This Week: Ancestry IPO, FamilyLink goes viral, Navigating Facebook Platform changes
Filed under: Facebook, Facebook Applications, FamilyLink.com, Genealogy, IPO Watch, Social Networking Watch
This week is going to be amazing. Possibly, the most interesting week of my career. I’ll explain.
Ancestry.com is slated to go public on Wednesday. I always dreamed of being part of that IPO, but I’ve been out of the company (7 years) longer than I was in the company (6 years). But my excitement about watching a company I helped create trade on a public exchange is mounting. I cannot wait to see what happens when ACOM debuts on the NASDAQ this week.
I’m thinking about holding an IPO party at my house on Wednesday for the early Ancestry.com employees who are no longer with the company. It would be fun to reminisce a bit and see where everyone is now. If “public demand” for a party is high, I’m sure we’ll be able to pull it off on short notice. Between LinkedIn and Facebook, my blog and twitter, we should be able to get at least a dozen or two people to show up. If you’re interested already (and qualify as a “former Ancestry employee”), shoot me an email. (paul AT familylink.com) We’ll watch a couple of old company videos and hopefully some Tivo’d coverage of some of the business news about Ancestry from Wednesday.
This week is also exciting because FamilyLink.com is going viral. Our FamilyLink.com Quantcast chart shows that we’ve had more than 6 million unique visitors since we debuted last month and we are just getting started. We think our Flash-based family tree tool is the funnest online tree ever created, and it is getting tons of usage. We hope to be a top Facebook Connect site soon. In fact, Facebook’s Wiki shows FamilyLink as an example of how to create invites and requests using Facebook Connect. Facebook has been an incredible platform for our company to build on.
Even though Compete.com shows us as having more unique visitors than Ancestry.com, and even though we are classified by them as a genealogy site, we are actually a totally different creature. We are a family social site. Users of our Facebook applications (we have about 60MM users) can easily navigate to FamilyLink.com and enjoy an enhanced family experience there. We connect you to your living relatives. We help you share content and life experiences and memories with your immediate and extended family. Family trees are a fun part of our overall experience (because everyone loves to see how they fit into their family) but we are not currently a deep research site for ancestral records.
About 15% of our users consider themselves genealogists (which means 85% do not). Many of them already subscribe to paid services like Ancestry.com or use free genealogy web sites for research. We believe that genealogy will likely be an important advertising category for us in the future, since we are attracting millions of families to our service and as the saying goes, “there’s a genealogist in every family.” But you can also say there is a photographer, event planner, scrapbooker, top chef, health nut, sports fanatic, vacationer and couponeer in every family. When we ask customers what additional features they want us to build into FamilyLink, we get everything from photo albums to recipe sharing to online chats and event planning tools. We will generate ad or product revenue from a lot of categories as we try to meet the needs of millions of families worldwide.
This week is also intense and interesting because of all the upcoming changes Facebook announced for their Platform last week. Here are some links:
- Video of Facebook’s platform changes. Ethan Beard, who heads up the Facebook Developers Network, describes the product roadmap in this nearly one hour video. Mark Zuckerberg introduced him.
- Facebook’s developer policies have been condensed from 17 pages to 3 pages — all policies are now in one place
- Nick O’Neill’s This Week in Facebook post shows how much is going on at Facebook right now. The pace of change is incredible, and it is hard to keep up with everything, but the pay off for being in the Facebook ecosystem can still be amazing.
More information has been coming out in the last few months about the best ways to monetize social web sites than I have ever seen before. The Social Ad Summit in NYC provided a lot of good information, especially about virtual currencies and virtual goods; PeanutLabs followed the Mike Arrington “Spam Facebook Like a Pro” blog post with some great survey data about how users prefer to pay for in-game virtual currency; and this article from VentureDig covers monetizing social networks with recommendations for 2010.
It’s a great time to be in social networking. Investor interest in social networking related companies seems really strong. For years the conventional wisdom was that social networks could not be monetized, but it turns out that for most of that time the fastest growing social networks (like Twitter today) weren’t even focused on monetization. They were sacrificing revenue or deferring even thinking about revenue to capitalize on the fact that millions of people would be joining social networks and that the network effect would lead to a few winners, with a winner-take-most outcome. That was a very good bet.
It is well known that Facebook has turned cash flow positive, Twitter raised money at a $1 billion valuation, and Zynga is generating a ton of revenue, some say about $250 million this year. But it is not so well known that teen social network myYearbook turned profitable this year (in Q1 according to CEO Geoff Cook) because of “Lunch Money” and virtual goods. There are other under-the-radar social networking companies and app/game developers that aren’t well known at the moment that will breakout in 2010 and become widely known.
Here’s to hoping that FamilyLink.com will be one of them.
