The Blog of Leon Apel » Social Networks

Hyperinflation or Raising Interest Rates?

admin — Sun, 10 May 2009 05:06:04 +0000

There has been ongoing uncertainty about whether the federal reserve would use monetary policy to create one or more of following outcomes to deal with the financial crisis:

1) Allow Hyperinflation – as the fed continues to expand the money supply, long term treasury auctions fail to receive buyers (eg. foreign investors don’t trust they’ll be paid back in non devalued dollars), inflation would naturally occur.

2) The Federal Reserve will Increase Interest rates (called the "overnight rate") – this will be used to as an indirect means to restrict money supply. Specifically, banks will receive "increasingly expensive" money and will likely cut off many high risk borrowers/restrict borrowing to only the best candidates.

The Federal Reserve via Ben Bernanke provides an argument for a slower policy to protect consumers while indicating his preference for option 2):

Either way, private banks have phenomenal power to shift policy, despite the Fed’s decisions. In particular, the massive Credit Default Swap market will change the landscape of world economics. "The value of the credit default insurance market is now much larger than the domestic stock market, mortgage securities market and United States Treasuries market" (source).

More Statistics From Facebook

admin — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 00:54:15 +0000

Statistics

General Growth

More than 57 million active users
An average of 250,000 new registrations per day since Jan. 2007
An average of 3% weekly growth since Jan. 2007
Active users doubling every 6 months

User Demographics

Over 55,000 regional, work-related, collegiate, and high school networks
More than half of Facebook users are outside of college
The fastest growing demographic is those 25 years old and older
Maintain 85 percent market share of 4-year U.S. universities

User Engagement

Sixth-most trafficked site in the United States (comScore)
More than 65 billion page views per month
More than half of active users return daily
People spend an average of 20 minutes on the site daily (comScore)

Applications

No. 1 photo sharing application on the Web (comScore)
Photo application draws more than twice as much traffic as the next three sites combined (comScore)
More than 14 million photos uploaded daily
More than 6 million active user groups on the site

International Growth

Canada has the most users outside of the United States, with more than 7 million active users
The U.K. is the third largest country with more than 7 million active users
Remaining top 10 countries in order of active users (outside of the U.S., Canada and UK): Australia, Turkey, Sweden, Norway, South Africa, France, Hong Kong

Platform

Over 7,000 applications have been built on Facebook Platform
100 new applications added per day
More than 80% of Facebook members have used at least one application built on Facebook Platform

Fresh Facebook Statistics From September 2007

admin — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 16:30:32 +0000

The following are fresh facebook facts acquired from my friend who works in Facebook’s Canadian marketing:

Audience:
• Over 47 million active users monthly.
• 19% have college as their primary network.
• 25% have geography as their primary network.
• 12% have high school as their primary network.
• 1% have work as their primary network.

Engagement:
•57 billion total page views per month (#6 among all sites).*
•50% of active users return every day.
•2.4 average visits per visitor per day, 22 visits per month.*
•21 minutes per visitor per day, 192.5 minutes per month.

OpenSocial – Google’s New Facebook Killer?

admin — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 16:25:29 +0000

OpenSocial is a set of three common APIs, defined by Google with input from partners, that allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks:

Profile Information (user data)
Friends Information (social graph)
Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)"

Read This Tech Crunch Article About New Facebook Killer Called OpenSocial