The Industry Standard - Facebook overtakes MySpace in international traffic - Comments

Josh Dilworth270852 — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 16:02:27 -0400

Okay, some more details. In terms of international traffic, Facebook was at 100.7 million uniques in January, and MySpace was at 109.3 million.

According to comScore, as of Friday, Facebook is now at 109.2 and MySpace is at 116.6. The gap is still decreasing, but the incumbent remains in the lead.

The community was, as usual, correct. Thanks for your patience!

Josh Dilworth270852 — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 11:42:29 -0400

Hey y'all -- we'll judge this either later today or Monday -- need the most up-to-date info to make its way into comScore's tables just to be sure. But just so you know, it looks like the community was right;) Thanks!

Josh Dilworth270852 — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 10:35:12 -0400

And Bradley, Josh here -- to answer your question about comScore, we have a login and are able to pull the data needed to judge this prediction. Can't disclose at this point obviously how it is looking as of this morning. comScore does do regular press releases announcing notable trends (which are free to everyone). It will be interesting to see if they do a release on this item as an update to their initial one.

If you want to stop me from

Aaron Frias — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 22:18:10 -0400

If you want to stop me from palying the Industry Standard like a day trader on the stock market, then my recommendation would be to disable the "cashout" feature.

Regarding the original

Ian Lamont — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:47:49 -0400

Regarding the original prediction, Industry Standard contributor Melissa Chang has analyzed international competition between MySpace and Facebook, and predicted a winner in Facebook vs. MySpace: The battle for global social network dominance

I try... :)

Bradley Baker — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 08:29:02 -0400

I try... :)

Very interesting, Bradley.

Eric Hill113600 — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:26:51 -0400

Very interesting, Bradley. We've gotten several requests for notifications, but your ideas are very intriguing indeed.

Kevin Railsback just showed

Bradley Baker — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 23:55:38 -0400

Kevin Railsback just showed what a chunk of money can do... His S$1.6mil dropped it from ~30% to ~6%. I cashed out my position of about the same amount, and then put S$1.1mil back in. Only way currently to take a bit of money off the table, although it guarantees a trading loss doing so.

@Eric what I was envisioning is a page where it lists the 10 (or 30, or some other N on that order) comments that have been posted, regardless of where the comment occurred or who wrote it. With a link to the location of the post. And, presumably, the author name/icon/title/date, etc. This would also work if it only included the first, say, 3 lines of the comment. Enough to get the main point and to determine whether one is interested in clicking through to read the rest of the comment and/or thread.

I would almost certainly turn off the notifications that you mention, but I want to be able to quickly identify and read any new posts when I choose to come to the site. I'll read everything*, probably daily, if it's convenient here, but I don't want it coming to my email box. While I wouldn't use any of the notification system, an obvious extension to it would be to allow users to tag predictions that they want to be notified about. Basically let people opt in to getting comments the same way they would if they were the creator, without actually having been the creator.

Can't wait to see what you're cooking up for us.

* well, until we get a large enough community that reading EVERYTHING would get excessive.

@Bradley - regarding

Eric Hill113600 — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 23:39:23 -0400

@Bradley - regarding comments, what you'll see in about 3 weeks (fingers crossed) are notifications when someone replies to you, or notifications if someone comments on a suggestion that you created (you'll be able to toggle the notifications on/off if you find them annoying). I'm not sure I 100% follow your request, though. Do you mean a list of, say, the 5 most recent comments posted on any prediction? We have a couple of comments widgets on the site, but nothing quite like that. It could be a useful tool to be placed in everyone's portfolio (My Predictions link). If that's what you're proposing, I'll float that idea over to the crew.

Also, I want to let you all know a little bit about some of what's in development to whet your appetite. We're busily working on a "karma" system which will allow the community members to value others' contributions, and intersect this with your rank. I don't want to give too much away for now, but Can's point #2 shouldn't be too much of a concern when we roll that out. We'll eventually have a team blog, too, so we can fill you all in there about what's going on and not fill up our comments section with these types of tidbits. Our newsletters also will pick up some of the load when important new site features roll out.

Oh, and the first phase of the prize program is just a few weeks away.

By the way, you guys simply rock!

Eric Hill113600 — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 23:06:05 -0400

@Can, besides the fact that you gamed the system, your honesty has been recognized here at The Standard, hence the reason for the delay in dropping the hammer as we've talked about you quite a bit around here. =) I'll talk to you off-line about what we propose going forward.

As for the detection system, what I'll say publicly is that, yes, we have one. Secondly, we are pumping it with steroids, and it will be quite sensitive going forward.

Also, we've been playing with the tuning during these early stages and will be making more adjustments as needed to find that happy balance. It's a challenge, as we want new users to feel empowered, but obviously richer veterans of the site can be seen to have immense power.

Lastly, yes - we very much plan to have a forum on the site in the next few months. Lots of other exciting developments rolling out in the next two months. We'll work as hard as we can to get a forum in place this summer, if not much sooner.

@Eric: Got it. Hadn't

Bradley Baker — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 13:59:19 -0400

@Eric: Got it. Hadn't assumed you meant multiple-account manipulation (what Can K describes). I thought you were referring to wave creation/riding (what Aaron describes).

Thanks for both the continued responsiveness and what appears to be continuing efforts to a) improve the site, and b) listen to user feedback.