FamilyLink Climbs Facebook Developer Leaderboard
Filed under: Facebook, Facebook Applications, Social Networking Watch
Sorted by Monthly Active Users
Name DAU MAU Daily Growth 1. Zynga 47,142,368 161,442,415 1.11 2. Playfish 12,136,211 57,661,305 -0.04 3. RockYou! 2,493,761 41,616,918 -1.41 4. 11,868,141 32,375,076 -0.26 5. Causes 2,135,480 31,881,017 0.72 6. Slide, Inc. 1,234,691 24,757,153 -0.05 7. Familylink.com 1,266,743 22,096,540 0.72 8. SlashKey 5,830,463 18,709,422 -0.08 9. 3happybytes 549,065 18,643,657 -4.07 10. LivingSocial 708,836 17,740,792 -1.30
If you don’t count Facebook’s own applications, FamilyLink.com is now the #6 developer in the Facebook ecosystem, based on Monthly Active Users. It won’t be easy to climb this chart, but with some of the new features we are launching soon, there is a chance that we will.
Posted via web from Paul’s posterous
oh my gosh, facebook is for families
Filed under: Facebook, Facebook Applications, Families, Social Networking Watch, Uncategorized
On Feb. 2nd, InsideFacebook reported that the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is women over 55.
In just the past 120 days, usage of Facebook by women over 55 has grown by an astonishing 175.3%.
Our team at FamilyLink.com is particularly excited as social networks attract older users because our mission is to connect families to each other using technology, and the glue that keeps most families (and extended families) together often happens to be the older female family members–moms and grandmas.
As they come into social networks in droves, a very large percentage of them do so with the primary purpose of communicating with their children and grandchildren–and not necessary just with their friends.
My mom started using Facebook actively just a few days after Christmas. During the holidays we had a big family discussion about how we could all keep in touch better. Everyone talked about their Blackberries, iPhones, Facebook and even Twitter.
I am now friends on Facebook with my mom, my siblings, my 82-year old aunt, and dozens of cousins, children of cousins, nieces, nephews, and other extended family. And we all use We’re Related. In fact, the primary way we found each other was through this application.
Time Magazine published a “Nerd World” column this week titled “Facebook is for Old People” in which author Lev Grossman listed 10 reasons (all in jest) why older people love Facebook. Reason #7 was:
We have children. There is very little that old people enjoy more than forcing others to pay attention to pictures of their children. Facebook is the most efficient engine ever devised for this.
That’s pretty funny. But more based in reality than Grossman’s claim that old people want to force others to see pictures of their children is the fact that most older people care more about their family members than younger people do and they themselves want to continually see new family photos.
Young people are busy with school, friends, and work. All of life is ahead of them, and they are optimistic about the future. It’s well known that college students phone home mainly when they are out of money. 
On the other hand, as we grow older, everything changes. What once was important in high school, college, and in our work years, no longer seems to matter so much. We have so many more memories to think about and we become more thoughtful about the past. As we age, watching children (and from what I hear, grandchildren) grow, and learn, and experience life, and staying in touch with our own remaining family members, becomes the most interesting and meaningful part of our own lives.
I think there is quantifiable evidence for this. While working at a previous company (from 1998-2002) my team discovered that the older people were the more times per month they logged into their private family web sites. It was pretty astonishing to see this hold true even for people up into their 80s.
Because older people are flocking to Facebook, the We’re Related application (by FamilyLink.com) has jumped in the last few months to become the #2 most popular application on Facebook as measured by Weekly Active Users. For a few days, it was #1 in daily active users, but that number fluctates often as various apps experience occasional surges in traffic.
When we launched We’re Related in October 2007, we reached our first million users in 29 days, and our second million a few weeks later. We were surprised that our application spread so quickly, especially because Facebook had already clamped down on the “unlimited invites” that had helped the first successful apps reach millions of users in just weeks or months. Our cap was 20 invites per user per day, so Facebook users with a thousand friends couldn’t tell all of them about our app at once. And yet we still grew like crazy.
But what surprised us even more was our discovery that half of our first two million users were from Canada, and that 17 of our top 20 cities were in Canada. We teased our product manager (who is from Canada) about making this happen on purpose.
We discovered, through further investigation, that even though the US population is about 9.1 times greater than the population of Canada, at that time there were actually more women over age 55 in Canada using Facebook than here in the US.
Then it made sense. Older people, especially women, love the We’re Related application. In fact, it might be the primary reason they use Facebook — like it was for my mom.
We weren’t 100% sure why Facebook had more members 55+ in Canada than in the U.S. But this is our theory: since Facebook was originally for college students (first at Harvard, then at 60 Ivy League schools, then for all US colleges and universities) and then for US high school students, and only in September 2006 was opened to the general public, the perception was widespread in the U.S. was that Facebook was for young people only.
In fact, the famous NY Times article from June 7, 2007 titled “omg, my mom joined facebook” reflected a reality at the time in the U.S. that young people didn’t want older people (especially their moms) to see what they were doing online.
