What you can measure you can manage

Facebook Flyers are the best way to reach audiences when and where they pay attention.

Promote your upcoming event, marketplace listing, or favorite candidate in the networks of your choosing, and target your Flyer at undergraduates, graduate students, alumni, or any combination of the three.

New! With Flyers Pro, only pay for the clicks you receive. Click here to try it out.

Wharton marketing professor David Bell says the long-term success of these sites will depend on their ability to retain the interest of their members. “There is a fad or a fashion component to all these networks. Some will come and go,” says Bell. The classic example, he suggests, is Friendster, which burst onto the Internet in 2003 and soon had 20 million visitors. Late last year, it slipped below a million after MySpace and other sites with better music and video capability lured Friendster users away. “A lot of the [success] is serendipitous. These things can have exponential growth. Then, if another community shows up that has better functionality in some way, there can be a mass migration.”

Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader agrees that social network sites are powerful, but mercurial, particularly since most are aimed at teenagers and young adults. “It’s a complete crap shoot. Look how many of these have come along and how many were touted as the next big thing. How many have disappeared completely or find themselves in some strange little unexplainable niche?”

The graph shows you your friends, the networks they belong to, and the social cliques they are part of. See who is central to a particular group and which friends are connectors between two groups.

The TouchGraph Facebook Browser shows your friends’ Profiles and Photos.
Click on friends in the graph to quickly flip through their pictures.

What you can measure you can manage

Facebook Flyers are the best way to reach audiences when and where they pay attention.

Promote your upcoming event, marketplace listing, or favorite candidate in the networks of your choosing, and target your Flyer at undergraduates, graduate students, alumni, or any combination of the three.

New! With Flyers Pro, only pay for the clicks you receive. Click here to try it out.

Wharton marketing professor David Bell says the long-term success of these sites will depend on their ability to retain the interest of their members. “There is a fad or a fashion component to all these networks. Some will come and go,” says Bell. The classic example, he suggests, is Friendster, which burst onto the Internet in 2003 and soon had 20 million visitors. Late last year, it slipped below a million after MySpace and other sites with better music and video capability lured Friendster users away. “A lot of the [success] is serendipitous. These things can have exponential growth. Then, if another community shows up that has better functionality in some way, there can be a mass migration.”

Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader agrees that social network sites are powerful, but mercurial, particularly since most are aimed at teenagers and young adults. “It’s a complete crap shoot. Look how many of these have come along and how many were touted as the next big thing. How many have disappeared completely or find themselves in some strange little unexplainable niche?”

The graph shows you your friends, the networks they belong to, and the social cliques they are part of. See who is central to a particular group and which friends are connectors between two groups.

The TouchGraph Facebook Browser shows your friends’ Profiles and Photos.
Click on friends in the graph to quickly flip through their pictures.

Facebook.com or Google MyWorld testing at the Arizona State University

It was very surprising to know that the fast growing social network Facebook has set a limit for the allowed number of friends to 1500. However the strange side of the story is they kick the user out of the network for using too much resources like it happened with the well-known norwegian model Lene Alexandra à˜ien which appears to be the first to gather this massive number of friends and reach this limit of 1500.

Well, a few questions arise from this story. First what is the reason behind this number? Why not 2000 or a typical power of 2 number 1024 or 2048. Is there some statistical reason behind it like is there some studies that a normal person should not have more than 1500 friends in a social network ?!
Secondly, why throwing the user out of the network? Shouldn’t Facebook support active members? If their resources are really being abused they could have just stopped her from adding new friends rather than kicking her totaly out of the network !

Anyways, à˜ien got no doubt a little push out of this story !!