You’ve read it here first, folks: Facebook has reached critical mass and will grow rapidly from now on.

How can I be sure? After all, Compete (but not Alexa) is reporting a slight drop in traffic for Facebook. Sure, its overall statistics are great, and the deal with Microsoft (and the 15 billion dollar valuation that resulted from it) is probably a good sign, but there’s no data that unequivocally supports what I’ve just said.

Well, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and use some good old pattern recognition, personal experience and small data sets. In everyday language, I’ve noticed that a huge number of my IRL friends have recently gotten interested in Facebook. In some cases, we’re talking about people that normally don’t even use computers. The number of my Facebook friends has grown tremendously, although I never advertise my profile anywhere and I don’t even use it on an everyday basis.

More importantly, absolutely no one talks about MySpace anymore. On forums, Facebook profiles are linked to. On blogs, MySpace is an afterthought, a tired (and ugly) dinosaur that’s desperately trying to catch up with Facebook, but is always one step behind. For example, compare Blogpulse’s data for mentions of Facebook and MySpace on blogs everywhere. Sure, MySpace is still leading by quite a margin, but those two lines seem like they’re going to meet pretty soon.

Sure, looking at sheer traffic/user numbers, MySpace is still king of the hill. But, there’s an undercurrent of news that indicate that momentum is on Facebook’s side. The number of registered users has hit 50 million. This is more than double compared to same time last year. AdBrite will start serving ads for Facebook applications. Advertisers are rushing head over heals to take a part of the Facebook cake.

All this is just a tip of the iceberg, but is it enough for bold predictions about exponential growth? Well, it’s hard to predict the future, no matter what information you have. But, judging by the zeitgeist, I’d put my money on Facebook.

Hulu, the premium content video repository, News Corp. and NBC’s baby, is great - strike that, can be great - only if you live in the US. If you live anywhere else, it sucks, because it doesn’t work.

Lemme just quickly check out the competition.

YouTube: works outside of US.
Joost: yup, works everywhere too.
Veoh - works like a charm.

I could go on.

The thing is, I really don’t care what set of laws or copyright issues prevents them from letting people outside of the US use the service. No one will. For us Europeans, it doesn’t work, and we’ll use something else. What I’m trying to point out is the fact that if you cut off 50% or 80% of your audience in the start, you’re bound to fail, and there’s no two ways about it.

If you’re really intent on trying it out, I can point you to my article about ways to listen to Pandora if you’re outside of the US. The same principles apply here, and there are some really good suggestions in the comments.

It’s not really that original anymore to visit Wayback Machine, type in a known website, and look what it was like several years ago, which translates to millenia in the world of Internet. However, seeing such a link on Digg or Reddit every now and then often brings a smile on my face.

This time, it’s Wikipedia from 2001, when it had a grand total of (gasp!) 6000 articles, aiming for 100.000. It’s interesting how every similar project starts out as completely useless, because its point is to be comprehensive and it can’t do that in its infancy. But, through enthusiasm of the few and viral spreading, six years from then Wikipedia has more articles than 3 biggest paper encyclopedias put together.

I was looking at Mahalo today, and though I did not find what I was looking for, I had to admit that Jason Calacanis is a clever guy. It’s like Wikipedia in its early days, only better and jumpstarted with millions of VC dollars. Perhaps it’ll never catch on, but you can’t blame him for trying, because the payout for success would be immense.

I love Techmeme, I really do. But, it’s an aggregator, and as such it doesn’t really recognize fake news from real news, or negative reactions from positive ones. It aggregates: sometimes it aggregates interesting articles, and sometimes it aggregates crap.

It’s clearly visible from the example of Fake Steve Jobs, who seems to randomly post unsubstantiated rumors just to generate buzz. His post about PodTech going out of business (and Robert Scoble ditching it) caused a lot of reactions, and although Scoble - PodTech’s flagship podcaster - denied this information, Fake Steve is still enjoying the benefits of Techmeme traffic.

Now, you can’t really blame these blogs for linking - be their reactions positive or negative - to the source. After all, I’m doing it right now. And you can’t blame Techmeme for aggregating it. But it still feels like anyone can just post rumors (the rumor about PodTech, some say, is bound to become true sooner or later because the company is not doing too well), say they’ve heard it from a “reliable source” and get traffic.

Now, FSJ is writing about Facebook receiving another $500 million from two New York hedge funds. It’s big news, and blogs are all over it, and, of course, it’s all over Techmeme. Is FSJ writing this cause he really knows something about Facebook that no one else doesn’t, or is he just abusing Techmeme’s mechanics? Time will tell.

Google is on the move again, but this time they’re not releasing new services or buying anyone; they’re improving the services they already have.

