebook’s controversial “Instant Personalization” service. While many people are still confused about the difference between this service and the “social plugins”, many website owners see the benefit of these new services.

It’s also likely that many users find the content shared by their friends on sites to be interesting, despite the privacy implications of the new services. It will be interesting to see if Facebook continues to find widespread success with their new social plugins for the web. If most of these websites are adding semantic data, there’s no doubt that this could have a much more significant impact in the long run.

A report from the Network Box shows that 6.8 percent of all the URLs accessed by businesses goes to Facebook and 10 percent of internet bandwidth goes to Youtube.  The study analyzed 13 billion URLs accessed by businesses and studied business bandwidths to find results, and found Facebook and Youtube leading other companies like Google and Yahoo.

The report also found that Google attracted 3.4 percent of all URLs, followed by Yahoo!’s image server YIMG at 2.8 percent and Yahoo! itself with 2.4 percent.  DoubleClick, the banner ad provider got 1.7 percent of all URL traffic, due to their massive banner network and its presence on a variety of pages.  In the traffic category, Facebook used 4.5 percent of all bandwidth, Windows Update used 3.3 percent, Yimg used 2.7 percent and Google used 2.5 percent.

According to the SC Magazine UK, Simon Heron, internet security analyst for Network Box, said: “The figures show that IT managers are right to be concerned about the amount of social network use at work. There are two real concerns here: firstly that employees will be downloading applications from social networks and putting security at risk; and secondly the amount of corporate bandwidth that appears to be being used for non-corporate activity.”

This is a report that analyzed businesses strictly, and these results give creedence to the fact that a lot of businesses are clamping down on the use of social networks at the work place.  7 times out of 100, the site visited by an employee at an average business is Facebook.  The study didn’t look at time spent, but Facebook is the site on the web with the highest time spent per user, and surely this means that users may be browsing and stalking during extended breaks during their work day.  Maybe soon we’ll have lunch breaks and Facebook breaks as part of an employee’s workday.  The alternative is to block the service completely but that likely angers employees.  What do you think?  Leave a comment below.

Cubicle image found via Talkaholics Anonymous.