Thursday, October 9, 2008

Facebook SA about to reach 1million users

So recently some stats was released on the numbers of people on Facebook and the fastest growing countries etc, SA is very close to crossing the 1 million mark and I reckon if you had to include the Saffas living in London and elsewhere we would easily be over the 1million mark.

It was quite strange to see that in the 3rd quarter Facebook's traffic decreased by 1% in SA.... strange. I've been working with Facebook Apps quite a bit and have a wishlist app out now that works off the MyKindaPrices database and allows users to create a wishlist and their friends to view it and book items to buy. Now, people often talk about Facebook been the next Operating System but in order for it to work they would need servers in every country cause at the moment the way it works is as follows:

1) You're logged into Facebook
2) You click onto the MyKindaPrices App
3) Request is sent from your pc to Facebook servers in the US, they in turn send request to our servers in Joburg which starts returning the data via the Facebook servers in the USA which in turn the relays it to your PC here in SA.

That is quite a bit of a round about and it not the quickest way to do things, Facebook obviously needs to make it secure and this is the only way.

Microsoft just launched Microsoft Live Search on Facebook, now as Facebook has 135million users this could improve their search market share if everyone runs 10 searches a month on it... but I would still prefer localised search results, maybe they should use Google for that!

Just to update everyone in case you didn't know - Google and Yahoo have put their deal on hold while they wait for the authorities to OK the deal. They were planning to just go ahead with things.

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