Gmail now supports IMAP, which means that you can now read your GMail account mail in desktop email clients, and the changes will be reflected in your GMail inbox. One more reason to fully switch to GMail, if you haven’t already.

Meanwhile, as reported by Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim, Google Calendar now supports Google Gears, which means you can access it and work with it even when offline.

Well, almost: it currently does not work for me, which probably means that Google has released this new feature to selected GMail accounts only. Looking forward to this one; Google Calendar is one of my favorite Google applications and being able to access it offline makes perfect sense.

ShoutWire, once touted as a strong competitor to Digg, Reddit, and other social content sites, seems to be slowly dying because of the owners’ neglect. After a solid start, the site has had several changes in ownership and extended periods of stagnation, in which old news would dominate the front page and no word from the developers was to be heard.

Today, a long open letter from a member of the ShoutWire community has reached the top of ShoutWire front page, an interesting development that might be common for Digg but not quite so for smaller social content sites. The letter cites spammers, slow loading times and frequent bugs as ShoutWire’s biggest issues. Personally, it seems to me that for quite some time the ShoutWire owners were simply trying to automate the site as much as possible and milk it for some cash until it fizzles out. But, as it turns out, there are real, live people visiting the site, and they don’t like this one bit.

While the letter is quite critical of ShoutWire and its leadership, it proves that there’s a community out there that still cares about this site, and that alone should be a wake up call for the owners.

Everyone with experience in online marketing has heard of the term “banner blindness“. The fact that most ads in the early days of the Internet took the form of a horizontal graphic banner resulted in the fact that many users got used to them and never clicked on them, regardless of their content.

The salvation - mostly - came in the form of Google AdSense ads, which were simple, unobtrusive text links that caught the users’ attention precisely because they didn’t jump into their faces. However, the fact is that every form of advertising, when overused, gets old. And if you push them even more, some users become so aware of them that they’re never going to click on them - no matter what. You could call this phenomenon “ad repulsion“, and I’ve just experienced it first hand.

Observe the following page, also documented in the screenshot below.

It’s a web site that brings you screenshots from the popular MMOG Eve Online. The site’s design is decent, and it really does have some screenshots, however the creator decided to organize all of the text on site into chunks that are visually identical to Google AdSense ad blocks. The size, the color, the placement: it’s all the same. It sounds like a good plan if you want to slip in some real ads, right?

Wrong. I found out that I was unable to click on the text. I tried one item from the menu; then another, and then another. My brain subconsciously decided I’ve found nothing of value on the site. Only then I’ve stopped and realized that those chunks of text that look like AdSense actually are the content. I had to consciously force my hand to do click on these links. I tried it with a couple of colleagues at work, and they all felt the same - even those that don’t really know what AdSense is.

Try it. I’m sure you’ll feel the same; it’s a weird feeling, because your brain is constantly sending you signals not to click. This site would be a great starting point for a research on ad blindness; I’m quite sure a great number of users would simply dismiss the whole site and move on.

This tells us that those popular AdSense blocks probably aren’t nearly as effective as they were a couple of years ago. Actually, they’re exactly the opposite: it’s almost as if they scream: DON’T CLICK ME. Sure, we all know that AdSense has been a bit stale for quite some time, but when an advertisement does the opposite of what it should be doing, it’s time for alarm.

Is the end of AdSense era at hand, or will Google be able to fix this by changing the default layouts, fonts, and color combinations of AdSense blocks? My guess is the latter. After all, you can’t run away from text: where there’s text, there will always be a textual ad that can fit in. However, I think it’s time for a change, because those black and blue AdSense blocks currently might be annoying your users instead of enticing them to click.

*disclaimer: I’m perfectly aware that I’m also running AdSense ads on this site. This article is not a crusade against AdSense; it’s just an opinion and an observation. I personally have my doubts about AdSense ads but I haven’t yet decided to remove them from the site altogether.

I rarely write about startups in my neck of the woods - Croatia and the surrounding region - simply because they’re mostly locally oriented and aren’t interesting to many readers of this blog. This one is no exception, but since I was in on it from the beginning and since I believe it’s a good project, it’s worth mentioning.

Under the wing of one of Croatia’s biggest general purpose news portals - net.hr - a new social networking called Trosjed was launched today. Trosjed (the word means “sofa” in Croatian) is a simple but well designed social network, with all the standard socnet features: friends, comments, groups, events, activities, personal blog, and a forum. Its unique visual design is worth mentioning: an artist has designed cute clay sculptures which are used for visuals all over the site, and - together with a solid overall design - it definitely gives a cute and unpretentious feel to the whole site. That, and the fact that net.hr is a highly popular local site with millions of monthly visits, might turn this one into a rare Croatian web 2.0 success story.

