This has got both its good points and bad points, it is good for the user, as it will in theory provide relevant things that the user will actually be interested in and may actually want to buy, meaning the higher chance of actually clicking on the adverts and maybe go the whole way through to buy a product, it will save companies money when it comes to advertising as they wont be wasting money advertising in places that will not return them any customers, such as websites that are completely unrelated to the topic or on sites that users of that age group will not be likely to visit.

The bad points about the personalization is that it will generate a very unfair market, certain things are much more popular than others, which means that the majority of traffic will look at things related to them, then hence the adverts and personalization on the page will only display things about them, meaning small firms and niche markets will struggle with online advertising, as they may rarely be discovered and their market share may never grow. This will also decrease the variety of advertisements that are displayed, some people may find things through advertisements that they previously didn’t know about, or may not see adverts about things they like but do not search for online.

In my opinion the personalization of websites should be done, but only for some of the adverts on the page, and the rest should be done in the normal fashion so that the market will remain fair.

An example of a page with normal advertising, the advert for sky plus, just on the homepage of Facebook.

An example of a page where the advertisements are personalized to the sort of thing a user of the site will be looking for.

Here is a list of keywords or phrases that are best suited to finding FaceBook.

“Find a friend”

This search term seemed to be highly related with facebook, showing a significant number of related results as shown in the screenshot below, so I belive this is an effecive way to find the website.

“Online Photo”

This term is used greatly to find facebook, as it allows users to upload photos online and all of the friends they have added on the site are able to view and comment on them.

“Social Network”

This term is used the most to find facebook, as it is a very general term that is used to find a vast amount of social network

“Application”

This keyword is used quite frequently as Facebook has got many different games and applications available to its users, some of which are very popular online

“Social Media”

This is a term used for all the social networking sites that allow users to upload and view things like videos, statements, photographs, and would be a very effective keyword for Facebook to use.

“Status Update”

A term used a lot in the social networking industry and is normally the main point to websites such as this so it is a very useful keyword.

“Farmville”

One of the most popular online games at the minute and is only available on Facebook, so using this as a keyword will link to the Facebook Site

“Fan Pages”

Each band or actor has normally got a fan page on Facebook, so this phrase is essential in a search engine

“Facebook Search”

Essential keyword as it allows people to instantly search for users or fan pages etc, directly from the search engine, making finding people much faster and easier.

“Connect with family”

This is a common phrase used, possibly by relatives that have moved to a different country etc, to communicate with ones back home

These keywords I believe sum up most of the workings of Facebook and all of the likely things a user is likely to search for trying to find the Facebook website.

“Facebook” – Returns Facebook as the first result

“Face” – Returns Facebook as the first result

“book” – Returns Facebook as the first result

“Social Network” – Facebook Listed 3^rd in results

“Farmville” – opens Farmville website which then links to Facebook, Facebook website appears 3^rd in results

“Bebo” – Facebook appears nowhere on the first page

“MySpace” – Facebook appears nowhere on the first page

There are many words which will link a user to the Facebook website, and I believe that it is one of the easiest websites to find using a search engine, as the name and any combination of the parts of the name will bring up the site, from what I can see there are no paid for advertisement results when searching for things to do with Facebook, other than for searching for Farmville, which is one of the most popular games on Facebook at the present time, most links that are not just links directly to the Facebook website normally take you to another website which then links to the Facebook website so it can also be found this way. When searching for competitors there was no sign of Facebook on any of the search pages or any paid for search results to do with any competitors, but when searching for social networking Facebook is the top one there, being below only Wikipedia which is providing a definition of social networking, and with MySpace being a sponsored link at the side but not actually appearing in the search results on the first page. This clearly shows me that Facebook is by far the dominant Social Networking website and is extremely easy to find using a search engine.

