“Facebook Blood Groups: Turning like into life”

A porrada vai estancar

As brigas facebook vs google e microsoft vs google passaram para outro nível!

O Facebook enquanto sistema operacional

Visão interessante do Gerd Leonhard sobre a empresa. Esses pontos foram tirados de uma palestra que o Gerd deu em Dubai:

• Doing business with the new consumer is not a technology play, it is a culture play – marketers must build on emerging cultural practices, not emerging technology. Key to these emerging practises are social consumption, social transparency (the tyranny of transparency), social trust and the use of social currency (FB Credits)
• Doing business with the new consumer is not a technology play, it’s a people play; technology will never replace people; people who use technology will replace people who don’t. The thing about people is that they are social – and they share; sharing should be hardwired into your value proposition – building share-ability into what you say and do (‘social brand actions’). And from this humanistic perspective, communicating why you do what you do is as important as explaining what you do and how you do it
• Doing business with the new consumer is not a technology play, it’s a content play – businesses must become publishers as well as producers – connecting consumers to ‘likeable’ (filtered/curated) content as well as producing likeable products
• In the new framework, Facebook is not a network, it’s a social OS enabling and empowering social action
• To help businesses profit from the social OS, agencies must become proficient in the 5Cs – contextualising, connecting, curating, culling and collating
• As a social OS, Facebook is the premier platform for social commerce – social commerce is the “new normal” – adding a social layer to retail will become a hygiene factor for successful commerce
• The simple success formula for operating on the Social OS – create more value than you capture (Tim O’Reilly)

A obscena margem de lucro da Zynga

47%. Sim, é isso mesmo. 47%!! Nada simboliza tão bem a estupidez do tempo em que vivemos.

By way of comparison, Google’s profit margin is is 29% and Apple’s is 28%, and both of those are considered fantastically profitable. Facebook had a profit margin close to 30% as well in 2010. Salesforce and Amazon by contrast, also very respected companies, have profit margins closer to 5%.

In fact, tech companies might not be the best comparison. Hermès, the world’s most lauded luxury brand — a company whose business is selling $20,000 handbags — has a profit margin around 30%. When one of your writers was in business school, a professor with extensive experience in the luxury industry told us that Chanel, a private company which doesn’t report financials, was rumored to be the most profitable company in Europe with profit margins of 45%.

Zynga is either the most profitable company ever – or it’s very close to it.

The main reason this kind of profitability is possible is that Zynga sells “virtual goods.” They don’t cost much of anything to make, don’t need to be shipped to shelves, and don’t need any kind of sales force to be sold.

Detalhe: isso aí já inclui os 30% que a Zynga tem que pagar ao facebook.

Nesse link da Business Insider dá pra ver uma assustadora análise da mecânica de um dos jogos da Zynga, o FishVille. Sim, tem idiotas que criam aquários virtuais e compram peixes virtuais.

Orkut Vs Facebook

Seria esse o “tipping point”?

Simplesmente, se tivermos uma abordagem técnica e fizermos umas rápidas contas, o Facebook passa o Orkut. Primeiro dado e o mais significativo: o Facebook cresceu 479% de agosto de 2009 a 2010, já o Orkut cresceu 30%, ambos segundo ComScore. Se continuarmos com essa mesma média de crescimento, ao final de um ano teremos Orkut com aprox. 43 milhões de usuários (+8 milhões) e o Facebook com aprox. 45 milhões de usuários (+35,5 milhões).

Outro ponto é que, hoje, o Facebook tem penetração de 4,73% da população total brasileira, o que é muito pouco comparado com Uruguai com 30%, Argentina 30,14%, Estados Unidos com 47%, Islândia com 62%, entre outros. Como mostrado no primeiro gráfico desse post, a curva de ascensão do Facebook está se manifestando e podemos estar no exato Tipping Point, o momento de adoção cultural e massificada. Na minha opinião, com muita coragem, eu acho que o Facebook passa o Orkut em 2011!

