Sheryl Sandberg Facebook’s COO recently delivered a talk at the London School Economics on how Facebook is changing the world. In the remainder of this post, I highlight some of they key points from the talk which you can watch above.

Facebook has over 30 million users in the UK.

The most recent innovation of the web,  is the shift from information retrieval to social discovery. This is the birth of the social web. When you browse Facebook, you are not necessarily looking for a subject matter – you are open to responses from others (Facebook’s newsfeed). We live our lives in social discovery and not in information seeking mode. The information web isn’t dying, it is just evolving.

Today, we are seeing two fundamental transformational shifts from the information web to the social web.

1. On the social web – you have real identity and real personalisation, its entirely personal

2. There’s a shift from information retrieval to social discovery (this is how Facebook works)

We live our lives mostly in social discovery, not really in information seeking mode. The social web is powering us as individuals in a totally different way. This is why we think people are spending so much time on Facebook. The average user in the UK spends about 7 hours per month on Facebook.

There’s another shift from the wisdom of crowds, where everything is done based on algorithms to the wisdom of friends, where we listen to recommendations of people we value. The social web doesn’t just connecting us to people we know, but it connects us to people we don’t know in ways that make them really human. This is a shift from the “what to the who”. Every single day 15 million people connect, and 50 million people ‘Like’ a page. Marketers have always known that the best form of advocacy is friend to friend.

Flickr Credit: Markus Pacher

As 2010 draws to a close we can take a look at some data that provides a window into the lives of the millions of people around the world who use Facebook everyday to share their lives, feelings and interests with friends. Here is a snapshot of 20 minutes on Facebook showing the huge number of photos, links and statuses posted everyday demonstrating how much the internet has changed the way we interact with our friends, making it easier for us stay in touch or share our interests, with Facebook being at the centre of that change in 2010.   Source: Democracy UK on Facebook

Relationship Statuses in 2010:

43,869,800 changed their status to single

3,025,791 changed their status to "it’s complicated"

28,460,516 changed their status to in a relationship

5,974,574 changed their status to engaged

36,774,801 changes their status to married

What 20 minutes on Facebook looks like

Shared links: 1,000,000 every 20 minutes

Tagged photos: 1,323,000

Event invites sent out: 1,484,000

Wall Posts: 1,587,000

Status updates: 1,851,000

Friend requests accepted: 1,972,000

Photos uploaded: 2,716,000

Comments: 10,208,000

Message: 4,632,000

Top Feel Good Story Shared on Facebook

Most Liked Celebrities:

Lady Gaga

24,712,169 people like this

Eminem

23,729,700 people like this

Megan Fox

19,575,080 people like this

Vin Diesel

19,425,325 people like this

Rihanna

18,903,844 people like this

Barack Obama

17,229,885 people like this

Bob Marley

17,168,034 people like this

Lil Wayne

17,004,850 people like this

Justin Bieber

16,779,874 people like this

Shakira

16,520,790 people like this

Last night I watched an advance UK preview of The Social Network, the Facebook movie. Having read Steve’s post a few week’s ago, I have been looking forward to seeing it as soon as it reached British shores.  This post describes my thoughts after watching the film and will contain spoilers. I’ve been a member of Facebook right back when it was called ‘The Facebook’, and I’ve been fascinated with it ever since. Aaron Sorkin did a great job with the screenplay and the outcome is a beautifully made film, dark in places though that’s a trademark to the genius of director David Fincher. The early part of the action takes places around the Kirkland campus at Harvard, and depicts Mark Zuckerberg as a socially awkward computer science nerd.

Jesse Eisenberg, plays Zuckerberg in a rather robotic performance, lacking any kind of human emotion during the early part of the movie. Once you get past the monotone voice, you do hear traces of Mark’s humorous dry wit. I found myself laughing out loud in certain places. The Winklevoss twins came across rather creepy, blessed by family fortune and the status that it brings. They are used to getting their own way until of course they meet Mark. He manages to give them the run around and take their idea of the Harvard Connection social network and build upon it. You  can’t help but feel they were naive suckers, despite their smugness.

Sean Parker’s (co-founder of Napster) role adds an injection of ‘coolness’ into the movie. Parker was the person that suggested that  ‘The’ from Thefacebook.com should be dropped to  simply read "Facebook". You can see how Zuckerberg becomes enthralled by Parker’s influence. Interestingly though, the film fails to mention that Parker became Facebook’s president up until the cocaine drugs bust.

Sorkin’s screenplay shows the painful build up of Eduardo Saverin’s betrayal by Zuckerberg, Sean Parker and the rest of the Facebook management team, it really stood out towards the end. In David Kirkpatrick’s Facebook Effect book (read my review here), Saverin came across as rather cold, socially awkward much like Mark himself. But above all he was a business machine, exceptionally shrewd and focused on making big contacts and even bigger deals. This didn’t really across within the movie. I genuinely felt sorry for him. Upon reading the Kirkpatrick book, I felt that Saverin was the villain. However, who is to really know the true story, apart from the main protagonists?  Overall, the 120 minutes of the movie passed by very quickly because I was engrossed. If you get the opportunity, I would certainly recommend you go and watch it. It’s a great story.

Last night, Facebook launched “Places”. You can see the announcement and launch video above. This new service from Facebook is similar to other Local Based Services (LBS) such as Foursquare and Gowalla, where you “Check in” at various locations and announce your presence.  Places allows you to see where your friends are and share your location in the real world. When you use Places, you’ll be able to see if any of your friends are currently checked in nearby and connect with them easily. You can check into nearby Places to tell your friends where you are, tag your friends in the Places you visit, and view comments your friends have made about the Places you visit.

Facebook is working with a small group of LBS developers including Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp and Booyah to build Places check ins into their own services. However, Facebook is also launching its own Places API, which means that Facebook will eventually become the key platform on which other location based applications will be be built upon. This is huge for Facebook and no doubt worrying for Twitter and Google.

Places works in conjunction with geo location supported smartphones and allows you to:

• Check in and your Places update, which will appear on the Places page, your friends’ News Feed and your Wall.
• Tag the friends you’re with so they can be part of your update.
• Appear in "Here Now" to friends and others nearby who are also checked in.
• Browse status updates of friends checked in nearby.

[Updated] Facebook releases, “Why to Check In?” video

It will be interesting to see the uptake of businesses on this new feature. To help them, Facebook has released a short guide to help advertisers, you can read the guide below.

Places creates a presence for your business’s physical store locations- encouraging your customers to share that they’ve visited your business by “checking in” to your Place. When your customer checks into your Place, these check-in stories can generate powerful, organic impressions in friends’ News Feeds, extending your brand’s reach to new customers.

Places-Advertisers

As of writing, the new service is not available outside of the US. However, a global rollout is expected over the coming months. Use Places on touch.facebook.com or the Facebook for iPhone.

NB. Places is currently available on phones that support W3 geolocation.