It’s also worth noting that the web startup situation in Croatia is heating up; the first startup conference was held in Zagreb this year, and several ambitious web startups will be appearing soon, some of them with global aspirations.

Check out some screenshots below, and while you’re at it, please comment if you’d like / wouldn’t like to read more about startups from the Eastern European region; a topic I know well but I’ve mostly been avoiding writing about it.

Many have criticized Wikipedia for the wrong or biased information its entries sometimes have over the years. For me, it just adds to the fun. Here’s a little nugget I’ve stumbled upon while browsing through my favorite encyclopedia (yeah, I like statistics of all sorts):

Biased? Sure. Unobjective? Hell yeah. Wrong? Perhaps.

But still funny as hell.

Read the original Wikipedia article here.

Pete of Mashable fame tackles a recurring topic: using some simple math & common sense he finds out that most of the numbers in those Feedburner chicklets which show the number of RSS subscribers for a certain blog are way off base.

The reason? Well, big RSS aggregators like Google Reader, Pageflakes, Netvibes and others have default feeds; which means that every new subscriber to those sites is automatically counted as a reader of those default feeds. So, if you have a big enough site that everyone includes it in its default RSS feed bundle, your feed subscriber count is probably larger than it realistically is. The gap between the big and the small sites widens: the big become bigger, the small grow slower and tend to stay small.

Some disclosure: this very blog is sometimes affected by this problem, with feed count showing unrealistically high (or, sometimes, low) numbers. It seems to have gotten better lately, though, but the issue is still present on many other sites.

Normally I wouldn’t see much of a problem there. I try not to take these things too seriously; after all, neither Technorati rankings nor RSS subscriber counts can ever be perfectly accurate. Techmeme doesn’t always pick up the real source of the news. Life isn’t always fair.

However, there is an important lesson to draw from this - RSS subscriber count, while perhaps a good pointer towards the quality/popularity of a certain blog, doesn’t really guarantee anything. I have some blogs in my feed reader that have tens of thousands of RSS “readers” and 5 posts in the last 3 months. I have some which have a couple hundred readers and churn out great posts every day.

Furthermore, even if the number of subscriber was close to “reality”, however we define it, people rarely unsubscribe from blogs. StartupMeme is a dead blog (hasn’t been updated since May 2007), and check its subscriber count:

The cold, harsh reality is that those cute RSS counters are fun widgets to have, but they don’t really work as a real metric, and readers should be aware of that.

Remember Ballhype, the sports-oriented Digg clone we’ve profiled a while ago? Although I personally had some reservations about the imageless and generally lackluster design, it seems to be doing really well. They claim a 50% increase in visitors every month, and Alexa’s stats seem to confirm this.

Well, fueled by the growth of Ballhype, the same team decided to create ShowHype - a RSVC (Read Submit Vote Comment) site for gossip and show business. The site is currently in private beta (it launches on Sunday), so you won’t be able to access it just yet, but at least you can see what the same team had done with Ballhype.

ShowHype brings you stories about movies, television, music, celebrities, and other topics in a familiar Digg-like style, with charts and a degree of customization thrown into the mix. Free registration will let you track certain topics, communicate with other users, and track their favorite stories, votes, or comments as well.

However, most importantly, the developers have realized that design is not their strong side, so they’ve outsourced that part of ShowHype, and the result is much better. Images, which are obligatory for this type of site, are included, although I’m betting that they’d have better results with even bigger images. On a side note, Erin Gurney from Ballhype told me that Ballhype is due for a much needed redesign, too.

In all my days of tracking social content sites and Digg clones I’ve seen only a few that will ever amount to anything. It’s hard to decipher the formula which makes such a site successful, and Ballhype - although a solid site - hasn’t really done anything very much out of the ordinary. However, Ballhype’s success so far gives reasons for optimism. We’ll see if ShowHype does that well, too; if it does, then this team might be onto something that others are missing.

First Nine Inch Nails, then Radiohead, now Madonna. In short, Madonna is no longer - at least officially - a part of the record industry, and she signed a 134 million dollar deal with Live Nation to distribute her next three albums, support her live shows and all that accompanies them.

Damn, I like the direction where all this is heading. It’s no secret that I loathe RIAA’s ‘methods’ against ‘piracy’, and that I’m all for free sharing of music; you can read more about it here, here, and here.

But now, for the first time, the big names that were until recently a part of that huge machinery of greed we call the record industry, are taking a different path. And it all comes right after RIAA’s win in a lawsuit against a mom who downloaded a handful of songs from some P2P service. Talk about Pyrrhic victory, right?

In any case, this news is especially significant because it’s Madonna. She’s huge, she’s a trendsetter, and she knows when to switch trains: that’s why she lasted so long. I sincerely hope that, once again, she’ll be starting a trend with her example.