The Community Next conference in San Jose, CA this last weekend resembled the mosh pit at a rock concert. It featured performances by the twenty year-old rock stars and a few older ones who have developed successful applications on the new Facebook applications platform. Business cards glowed with approval like cell phone lights at a concert. Venture capital promises were passed around like illicit drugs. The performers were mobbed by their fans.

On May 29th, Facebook opened its platform to application builders. Now four months later, 5,000 applications were reported at the conference. Compete data show that Facebook activity grew 32% from May to August, 2007, with more than a third of the growth coming from the new applications. Zach Allia, a recent graduate from Northeastern University in Boston is one of the stars. His Free Gifts application has grown from start up to 7 million Facebook users in the last 120 days. Cool!

Sage old rock star, Mitchell Kapur headlined Saturday’s presentations. He advised the young developers of the unavoidable tensions between their applications and the platforms they are developing upon. He counseled:

• Platform owners have the power
• Innovations migrate into the platform
• Some platform owners want to control the whole system
• Platform owners need their applications, but they are destined to absorb the best of them into the platform.

Mitch should know. Twenty years ago, his Lotus 1-2-3 and Lotus Notes performed brilliantly, but eventually succumbed to platform-provider Microsoft. I remember. I was there.

One of the hot young performers listening to Mitch was Craig Ulliott. In 2007, he launched Where I’ve Been which has quickly become Facebook’s most popular travel application. Craig is now pursuing the transformation of his Facebook application into a successful online travel company with its own web service (www.whereivebeen.com) and additional applications on MySpace and other social networks, beyond just Facebook.

Rock on!

I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that a) going out to the movies has gotten ridiculously expensive and b) most mainstream movies aren’t terrific. Given these two truths, RottenTomatoes.com is a default stop most Fridays; one critic’s review may not be a good measure of my future satisfaction with a movie, but when multiple reviews are averaged they become a powerful tool.

Rotten tomatoes has been steadily growing for the past 5 years. The chart below shows unique visitors per month, from August 2002 to August 2007. Over that time period the site has grown from just over 1 million visitors to nearly 2.5, peaking in December at over 3 million. Interestingly, while unique visitors has fallen since the December peak, Visitors spend about 25% more time on the site, so monthly attention remains relatively consistent.

The home page of Rottentomatoes.com answers the most immediate question visitors have;“Is the movie I’m about to see not a dive?”. But at around $10 a seat, there are reasons to dig deeper, so what movies were RottenTomatoes.com visitors researching the most? The chart below shows the top 20 movies on RottenTomatoes ranked by the amount of total time spent on each movie, from January 2007 to August 2007, along with each movie’s total budget, opening weekend revenue, and “TomatoMeter” score.

• Its (sort of) all about the ad spend: It appears that the primary influence on consumer interest all comes back to money. Generally, movies with the largest budgets received the most traffic.
• …then our ticket lines will wait in the shade: An internet rock star, 300 was the only site with a sub-$100 million budget to make it into the top five. It’s enormous online presence also helped drived $72 million in opening weekend sales.
• Lipstick on a pig: Bad movies with big budgets (Eragon, Fantastic 4, Ghostrider) tend to attract far less interest on the site than their more positively reviewed peers, but it doesn’t seem to impact opening weekend sales.
• A different kind of action movie: Amazingly, even RottenTomatoes isn’t immune to the adult industry’s massive web presence. WWE Divas Undressed captured more attention on the site than Live Free or Die Hard.

…but I’d still bet on Mclane any day.

Three big events rocked the web 2.0 universe this summer. Internet rock stars Guy Kawasaki (Truemors), Jason Calacanis (Mahalo), and Kevin Rose/Leah Culver (Pownce) launched new companies.

In the chart below, you see how all three have done extremely well thus far. Any startup would kill for these sort of results in their first two months.

