Darby Sieben -

Remember Friendster? One of those early social networking sites. Well as of this week, they have made a couple of key announcements that could help bring friendster.com from the depths of the Canadian Internet space to – perhaps a competitor to facebook? Well – let’s not get carried away, but they have announced opening up a developer network as well as integrating with OpenSocial – both positive steps in the right direction, however, probably a little late – at least in the Canadian market. For the full story please read, Friendster developer platform goes live with over 180 apps.

From a local business perspective – your best bet is still facebook.com as a vehicle to communicate with your customers and friends. With the launch of facebook’s business solutions – there is a very viable solution for local businesses to get involved in the social space.

However, what about friendster? You know, at one point, they had a great service but what they are doing now is reactive not proactive. They, like myspace, are in reactionary mode to facebook and this is a touch position for any business to be in.

Anyway, as a FYI – here is a 12-month media trend comparing facebook.com, myspace.com and friendster.com in Canada – the graph speaks for itself as to what Canadians are using and where local businesses in Canada need to be.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Currently at the Kelsey Conference in LA and had an enjoyable time listening to Chamath Palihapitiya, VP Product Marketing and Operations for Facebook. He was speaking about facebook and its product with respect to advertising – I am currently doing some testing and will have a future post on my findings with respect to their ad platform from a Canadian perspective.

Anyway, here were some of the stats regarding the growth of facebook.com that I found very interesting and impressive:

55 million active users (usage in the last 30-days)

250,000 new users a day

doubling every 6-months

over 50% of users are returning everyday

70+ billion page views per month

end of 2007 – 1 trillion page views per year

40+ page views per user per day

Popularity: 11% [?]

This is a follow-up on a post that I did back on July 19 – titled “YellowPages.ca Launches Facebook Integration for Local Businesses” in which I profiled that yellowpages.ca had included facebook as part of their save and share functionality. However, in September, yellowpages.ca expanded one step further by integrating the “add to facebook” directly into the search results as well as the merchant page for each and every business in Canada.

Here are some screen shots of what this looks like. I used my mom’s business in Calgary called TheBraLady.ca. Here are the steps of how I got these screen shots:

First visit yellowpages.ca and do a search for bras in calgary. This actually loads a full page of results, but I captured just the result listing. As you can see, from the listing level you can add to facebook.

If you click on the company name this loads the merchant page for TheBraLady.ca. As you can see from the following screen shot there are two locations where you can “add to facebook” including the logo in the top right hand corner. Sorry for the small size – click on the link above to see the live version.

This is what it looks like inside of facebook.

As far as I know this is one of the first times that a company has allowed every single business in a country the ability to brand itself inside facebook – if you know of another integration – please send me a comment.

From a user perspective this is a great way to share a meeting location since all the merchant pages on yellowpages.ca have a map – when an address is available. From a small business perspective – this is a great opportunity to brand yourself within facebook.

Imagine – you set up a small business profile in facebook and invite your customers to connect to you. Why would they do that – because you are going to send out messages, promotions, coupons, etc. You use the add to facebook functionality to continue to update your friend list of these promotions. There is very little investment to make this happen and you potentially create a great viral tool.

If I had a small business – I would definitely take advantage of the many opportunities that could come from this integration. But that is just me – I tend to think a little differently.

Popularity: 8% [?]