It'll hopefully make your lives easier once we have the user forum. I'm amazed that you all can effectively glean useful feedback from what start as prediction-specific comments threads and then occasionally drift into site feedback and site feedback discussion, but it appears that you manage to. Must require a lot of reading through all kinds of comments.

While we've converted this (partially) into a feedback/suggestions thread, is there a way (either currently or planned) to get a list of the N most recent comments posted to any prediction thread? I'd certainly browse such a list and it would help find what could be otherwise obscure comments, making them more useful for all involved.

@ Can Koklu: Merely posting comments shouldn't have the type of concentrated effect that you describe. Either the comments are pointing out real news -- in which case it's reasonable for the market to react and all you're doing is helping that happen sooner (ie be more responsive in the correct direction) -- or you're posting false information -- in which case a) regular users will start to ignore you and/or warn off other, and/or b) you'll be sanctioned much the way people are in the real world. If false information becomes common place (a la pump and dump posts on Yahoo! Finance message boards or stock picking email spam) then it'll merely result in all such information being viewed as unreliable. People may use Google News, etc. to verify or they may ignore such posts, but either way the false information should have limited effect. Other than getting repeat offenders banned.

Multiple accounts working in concert, on the other hand, can easily move stocks. Especially if the amount of money available in a reasonable number is enough for a significant move. As the site population grows and individuals get less power vs. the community (which may be difficult when the top people have the port size of dozens of average people) this will, hopefully, become more difficult. And in any case should be fairly easily detectable (or at least difficult to make hard to detect).

Wow.. Sorry I guess I

Can Koklu Can — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 07:23:38 -0400

Wow.. Sorry I guess I underestimated how much I made from gaming this thing:

04.10.2008 Cash out at 44% odds S$417,064.16
04.10.2008 Bet in favor at 30% odds S$287,487.68
04.10.2008 Cash out at 42% odds S$287,486.50
04.10.2008 Bet in favor at 27% odds S$181,597.66

I know it was wrong but I

Can Koklu Can — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 07:21:57 -0400

I know it was wrong but I just couldn't help myself. I wanted to see if it could be done (and to be honest, I wanted more $). I filled out a bug report afterwards explaining what I had done and have been waiting for the sky to fall since then..

Here's the lowdown:

I don't know how closely you've been following this prediction but last week I created a couple of extra accounts and gamed it. I simply created a few dummy accounts and purchased the stock to push the cashout yield higher. I then cashed out with my main account (followed by the dummy accounts) and then bought again with the main account (and then the dummy accounts). I'm not sure but I think I did this 3 times and within 10-20 minutes I had more than doubled my $.

The jumps in the odds were insane.. Just by dropping a few hundred thousand on the table I could push the odds between 10% and 60%..

This is simple stock market manipulation and -obviously, shouldn't be allowed. The thing is, I didn't really need to make bets with the dummy accounts. I could also have just posted 5-6 messages that could sway other bidders. I can imagine that the multiple betting can be detected and penalized, but how are you going to fix the second issue? (It's not easy, stock markets still haven't found a surefire way to detect this..)

A more logarithmic (?!) algorithm is a must in my opinion.. I didn't understand how the concept of time can be incorporated into this though..

Thanks for the feedback,

Daniel Fort — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 21:02:32 -0400

Thanks for the feedback, Eric. You aren't hiding a forum where these things can be discussed, are you?

Eric Hill113600 — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 18:17:12 -0400

@Bradley - what I'm talking about is a scenario where one user creates multiple accounts to attempt to "game" the system. We have alerts in place and are upgrading the sensitivity as I write this. We currently believe in a policy of going after the individual wrong-doer(s), rather than halting a bet and hurting everyone involved. It's a tough call, as these markets are very fluid (and, it's not always 100% cut and dry as to what is going on, but rest assured we are monitoring this very closely).

We will know quite soon who (if anyone) has attempted to "cheat" their way to some easy money. Slapping a bunch of money down at the last minute is totally fair game, however. Creating multiple aliases to achieve those goals is not, and grounds for significant penalties, and possible site banishment, loss of S$/status, etc. You'll see more soon on that in an update to our Terms and Conditions.

That's what I was talking about.

@Bradley and @Daniel have really hit the nail on the head in terms of the sweetspot tuning. It's a bit of an art form. I really like this idea: ""it would also be nice to be able to pare positions without completely cashing out." We had that in place on the site prior to our launch, and should be able to bring it back in the very near future as we finish off some Trading Page updates.

Facebook overtakes MySpace in international traffic

The Standard — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 23:40:12 -0400

The community was right again. See the comments section below for more details. The gap is closing, but we're not there yet. --The Industry Standard

Peter Kafka of Silicon Alley Insider makes some really interesting observations based on recent comScore data. While MySpace still has a large lead on Facebook in terms of uniques per month in the US, when it comes to international traffic Facebook has already passed MySpace in terms of uniques per day, and is poised to overtake the incumbant in terms of uniques per month in the very near future. The gap in international uniques per month is currently a mere 8% in favor of MySpace.

Facebook has been closing fast over the last year, and the question is -- perhaps not if, but when will Facebook seize the international traffic throne? Kafka offers more detail:

"Facebook continues to close rapidly on MySpace's visitor total: At 100.7 million uniques in January, Facebook is now just about 8% smaller than MySpace' 109.3 million. A year ago, MySpace's worldwide lead was nearly 4x."

This is a prediction that Facebook will overtake MySpace in terms of international traffic by April 18, as measured by comScore using the metric of uniques per month.