Wondering what actually drives traffic to these sites? Take a look at the table below. The table details the top 10 domain level referrals to Pownce, Mahalo, and Truemors for August 2007. This table may give you ideas on how you may want to go about driving traffic to your own startup — perhaps even a launch strategy blueprint.

* % of total domain referrals

Continue reading “How internet rock stars drive traffic. We take a closer look at Mahalo, Pownce and Truemors.” »

Facebook has been impressing more than just Compete over the past few months. As we reported on Tuesday, for the month of August, the social networking rising star is now ranked third in terms of pageviews, and may have started to finally pull users away from MySpace. But if Facebook was a novel, this domain level traffic would be the jacket; to get to the story you have to open it up…so here’s chapter one.

Because of the Facebook’s design, it is essentially impossible to do anything as a non-member. While Facebook received over 26 million visitors in August, a little over 22 million end up signing in. The chart is a visual representation of the Activities that the Facebook community used in August. The size of each circle represents the share of total Facebook visitors who are involved in each activity, and the shade of color represents intensity of use (based on both visits per month and time per visit). For each activity, the number of monthly visitors, total number of visits and time spent during each visit is listed within each activity’s circle.

Of the 22 Million people who logged into Facebook in August, nearly 21 Million go on to check their profile or their friends. Beyond that, activities differ:

• 14 million people interacted with Facebook Applications in August.
• Applications are also highly engaging; capturing more time per session than any other activity on the site.
• Over 16 Million people browsed photos in August. On average, they viewed nearly 150 per month.
• Only 80,000 (or .3% of total active members) “poked” someone in August.

Facebook’s story is far from over. With school back in session how will things change? What sort of implications will search indexing have on site growth, member privacy, and member engagement? We’ll cover all this and more before we close this book.

* Note: the “read discussion boards” activity is defined as opening up a specific group’s discussion board, as opposed to reading the latest comments on a group’s home page.

MySpace has enjoyed a relatively long and successful run as in a red hot sector of the internet, but it may not be long before the site has to defend this title. Facebook, having gone through big changes about every three months for the past year, may have finally started to pull users away from the incumbent. Facebook has grown not only in member base, but also in member engagement, while MySpace has fallen dramatically on these same measures.

• In terms of both monthly Attention and Page Views, MySpace has been the highest ranking site on the internet since early 2006.
• What it lacks in unique visitors, MySpace makes up for with intensity: people visit an average of 18 times per month, and stay for over 26 minutes.
• Facebook received 15.7 billion page views in August. This puts the site squarely in third place (across the internet) in terms of page views
• Since launching its application platform, Facebook attention has grown over 50%.
• Visitors to Facebook have been spending more time on the site, and visiting more frequently in August than in any other recent month.

There’s still a substantial gap between traffic to these two social networks, but Facebook’s growth trajectory, seemingly endless supply of 3rd party applications and multiple ways for members to engage one another makes it a serious threat to MySpace. But how does this engagement happen? Later on this week we’ll take an in-depth look at Facebook usage…stay tuned.

Social networking has continued to expand its empire, and music sites have become its latest victims. From January to June of 2007, the sites where listeners are able to listen to music and interact with other listeners for minimal or no cost, such as projectplaylist.com and rhapsody.com, have had a noticeable increase of unique visitors over sites where there is little interaction with other listeners, such as itunes.com and napster.com.

The site with the most traffic in 2007 is projectplaylist.com, which has such features as creating your own profile, creating your own playlist, sharing playlists with friends, blogging. It also offers the option of posting your playlist on several social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, etc. Rhapsody.com, another site that has been gaining significant ground over the year, allows members to personalize updates and features, and visitors can view other listeners’ playlists and watch music videos for free.

In contrast, iTunes.com, musicmatch.com, and napster.com have all dropped in UVs since January. These are all pay sites, except for free.napster.com, which offers only free music. However, the extent to how much listeners can personalize their players and adapt it so others can easily view their music is limited. Will these sites be able to keep up with the growing personalization fad? Stay tuned…