Surviving Facebook
Facebook is approaching 50 million users, 4 million of them are in the UK, and the site’s growing by 3% a week. At this rate, it will hit 200 million by Christmas.Facebook is a mature social network site (aka Web 2.0), it draws inspiration from Flickr, YouTube, and MySpace. Perhaps it’s smartest move is a gloriously open API that encourages developers to contribute applications that immediately tap into the community. Scrabulous (no prizes for guessing what this is) wallowed in anonymity until it accelerated through its tipping point on Facebook.On November 8th I’ll be speaking at Jersey Tourism’s annual conference on the threats and opportunities of Web 2.0. For the hospitality industry, networking sites like Facebook (and more pertinent still; Trip Advisor) demand attention. I was visiting the Movenpick hotel in Geneva recently, and was impressed to see their home page linking to TripAdvisor comments.For good businesses, the social networking space represents huge opportunity. Bad business will be more easily exposed in this new world of near-perfect information. But all business will need to engage in this new space. Pretending its not happening is not an option.
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