NEWS ANALYSIS: Facebook draws in hundreds of new Finnish users every hour

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By Olavi Koistinen
     
      A week or two back, the main auditorium at the Old Student Building in downtown Helsinki was packed with people. TV-cameras rolled and the sponsors' neckties gleamed as media guru Sam Inkinen delivered a presentation.
      As it happens , the content of the event did not quite match up to the surroundings and the glitz: the National Union of University Students and the Student Union of the University of Helsinki were launching their new Virtual Campus Lyyra, a nationwide Internet networking service, where students can keep blogs and photo albums and send messages to their friends and colleagues.
      Nothing so terribly revolutionary in all this, then. However, the stunt - arranged by the Helsinki advertising agency BOB - filled the hall because the invitations contained the magic words: "Lyyra to challenge Facebook".
     
Back in the spring of this year, Facebook was for Finns still just one social networking site among many. Yes, it had users, but it was hardly the sort of mega-phenomenon that the video-sharing YouTube operation represented.
      However... during the summer the service achieved critical mass, after which user numbers increased rapidly.
      Now they have gone ballistic: on Tuesday afternoon [October 2nd], nearly 500 Finns joined the Facebook community in the space of around an hour and a half.
      It is hard to list the number of users in a newspaper article, because the figures are out of date before the paper heads off to the printers. On Sunday evening just over a week ago, the total was 57,000 users - by Tuesday evening it was 63,500. Today [October 9th, 15:00] it is hovering just under 88,000.
     
It would appear that Facebook is becoming for young adults a rather similar "generational" experience to that offered to Finnish teenagers by the web-based "virtual best-friends' book" community IRC-Galleria, even though as yet Facebook is still well shy of the huge numbers on IRC-Galleria.
      It is difficult to explain quite why the Finns found Facebook right now, and not earlier. In Norway, for instance, the big boom in new members took place back in the spring, and there are now nearly 370,000 Norwegian Facebook users, and more than 400,000 in Sweden.
     
The main event in Facebook is interaction with one's existing friends and acquaintances, although there is also scope there to make new friends online.
      Each user has a profile page onto which he or she can upload information about himself. In addition to the basics, one could for instance put up on "The Wall" what sort of mood he or she is in right now. The page also lists all those persons who have signed up as friends to the particular Facebook user.
      Users can send messages to their friends on the site, and for instance distribute their photo albums. Perhaps the most progressive aspect of the Facebook package is the ability to pass on small software applications to their friends.
      These can be used for a variety of purposes, for instance to show on a map all the cities of the world that the user has visited, to list the books they have read, or to describe what turns them on or turns them off.
      Everyone can make their own applications, and in this way the Facebook user community is constantly expanding the whole.
     
Facebook is a slightly bewildering mix of the informal and of rather more official messaging.
      Members are there by real name rather than by nickname (as in message boards or chat rooms), and many companies have established Facebook networks that are intended for members of staff.
      Many members have work-related contacts among their lists of friends, thereby maintaining an impression that the whole thing is above board and acceptable. Dotted in among these are friends who send sex-preferences questionnaires or applications that reveal to the user his or her "stripper name" or "pornstar name".
     
Particularly now, when Facebook's popularity is still in a fast upward trajectory, many perhaps behave incautiously online and reveal things about themselves that on sober reflection they might not have wished to make public to such a large audience.
      There are estimated to be more than 40 million registered Facebook users worldwide.
      Many anticipate that one or other of the big technology or IT names will soon swallow up the community service for the sort of telephone-number sum that will make the USD 1.65 billion that Google paid for YouTube in 2006 look like loose change.
      This autumn, for instance, Microsoft and Google have both been rumoured to be angling for a slice of Facebook.
      How a buyer could make money with the service to recoup the likely billions on the price-tag is nevertheless quite another matter.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 3.10.2007


Links:
  Facebook
  Facebook (Wikipedia)
  IRC-Galleria (Wikipedia)
  Virtual Campus Lyyra to Challenge Facebook

OLAVI KOISTINEN / Helsingin Sanomat
olavi.koistinen@hs.fi