Case studies/Facebook

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Facebook is a popular social networking site. It is the fourth most popular web site in the world, just above Wikimedia.

Facebook has 300 million active members worldwide.[1] For comparison, Wikimedia has about 100,000 active contributors worldwide. Over 100 million people log in daily.[2]

As of late 2009, Facebook had over 1 million developers and more than 350,000 active applications, and more than 15,000 websites, devices and applications had implemented Facebook Connect since its general availability in December 2008.[3]

Facebook adoption worldwide visualization (July 23, 2010)

Strategic Oppportunities

As a rapidly growing web site that is more accessed than Wikimedia, Facebook presents several opportunities.

One opportunity would be to use Facebook to increase the reach of Wikimedia. Currently, Wikimedia receives about 102,000 image requests and 25,000 content page requests daily.[4] This number could go up if there were more Facebook Applications that leveraged Wikimedia content. For example, there could be applications that made it easy to share and discuss Commons images or Wikinews articles.[5]

(There is a template on strategy wiki that makes it easy to share wiki pages on Facebook and other social networking sites.)

Another opportunity would be to learn from Facebook and implement more social features. As part of this, Wikimedia could also integrate more tightly with Facebook. There are a few proposals for implementing Facebook Connect on Wikimedia sites, which would enable this tight integration.

See Also

  1. Improve quality content/Opportunities to expand content - topical#Important_trends
  2. Proposal:Can Wikimedia Become A 300 Million People Movement By 2020?#Motivation
  3. Optimize Wikimedia's operations#Technology_innovation_and_improved_usabilty
  4. Thread:Talk:Task force/Strategy/Facebook and wikimedia/reply (2)
  5. Thread:Talk:Task force/Strategy/Facebook and wikimedia/reply (3)