Cloud computing is likely to have a massive impact on e commerce, as at the current moment in time many firms are having to fork out huge amounts of money to pay for the licenses to the various software suites they need to use in order for the business to function, and also need to have servers on site for the software to be installed in, which again adds to the costs of cooling, the actual place they are stored in and the maintenance charges for looking after them. Having it set out this way does have its advantages however, such as them having full control over the programs and the servers so they can change and modify them to exactly suit the firms needs.

If businesses where to start to use the cloud they would firstly save a lot of money on the actual cost of the software, as it can then be paid per usage or rented from the cloud websites for a relatively small amount of money, the software can then be used like it installed on the machine the person is using, it also means that the firm would only be paying for what they use. This would also save on the costs of storage, cooling and maintenance as the servers are owned and run by the government, so it would be very reliable and close to 100% uptime.

Over time I think that cloud computing will become the standard way to use applications as it will be cheaper in the long run for most users, as well as the software always being up to date and very reliable.Things may also become more of a standard so there will be less compatibility issues as users will be able to use the same software package no matter what computer they are using. It also has large environmental benefits, as the excess heat the servers make can be used to make electricity, or due to the location will be cooled using natural resources, which then saves on electricity.

There is lots of evidence of value networks in Facebook, as it is a social networking website. When someone signs up to the website they can then use all of its applications and view the various adverts available on the site, these activities can then be posted on other places such as friends pages, giving a sense of community within the website which again will make people continue to use it . There are various other companies that make adverts and applications for use with Facebook, which use the amount of traffic Facebook provides to their advantage.

Evidence that the supply chain is efficient is the amount of people playing the applications, some of the big ones, “Mafia Wars” and “Farmville” are ones that have been tried by just about everyone that has got a Facebook profile, this shows that they are making applications that are relevant and wanted by the groups of people using Facebook, and the programs are updated regularly with new features, extra revenue is then earned by selling things inside of these applications.

Facebook at the minute is the dominant social networking site, but there are other large ones, such as Bebo, which from my own knowledge, its popularity is going downhill due to a large amount of users moving to Facebook, largely due to its more grown up user interface and just the ease of doing things. Facebook is over time being introduced to many more sites and applications that allow them to post things on your Facebook page, its things like this that is keeping Facebook fresh, as it is now basically available everywhere, even when not on the actual Facebook website.

The Threat of the entry of new competitors

With the internet being open to anyone to use, it is very easy for similar products to appear that could very much cause threat to any business, Facebook’s main growing rival at the minute would be twitter, a micro blogging sight that works very like the status updates on Facebook, except unlike Facebook many people are drawn to it due to the fact that many celebrities have and use the service quite regularly and any normal person can “follow” them to get updates from them, Facebook has got fan pages for people but its not the same as they are mostly companies that just bombard people with information about upcoming products. Most websites and applications now also have twitter support as well as support for Facebook, which shows just how much it has grown in a short amount of time I expect its popularity to increase rapidly.

The Intensity of competitive rivalry

Facebook is not overly different than any other networking site, myspace and bebo let you do basically all of the same things, just with different user interfaces. Facebook is however the one that introduces the most new products, things like the iphone applications means that more people will use the service whilst on the move, something that the competing sites do not have. Facebook is continuously updated with new features and novelty items that will keep people visiting the site, just to see what has changed. Facebook is also now available in the majority of countries world wide and is available in over 70 languages, 2 of which are novelty languages, English Pirate, and English Upside down, both of which have no real use, but will make people use Facebook over other sites.

The Bargaining power of Customers/buyers

Large amounts of users on Facebook are likely to be able to have quite an effect on Facebook, as it relies largely on the network effect, if one person was to leave it to try a different site, so might their friends, then their friends friends, and in a short space of time a very large amount of people may have left, leaving Facebook to try and find ways to out do its competitors further to try and get the market share back. Many firms do however have spaces in Facebook which means that there is very little reason to leave it for any reason as everything is already available without signing up for anything now, benefits Facebook, but also the other companies due to the hugh amounts of traffic that Facebook offers.

