Buzzgain

Our advisor Louis Gray attended the Lifestreaming panel by MIT/Stanford where FriendFeed founder Brett Taylor presented in the session titled “Lifestreaming : The Real time web“.

There’s a very interesting statistic that Brett mentions in his presentation.

FriendFeed has stored over 100 million entries shared by FriendFeed users.

BuzzGain tracks about 82,353 (as of August 2008) users for friendfeed which counts the who’s who of technology early adopters as its users. According to our numbers, the “early adopters” for technology Web 2.0 startups ranges from the bleeding edge user to the cutting edge user, but still totals about ~1.7 Million globally. Over 64% of these are in the US.

These are your hyper enthusiasts, try anything first before anyone else does types of folks. You know; the kind that will stand in line for the Apple iPhone, 2 days ahead of schedule, the ones that are first to comment on every techcrunch post, and the ones that live blog every conference and seminar they attend.

BuzzGain tracks 1.7 Million “early adopters”, who frequently use (daily) about 4 Web2.0 applications and generate on average 1.7 posts daily (this is a big number BTW since the top users skew the numbers for the bottom of the list).

So how do we get 100,000,000 entries from 85K users? The active users of friendfeed (at least 1 comment weekly) per usage and one entry (either a blog post or a tweet, or a flickr photo upload) is about 61%. The rest either opened an account and never did anything with it, or just set it up and “forgot it”. For the sake of this argument I am going to assume every friendfeed account as an “active one”.

That works to about 1175 entries per user. Assuming they were live from Dec 2007 (or about 10 months), that works out to about ~117 entries per user per month. This is about 4 entries daily. So if you are an early adopter, you are blogging once daily, tweeting 2-4 times daily and maybe uploading photos once a week.

The average # of tweets (which is the # 1 Web 2.0 application used by Friendfeed users) per early adopter per day is 9.2 (roughly 79% of friendfeed users have a twitter profile).

My question on the number 100,000,000 from Brett is “So WHAT”?.

If every twitter user automatically posts their feed to friendfeed and that immediately constitutes an “entry” in friendfeed, why is that number even marginally useful?

Unless its just there to show a big number for the sake of showing momentum. Which I suspect is the case.