Two months back, I broke the story regarding Facebook overtaking Friendster in Malaysia and predicted that the surrounding countries in the region will also fall after. After looking at an updated world map of leading social networks in the globe (by Vincenzo Cosenza - translator of Facebook Marketing Bible in Italian), the domino effect is continuing across the whole of Southeast Asia. Facebook has now overtaken Friendster in Southeast except Thailand and Phillipines. Note that Hi5 is still the most dominant social network in Thailand, and Phillipines remains to be the last bastion for Friendster with their recent introduction of calling cards and mobile payments. How did that really happen given that Friendster received a fresh injection of funds from IDG Ventures SEA?

•  Design Interface of Facebook continues to bring new users to her platform: One of the key revolutions in online social networks in the 2.0 era, is the ability of users to be clairvoyant and view the activity of their friends. An example that I often used during my talks on online social networks from Barcamp to Unconference 2009, is that I can now know a lot about a friend who I have not been in touch for the longest time via the activity feed which was first introduced by Facebook. For example, if my friend has uploaded new baby pictures, I would know that his wife has just given birth. It is that kind of interaction that attracted Facebook users. Whereas in Friendster (see the activity feed picture I attached on the right), when I login, the first page that I am directed to is not the page which displayed the activity of my friends but my own user profile. To be fair, Friendster has recently incorporated a "Home" page. In fact, I believe that they have taken a leaf from the dashboard (or Home) page from Hi5.com with the way they display activity of other users connected to you. It is not that Friendster is losing the battle by not trying to catch up with Facebook in terms of functionalities, but rather the way how the users interact via a clean and well-designed interface in Facebook makes Friendster less appealing and starts losing users. In fact, I can easily point out two features which Friendster has imitated from Facebook but failed to gain traction within: groups and apps. Till date, BattleStations (one of the successful Singapore games on Facebook by Tyler Projects) has not done well after their app is launched on Friendster is one clear example.  
• Migration of Friendster users over to Facebook: The tipping point for Facebook happens in Sep-Oct 2006, where there is a lot of coverage from the mainstream media in Southeast Asia about the platform. In fact, when I was working with my students in National University of Singapore, most of them are organizing events using the Facebook event feature. Even when I first signed on Facebook, I did not really use the account until I started getting a lot of friend requests via Facebook from my alma mater in UK. In fact, I can now safely say that the crossover of users from Friendster to Facebook and vice versa is asymmetrical with more flow going towards Facebook rather than Friendster. The interesting question now is why Facebook has not been able to supercede Hi5 in Thailand. We should probably explore this further.
• Why social networks in East Asia are not subjected to this Domino Effect: The social networks in the East Asia bloc are making more headways against Facebook as compared to those in Southeast Asia (and they are few and far between local social networks). First of all, one should probably notice that the western social networks are dominant in Southeast Asia and India. India is former British colony and also have a huge English speaking populace, and hence a western social network like Orkut (owned by Google) dominating should not be much of a surprise.The key is that most of the countries in this region are former western colonies and the local populace tend to follow the western social networks with little need for localization. A more subtle reason, I suspect is to do with the business model. In the East Asia bloc, the main revenue model is not just online advertising per se. In fact, most media buyers are still thinking that the only thing they can do in online advertising is just banner ads. They are more conservative in adopting new and radical approaches and given the limitation of micropayments, the situation gets much worse. So, the western social networks may dominate Southeast Asia, but the monetization does not come along while the East Asian social networks are fully monetized from dollar to dollar and cents to cents. 

So, the story continues. Speaking of which, if Friendster will to fall in the future and Facebook will to set up shop in Asia, will they be still hiring the same group of executives who did not successfully revive the company against the onslaught from Facebook?

P/S: I have just received a note that the Social Networking World Forum for Asia will be held in Grand Hyatt Hotel, Singapore on 22-23 Sep 2009. I will suggest that a forum like this will be helpful in knowledge transfer from East Asia to Southeast Asia to explain why the social networks in the East Asia bloc are monetizing better than their western counterparts. Perhaps, brand marketers and media buyers should start to move beyond banner ad online advertising for a change.

After listening to Dan Ariely's TED talk on our buggy moral code, I become interested in his research on behavioral economics. During a transit flight in Frankfurt airport back to Singapore after my trip to Monte Carlo, I managed to bought myself a copy of his book "Predictably Irrational" (and you can hear the story what prompted him to write the book in another TED talk entitled "Are we in control of our own decisions?"). Upon reading the book, I found that he was basically reiterating the examples from the book during the TED talk. It's a fascinating book providing a different perspective on how we make decisions using the combined discipline of psychology and economics. In fact, you will be convinced by his reasoning why there is hidden rationale behind people performing the acts of cheating and dishonest behaviour. So, I thought I might just summarize two interesting concepts that popped up in this book:

• The strange truth about Relativity in decision making: In the book, Ariely explained that we tend to focus on compare things with one another but also tend to compare things that are easily comparable while avoiding comparing things that cannot be compared easily. In his model, he explained by giving a person two options A and B. By placing an additional option or decoy (-A), which is similar to A and looks slightly better than B, the individual will tend to choose A as a result. In the book, he used the following example from the subscription options available for "The Economist" magazine: (Option A) Print and Web Subscription priced at US$125, (Option -A) Print Subscription priced at US$125 and (Option B) Web Subscripton priced at US$59. Since the decision is originally between (A) and (B), with the introduction of (-A), the individual will end up picking (A) given that it looks like a viable choice.
• The cost of social and market norms: I appreciate the distinction made by Ariely on the two worlds characterized by social and market exchanges respectively. There are different norms that attributes to different relationships. Once if you make a mistake in the social norm by introducing market norms into social exchanges. I thought the example on "the most expensive sex is free sex" in the book. The unfortunate fact is when a social norm collides with a market norm, the social norm goes away for a long time, i.e. social relationships are not easy to re-invigorated. The cases on how corporation introduced social norms to make workers more dedicated to the business and open source movements gave us some intrinsic insights on how these two different norms operate. It did prompt me to realize the distinction between bloggers and journalists. Bloggers gain trust and credibility through the quality of their content (social norm), while journalists writes articles to earn a living (market norm). Once a blogger overstepped and become more commericalized by writing too much advertorials, that social norm may be violated. 

Dan Ariely's "Predictably Irrational" is definitely worth a read and if you are not convinced by my recommendation, you can always watch the TED videos (and his talk on the buggy code is one of my all time favourite TED talks which presents actually all you need to know in the last two chapters of the book) here to make an informed decision.