by Scott McAndrew on April 5, 2009
Both Venture Beat and Mashable had coverage last week of a Facebook feature currently being tested called “credits.” I thought “credits” was a April Fool’s Day joke that just wasn’t all that amusing. Apparently, it wasn’t.
Here’s an excerpt from the Venture Beat coverage that explains how it works:
When you leave a comment on an item, you’ll see a field where you can enter the number of credits you want to give the person who created the item. You’ll also see the number of credits you have available to give — you can choose to give up to the number of credits you possess. You can only get credits by buying them in Facebook’s virtual gifts store — $1 for 100 credits — or by receiving them (or by getting some free when you start using credits, although Facebook is testing how many to make available that way).
Once you’ve left a comment with credits, you’ll see the credits appear next to the comment, following the feature’s green plus symbol icon. There’s no other way to create credits at this time. This means people need to think twice before giving their credits away.
“No brainer” or “no brain”?
For Facebook, it’s a no-brainer. Getting users to exchange real cash for virtual compliments doesn’t have a downside. And, they’re the coolest social networking site on the block. They’ve proven that they are adept at rolling out ideas then, if they tank (or worse, aggravate people), they can backpedal without too much damage.
For Facebook users? My guess is that the average Facebook user’s response is “thanks, but no thanks.” The idea is, well, clunky. While there’s likely far more behind this than what’s being exposed at this point, in response to one’s status giving someone a quick text retort or clicking a ‘like’ link feels natural. Giving them ‘money’ they can spend on tchotchke or re-credit to someone else’s clever status does not.
What do you think? How will Facebook users respond?
Photo by chrispulo
by Scott McAndrew on August 30, 2008
I recently participated in writing a research brief on marketing opportunities on social network sites (social network sites such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.). Part of our research was to see what information we could find regarding popularity of social network sites worldwide as well as member population makeup, specifically social network population by age and gender. The research data I needed went far beyond my high-level post on social networks in February.
Happily, we were able to find data that helped in our analysis without spending a dime.
Global popularity of social network sites
In research social networking site popularity, we came across a great blog post: “Modeling The Real Value of Social Networks“. The post by Michael Arrington (that appeared on his site TechCrunch) was focused on assigning a valuation social network sites. While I wasn’t interested in the valuation, the post leveraged data that was just what we were looking for to get a gauge on overall popularity: April 2008 comScore social network site data for their supported countries and regions.
Interested? TechCrunch made the data available as a Google Docs spreadsheet:
Member population: age and gender
Another key piece of data we were trying to find was a breakdown of social network site members by age and gender. I was fairly confident that this data would be hard to come by, but some persistent Google searches turned up this gem: Two Rapleaf studies focused on that exact topic. The studies are biased towards the U.S. market, but the information is compelling and valuable nonetheless. Rapleaf’s commentary on how males and females differ in their usage of the social network sites is also interesting. Following links from these press releases will get you to data (some of it is provided right in the press releases also):
I hope this data helps in your social network research!