The Bargaining power of suppliers

The main suppliers of Facebook would be of physical computer components and internet usage, with a company the size of Facebook its likely that their computers and servers would be updated quite regularly due to the speed of growth, so there will be many suppliers that want to supply to youtube, which will mean they will offer their best possible price to try and get them to buy from them. With the ISP that Facebook uses they probably charge for the amount of traffic, again Facebook will be going to bring a lot of business to the ISP company so again there will probably be some sort of price war to get their business.

Registering for FaceBook is an extremely easy process, which involves the user going to the main homepage of the website, where they will then find they don’t even have to click anymore buttons to be able to register, the text input boxes for you to put your details in are right on the homepage, once these are filled in click “Sign Up” and that is your user account created. The initial homepage where the user first types in their details however is not secure, its only after the button to sign up has been clicked that the page becomes secure, displaying the padlock and the address bar changing to https showing that it is secure, which means the details that have been filled in are now being sent over a secure connection, so as far as I am concerned Facebook is a very secure site.

FaceBook does not heavily relies on the use of cookies for how it runs, it may use cookies to see when the last time that the user logged on, and to provide relevant adverts by studying what groups the user is  member of on FaceBook. But i think the website relies more on studying patterns in usage and patterns in friends in order to provide suggestions to things the user may be interested in or other people they may want to add as a friend.

Stats taken from:

http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

http://socialmediastatistics.wikidot.com/bebo

facebook itself does not actualy sell physical products as it gets most of its revenue from occasional adverts and other sources such as game add ons, there are no actual adverts untill a user makes an account and loggs in, which some may arrive at the side of the screen or the top depending on what the user is doing, facebook will then get paid if the user clicks on any of these things. The next thing is that there are many games available to play on facebook, some of which require physical money to buy add ons for use within the game, which facebook will then get revenue from these. There are also sponsored groups within facebook that companies will pay money for.

Facebook has got one of the strongest mobile support systems from any company, with over 65 million users using the mobile service, this is greatly helped by devices such as the iphone and googles android operating system as these have dedicated applications for facebook, and it found that users that use facebook on their mobile phones are over 50% more active than users that dont. I think this is a market that will continue to grow over time as more and more people start to use the service on their mobile devices, with facebook possably needing to make more of the desktop sites features available to the mobile users.

Facebook now has over 300 million users around the world and was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Facebooks has got over 900 employees and 2 headquarters, one in California and one in Dublin. It has a revenue of of more than $300 million. It has also been expanded to the point that alot of larger businesses and retailers now have facebook pages to advertise their own products and update customers on new products and the likes, as over time this is proving to be much more effective than sending out email newsletters.

The facebook website was not started up by a business as such, but a group of students from Harvard University, in Massachusetts. The site origionally was only for use for students of the university but was then made public for anyone to join over time. The Facebook website is available on the internet via a computer, via mobile phone and now has its own dedicated iphone, blackberry and android applications so it is accessable from basically anywhere in the world, which again is expanding its user base greatly.

This basic trend that I find is that the amount of people in the uk is steadily increasing as the years go on, with in 2006 there was just over 14million households in the uk that had the Internet, with this rising in 2007 to just over 15million, then in 2008 it was just under 16.5 million households.

This shows that there is a steady increase of 1 million households each year. The main reason for this is the introduction of broadband, which means that homes can have very high speed internet and as time goes on it is becoming much cheaper, somtimes even beig thrown in for free on telephone packages. Because of these advancements it now means that only 9% of the uk’s population is without Internet, and this number is steadily decreasing as more and more people are seeing the benefits of things like the BBC iplayer, internet banking and shopping online.

Graph to show percentage of uk with broadband and narrowband

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/images/charts/8.gif

Graph to show world Internet usage

http://www.trefor.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/internet-growth.jpg

As you can see from the graphs Internet usage is growing and will continue to expand further in years to come

Internet sites used to gather this information where
www.statistics.gov.uk
www.google.co.uk
www.emarketer.com