Facebook Keynote Includes Key Stats and E-Commerce Plans

I attended ChannelAdvisor Catalyst over the last few days in Pinehurst, NC. 500 people attended and listened to executives from eBay, Google, Amazon.com, Facebook, Nike and Paypal. It also included a lot of valuable networking and a panel from leading stock analysts.

I always enjoy re-connecting with some of ChannelAdvisor's customers as well as meeting new ones. It was hard to believe the slowdown in e-commerce given the strong growth in attendance over 2007 and the bullish comments made by so many internet retailers.

A keynote I particularly enjoyed was the one yesterday by Ben Ling, Director of Platform Product Marketing at Facebook. As most of you may know, I am a pretty avid Facebook user with 3 of our companies having apps on FB and some of them have multiple apps.

Anyway, here are some notes I took from Ben's talk and I thought I'd share them here:

- Facebook views shopping as a social experience and they think more and more experiences online will be social.

- Facebook's goal is to create the ability to share information more effectively.

- Some general stats I noted during his talk:

• Facebook now has 71 million users with 200k new users a day;
• 50% of these users return daily
• geographic breakdown 1/3 of their users are in the US, 1/3 in Europe and 12% in Canada.
• 1/2 of their users are not college students
• they expect a trillion page views in 2008
• They have over 300k applications and they have the #1 photo application on the web and the #1 event application on the web as well
• Facebook has 500 employees including 100 engineers

Facebook will be releasing general e-commerce capabilities towards the end of 2008. They will allow acceptance of credit card payments and passwords will be stored for other purchases on FB. Ben mentioned they will be partnering to make all of this happen. It will be interesting to track this and watch as Facebook finds ways to monetize the success of the strong and rapidly growing user base.

UPDATE: Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor posted a good summary of Catalyst here.

Comments

[hasan luongo]

there have been many rumors regarding ecommerce functionality on fb, and I recently noticed a buy/pay feature on the signup page for the fb'08 developer conference. eCom on fb could be very big, but it needs to be native like events and photos, if its just some paypal integration that would be lame. but an easy to use and highly secure payments system that can be used be merchants and app developers would be really cool. nice recap.

[Marc]

Well with the increase in number of users of Facebook there is also a wide range of applications available like the one Talking Photos This application is provided by a website www.razz.com. This application allows you to add movie lines and voice to any Facebook photo and share it with friends.All this Make your pictures talk!

[Bill Warner]

I agree Jason. This is truly a phenomenon that changes the way that people relate to each other. Even my grand kids have facebook and myspace sites and are all communicating with cell phones and instant messages. It is more impactful than the invention of the telephone because its adoption is happening orders of magnitude faster.

The more senior community, like me, gets brought into this as well, because people we communicate with are on these social networking sites and reach out from there.

It's amazing and scary too. I am positive that money will be made if not from advertising and retail then from things we have not yet imaged.

Best regards...Bill Warner