Lembrando que a imagem não se relaciona diretamente com os números. A imagem mostra uma pesquisa do Google Trends, os números são sobre o crescimento absoluto de cada rede.

Via CHMKT

Mundo louco

“The Net makes what was always implicitly virtual explicitly virtual”

O título do post é baseado em uma observação do fodástico Nick Carr sobre um texto de Justin E. H. Smith

If then there is a certain respect in which it makes sense to say that the Internet does not change everything, it is that human social reality was always virtual anyway. I do not mean this in some obfuscating Baudrillardian sense, but rather as a corollary to a thoroughgoing naturalism: human institutions only exist because they appear to humans to exist; nature is entirely indifferent to them. And tools and vehicles only are what they are because people make the uses of them that they do.

Consider the institution of friendship. Every time I hear someone say that Facebook ‘friendship’ should be understood in scare quotes, or that Facebook interaction is not real social interaction, I feel like asking in reply: What makes you think real-world friendships are real? Have you not often felt some sort of amical rapport with a person with whom you interact face-to-face, only to find that in the long run it comes to nothing? How exactly was that fleeting sensation any more real than the discovery and exploration of shared interests and sensibilities with a ‘friend’ one knows only through the mediation of a social-networking site? …

One would do better to trace [the Net] back far further, to holy scripture, to runes and oracle bones, to the discovery of the possibility of reproducing the world through manipulation of signs.

 

Jogos sociais no Brasil

A Mentez é a empresa mais bem sucedida em jogos online na AL, em especial no Brasil, e o Orkut é a principal plataforma. Em uma entrevista, o CEO da Mentez falou coisas interessantes sobre o mercado brasileiro. Comecemos com uma provocação. Ao falar das características dos jogos brasileiros, o cara diz que é muito importante injetar a cultura nacional no jogo:

“Another example is that in farming games in Brazil, users could steal from other users. That wouldn’t work in the US or Europe, but for Brazilian users it was a key functionality, and it’s a reason our farming game is number one in Brazil.”

A Mentez tem uma espécie de paypal bem peculiar:

[At Mentez] we have a strong monetization platform that’s a combination of online and offline. In Brazil, about 40 percent of people don’t have a credit card, so there’s a payment gateway to process cards, and 120,000 points of sale on the street, so users can go and buy the credits. Also, 35 percent of the population accesses the internet through cafes.

Orkut ou facebook?

Right now Orkut is huge, I believe the number one site in Brazil. My estimation is that it has over 50 million users. So for Orkut to keep growing is difficult. I don’t believe they’re growing because they have 80 percent penetration of internet users, and from what I’ve seen Google is investing in Orkut and they want to keep their leadership.

But Facebook is investing as well. The way that Facebook is growing in Brazil is with high-income users, people that speak English or have friends in the US. They’re very strong with the high-income users. However, the Brazilian market is a massive market, so if you want to be a player in Brazil, you need the rest, where Orkut has its leadership.

Para fechar, mais monetização:

The good news is that the Brazilian user’s monetization behavior is similar to the United States. Four to six percent of the user base does transactions, versus what I hear is about six to eight percent in the US.

For our only game that has been on the market for more than a year, we’ve seen users spend $10 per year. The life-cycle of our games, from what we’ve seen, is 8-12 months, but like in any other market they eventually get flat and start to decline.

Facebook vs Orkut no Brasil

Texto do professor Sílvio Meira.

“ano passado, o número de usuários de facebook no brasil passou de um para oito milhões. bem menos do que os vinte e oito milhões de usuários de orkut, mas um crescimento espetacular para um único ano. se o tamanho do facebook brasileiro estiver dobrando este ano… pode ser que orkut, aqui e em breve, tenha o mesmo fim de mySpace no mundo. ou seja, deixe de ser relevante. e desapareça.”

“Do we play Farmville because we’re polite?”

The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness.[11] We play Farmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people.

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