Facebook usage has grown to 200 million, but, while local growth mirrors this global trend, South Africans still do not use social networking efficiently.
Frost & Sullivan ICT practice analyst Lindsey Mc Donald says the efficacy of the site as a social networking tool is lost on local users. “Facebook is a fantastically effective social networking tool, but in SA, we don't use Facebook to its full functionality.”
Bandwidth - which she points out is more a South African problem than a Facebook problem - is not a hindrance to local Facebook usage. “The company [Facebook] should look at educating people about all its functionalities. Instead of just focusing on the UK, US and India - which are big Internet countries - they should also look at raising their profile in SA, which is a leading market.”
Mc Donald states the functionalities which have contributed to the site's increasing popularity - such as its ability to integrate with Twitter and Flickr - are not being maximised locally. Despite this, SA is still a tech-savvy country and even with persistently low Internet penetration levels, the country should still enjoy as high a profile as other countries.
Consumer rights
Launched in 2004, the networking site now boasts over 100 million user logons, at least once each day, while more than 3.5 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day.
Local membership numbers also mirror increasing Facebook use. The social networking site, which registered 87 000 local members in 2007 and 961 000 users in October 2008, has now grown to over a million users locally.
With more than 52 000 applications available on the site globally, the functionality of the site has increased considerably over the years. According to Facebook, every month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with platform applications and more than 5 000 applications have 10 000 or more monthly active users.
Advertising still remains a problem on the site, notes Mc Donald. Local users still have to contend with a range of advertising which is either unwanted or not specific to their location and interests. “You would think that even after you've installed Adsense, you would get relevant advertising - but you don't.”
Facebook also needs to get a better grip on its transparency, risk and control rights, says Mc Donald. Referring to an incident last month when local users' pages were forcibly translated into Afrikaans, she says the site still has some problems.
“This is one of the challenges Facebook is facing. It makes assumptions and sometimes ends up dictating to users instead of waiting for them to dictate what they would like,” she explains.
Regulations
The European Commission recently issued a warning to social networking sites - such as Facebook - to implement improved personal data protection policies. The EC said its main concern was that data collected from personal profiles was increasingly being used for commercial purposes and privacy rights were being ignored.
Mc Donald notes that currently there is a level of privacy available to consumers. On the profile pages, users are given the option of making certain information private, public or available to only family and friends. There are options available to users, she says.
Privacy issues at the social networking site came to the fore earlier this year, following policy changes made by Facebook. Users protested new policies saying they granted the social-networking site the ability to control their information forever, even after their accounts have been cancelled.
The problem is that the site tracks users' behaviour on the site, which is in turn used to target content to the user, says Mc Donald. “This is a growing privacy concern.”
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