Big sites and services like Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and many others rely heavily on open source software to run their operations. Happily, this isn’t a one-way street. They are also giving back to the open source community, not just by contributing to existing projects, but sometimes by open sourcing their own internal projects, giving back something completely new.

And what these popular sites can contribute is often quite valuable. Since they tend to be very large, they run big operations and have been forced to create solutions for scalability and performance problems that most other sites simply don’t have to deal with.

Read more

Is Facebook taking the first steps towards making itself an internet-wide payment platform?

You may know that the company is working on something it calls Facebook Credits (it’s in beta). You can buy Facebook Credits with a credit card or Paypal, and then use these credits as a currency when buying virtual items from applications on the Facebook platform (Facebook apps). A number of apps already use it.

Read more

How old is the average Twitter or Facebook user? What about all the other social network sites out there, like MySpace, LinkedIn, and so on? How is age distributed across the millions and millions of social network users out there?

To find out, we pulled together age statistics for 19 different social network sites, and crunched the numbers.

Read more

Facebook has announced that it now has 400 million active users. Just one year ago Facebook had 150 million users, so 2009 was an incredible year for the social media giant.

There can be no doubt that Facebook is pretty much unstoppable at the moment, a real juggernaut. For some perspective on Facebook’s amazing growth, we have put together this infographic. We hope you’ll enjoy it!

Read more

You could say that this is a post about unexpected success in unexpected ways.

Great products and services often come about more or less by accident and coincidence. The business world sees this kind of thing happening all the time. It’s actually not all that unusual that a company morphs an initial product into something it wasn’t originally intended to be. Because the truth is that it’s not easy to predict how something will be used, or what people will respond to.

Read more

On most social networks, you have to create a username when you sign up. Not only that, that username has to be unique, no duplicates allowed. Facebook on the other hand just takes your real name, no username, and it doesn’t matter if there’s someone already on the site with the same name as yours.

There are probably hundreds of factors that add up to explain Facebook’s success, but the question is if using real names instead of usernames isn’t one of the key features that have helped Facebook grow as large as it has.

Read more

Some sites are utterly addictive. You return to them often, and when you do, you tend to stay there for a good while, visiting different pages, viewing interesting content. In a word, the site is engaging.

But how do you measure it? How do you put a number on how engaging a site is?

That is exactly what we are going to do in this post, and we will be looking at social network sites, arguably the most engaging sites out there.

Read more

Did you ever wonder how busy the servers of the world’s largest social networks are? It turns out it’s very hard work being popular, especially for the number one player.

According to data from Google, Facebook serves 260 billion page views per month. That’s more than six million page views per minute, or a staggering 37.4 trillion page views in a year. We can safely assume that Facebook’s web servers aren’t getting bored waiting around for work to do.

Read more

Have you ever wondered how many of Twitter’s users are women? Or men? What about Facebook, MySpace, Digg, LinkedIn, and other sites in the social media sphere?

We have tracked down this information for a number of social network sites (19 of them). All the major ones have been included, like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter and also some of the most popular social news sites; Digg, Reddit and Slashdot.

Read more

Facebook is easily the most widely used social network in the world today, an international success. Since its start in 2004, it has grown to more than 300 million active users, which is unprecedented. No social network has ever been as big as Facebook is now.

This post takes a look at Facebook’s geographic expansion from its start in 2004 until today in 2009, showing how its popularity has grown year by year.

Read more