For some reason in Canada Facebook spread quickly to all ages. Maybe it hadn’t really taken off in Canadian universities. Maybe Facebook had launched in U.S. high schools but not in Canadian high schools. Or maybe Canadian youth don’t have as many things to hide from their parents.
Who knows? But whatever the reason, there were literally more men and women over 55 in Canada than in the US on Facebook.
When We’re Related launched, it became especially popular in Canada, probably because the large population of moms and grandmas embraced it and shared it.
We don’t know if our growth will continue at the current rate, but if it does we will have more than 50 million users by the end of this year. Not bad for an app that will turn 2 years old in October.
The challenge for us now, is to design a user experience that meets the widely varying needs of millions of families. Families come in all different shapes and sizes.
We are anxious to create an experience that works for your family, that helps you stay in touch regularly with your siblings, parents, children, and extended family, in meaningful ways.
We would like to know what you want We’re Related to do for you and your family. How can we make it better?
Please comment on this blog about what features or design changes would lead you to use We’re Related regularly to keep in touch with your relatives.
We would really appreciate your suggestions.
Or, if you want to vote on each other’s ideas, please visit our customer feedback forum on Uservoice, where thousands of our active users are suggesting ideas and voting on them.
Please let us know what we can do for your family.
Facebook and iPhone apps selling like hotcakes
Filed under: Business Models, Facebook Applications, Mobile Applications
And by that, I mean, one at a time.
You’d think that by now hundreds of popular Facebook and iPhone applications would have caught the interest of older established companies that weren’t able to move quickly enough to capitalize on these two most exciting development platforms.
You’d think that established brands with profitable business models would realize that perhaps one of the best ways to reach an audience of millions of potential new customers is through social networks and mobile platforms.
Today brought the news that The Knot, Inc., a 12-year old publicly traded media company that started out as TheKnot.com has acquired the #1 wedding application on Facebook — the Weddingbook. The Knot has roughly $100 million in revenue and a 10% profit margin. It’s market cap is $229 million but it doesn’t have a very exciting 5-year stock chart.
I think this was a very smart move by The Knot. Weddingbook was developed by WedSnap founder Kevin Lister in June 2007, a month after Facebook Platform launched. (I’m three degrees away from him on LinkedIn, but have never met him.)
I saw a several news reports and tweets today about the acquisition, but no one has speculated yet on the acquisition price. I hope it was a lot. Cleary Weddingbook represented a possible disruption to TheKnot.com, so I hope the founding team and investors were appropriately rewarded for how quickly they capitalized on the Facebook opportunity.
Also today, TechCrunch reported that the MindMaker iPhone app was acquired by German mind mapping application builder MeisterLabs. Again, no price was discussed. TechCrunch is aware of only three iPhone-app related acquisitions so far.
Maybe some highly publicized Facebook and iPhone app acquisitions will lead to even more acquisitions. Maybe the hotcakes will start selling faster now as large established companies shift their budgets from traditional advertising to more cost-effective customer acquisition strategies.
I think one of the problems is that so many of the early Facebook and iPhone apps have been rather silly and fluffy, and not easily connected to traditional business models. I mean, what major company would buy Vampires (although maybe the Twilight author could leverage that one) or Werewolves, Pass a Drink, Who Has the Biggest Brain, or Bumper Sticker? And what company would buy one of the plethora of iPhone fart applications?
Actually, maybe there is a potential acquirer for each one of these, now that I think about it. Any major gaming company would be happy to own Vampires or Werewolves or any of the hundreds of other popular Facebook gaming apps. Pass A Drink, with its 7.6 million Monthly Active Users could be acquired by six alcoholic beverages companies with billion dollar plus market caps. Biggest Brain, of course, should be acquired by the maker of Trivial Pursuit or the popular Cranium game. And Bumper Sticker should be acquired by Cafe Press. And finally, the top fart application for the iPhone should be acquired by the maker of the Whoopee Cushion, which I just discovered through Wikipedia was invented in Canada in 1930, just in time to make the Great Depression seem a little less depressing (or more depressing in a way, if you were the target of the practical joke and were the one doing the depressing.)
I could see some of the large online dating sites SNAPping up (pun intended) leading social app developers who are going to be disruptive to their business models, but some apps won’t easily fit into a parent brand, the way Weddingbook does so nicely with The Knot.
I would not at all be surprised to see more and more marriages between traditional brands and online applications. It is increasingly difficult to launch a new successful social or mobile application, simply because there are so many thousands of apps already, so the space is become more and more crowded. So it makes a lot of sense for larger companies to be on the lookout for apps that already have initial traction, and could be rebranded or redesigned to fit into the parent company’s overall product or marketing strategy.
In other words, look for the hotcakes to really start selling this year.
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