There was an article on TechCrunch regarding Facebook growing much faster than their current investments.  According to the article, estimated costs include $1 million a month on electricity, $500,000 in bandwidth, then there is their equipment costs and payroll for it’s employees.  These numbers don’t really surprise me all that much.  It seems about right and maybe even a little lower for the bandwidth number than I would expect.  I talk to clients and entreprenuers a lot and the big trend in the industry is user generated content focused on media (images, audio, video, etc).  People want to create sites like Facebook or YouTube competitors and have no idea how much monthly costs are to run an infrastructure like that.  People just figure they’ll hire someone to build the site and throw it on a shared server somewhere and make a ton of money.  The people at Facebook I would assume know all this and the clients I work with are on a much smaller scale, but let’s say you have 1% of Facebook’s user base the sites bandwidth costs are still quite a lot.

It’s hard to monetize a system like that and I’ve read articles in the past where MySpace has had similar issues.  I haven’t really been too impressed with the direction MySpace has gone in order to generate more revenue.  It’s always really been put anything and everything on your page and see what happens.  I’ve never really liked going to friends profiles and have 10 random videos load at once.  It’s just not a great user experience for me.  Because of that I left MySpace to join Facebook.

So how is Facebook going to generate revenue in order to keep up with its rising costs?  In the comments of the TechCrunch article, people were suggesting charging a yearly fee for users.  Some said they would pay others thought that people wouldn’t pay for something they want for free.  I think I’m one of those type of users.  I’ve joined quite a few social networks and the only one I’ve paid for is Flickr and that’s debateable on whether that is a network or not.  I paid because I’m interested in photo backup and not for the social aspects of the site.  I’ll probably also pay for larger space on Dropbox for the same reason.  For real social sites, Pownce offers a free and pro account setup, but I haven’t really felt like I should pay for the pro account.  It might be that I don’t have as many friends on Pownce so that might make a difference.  I think if Facebook did a similar scheme as Pownce that might work out for them.  I’m not sure how well it’s working for others using that model.  I still think they need to have a tier system instead of an all user paid system.

I think if they did charge I’d search for another alternative.  So I’m wondering for others out there, would you pay to use Facebook?

Brightkite is a location-based social network.  I’ve been using Twitter for quite a while and read a few things about location based social networking.  The problem was I wasn’t too interested in SMS based implementations that a lot of these services use to tell the service where you are.  Sure you could use a laptop and “check-in” but you aren’t always around a laptop or even a computer.  I just don’t really care for the SMS based implementations because I’m not really sure what’s going on.  I send something and hope it gets there and I might get a notification.  I don’t have unlimited SMS messaging and it can get annoying if you have a lot of friends and notifications.

What got me interested in Brightkite was their iPhone application.  I looked at Loopt and even created an account, but never really used it.  It wasn’t quite enough for me to use instead of Twitter.  I’ve been using Ping.fm to update my social networks and Brightkite was one of the supported services.

I signed up for the beta testing and sent invites to a few friends.  I downloaded the iPhone application and setup a few placemarks in the system.  Brightkite uses the iPhones location service to find location and for the most part is pretty accurate.  At times I’ll search for the exact place I’m at and check in.  I then use Ping.fm to update at that location.  Brightkite also lets you post photos directly from the iPhone interface.  If you don’t have an iPhone you can send an email to the service with the photo from your phone, but again it’s not elegant to me.  It’s not as easy to use so when I’m on the go I’ll probably not use it.

The iPhone interface is really nice.  For the most part everything on the site is accessible through the iPhone app.  It’s nice to see that some services will give the same user experience in the mobile interface as their full blown website.

I think once the service leaves beta, if it can catch on with more users it will become a pretty nice service.  It will be cool to look at locations and see what people are currently doing there and also what’s happened.  I also see this as one example of the transition to a usable mobile platform.  Mobile applications will evolve and become easier to use.  They will offer a full service as opposed to partial service like a lot of platforms are now.  Some of the blame is because mobile platforms have traditionally been limited and some just because companies don’t allocate enough resources to this type of development.  I think the iPhone and Android will help alleviate some of the roadblocks with their SDKs.

So far I’m pretty happy with the service.  I would still like more friends to use it so I can get a more complete experience, but I’ll just have to wait and see if that happens or not.

There was a post on TechCrunch yesterday regarding MySpace and Facebook’s inability to penetrate into a market like Japan.  In the post it says it took a long time for translation (Internationalization) to happen, but more importantly the site that works here in the US market isn’t catered to that of another global market.

With my clients now, it has become important to build sites with global aspects in mind.  Previously, clients just wanted an English based site, which for most businesses based in the US, is probably just fine.  For more complex projects like social networking, developing the site with this in mind early makes for a much easier task than trying to do it later.  This was seen by how long it took Facebook to get up to speed.  Translations take a long time so knowing what you want to do in the beginning can be a great help.

As for Localization this is a little bit harder.  There’s a lot more research that needs to take place in order for your site to look and feel just right for your target audience.

So the terminology Localization (L10n) and Internationalization (I18n) gets mixed up at times and people believe them to be the same thing.  In general clients think Localization is your website translated into another language so that the target country can understand the content. This is actually part of Internationalization. Internationalization covers language, number formatting, dates, times, currency, etc. Localization deals with catering the site to the target market. An example of this may be a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge here in America, but using a graphic of the Great Wall in China.

Overall, I think it’s great that people are looking to expand their site to different markets.  It’s also good that clients see that they want to do this up front which makes it a lot easier.  Don’t get me wrong though, the way we design sites, we can always do the translation after the project is complete, it just always seems to be planned better knowing beforehand.

Facebook has just released their new layout to its users today.  Just login to the site and you will be directed to the new layout.  I think they did a good job on the redesign and improved quite a few things over the previous beta versions I have seen in the past.

Facebook seems to be the standard as far as usuability in social networking.  The layout seems to load very quickly and they use AJAX technology effectively.

If you get a minute, it’s worth checking out.

Facebook has a new layout they’re testing and if you have a facebook profile and haven’t checked it out point your browser to http://www.new.facebook.com/.  My first impression is a like it a lot.  Facebook has always have a clean and simple, easy to use interface which was one of the main reasons why I switched from Myspace to Facebook.
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What are you doing?  This is the question Twitter is trying to answer.  I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about Twitter.  I’ve integrated Twitter with the API on this site as well as installing plug-ins for things like Facebook.  For those of you that don’t know, Twitter is a social networking site which is primarily based on status messages.  It’s what I like to call “mini-blogging” because it’s short quick posts.  Twitter also makes it relatively easy to update.  You can IM, text message, use the web, or use applications that use the Twitter API to post to your profile.  This is nice because there are times when I don’t blog because it takes time and sometimes I’m just too busy.  With Twitter it takes no time to update.
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