These days, 70% of Facebook users are from outside US. In Asia, Facebook is fast becoming the one the region’s leading social networks. Indonesia has the fourth highest number of Facebook users in the world, after US, UK and Turkey. With 18.9 million users, Indonesia is well ahead of Philippines, the country with 10.5 million Facebook users (refer to table below). This is followed by India (6.8 million), Taiwan (5.8 million) and Malaysia (5.1 million). In terms of penetration rate, Hong Kong has the highest “Facebook users per country population” rate in Asia, at 39%, followed by Singapore (38%), Taiwan (25%), Malaysia (18%) and Philippines (11%). The total Facebook users in Asia is 59.6 million, or about 15% of the global Facebook population.

(UPDATE: The % of Facebook Users over Total Online Users to provide a much richer perspective on Facebook use in Asia. Based on the suggestion by Gen Kanai – see his comment below.)

In Asia, the two dominant age groups on Facebook are “18 – 24″ and “25 – 34″ (see Table below). The youthful “18 – 24″ age group is dominant in Indonesia, Philippines, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Pakistan, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. In Pakistan, Vietnam and Bangladesh, the age group constituted more than half of the Facebook population in their respective country.

The “25 – 34″ is the dominant age group in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and South Korea and interestingly, these are all developed economies. In these developed economies, Facebook users above the age of 25 constitute more than half of the Facebook users population in each respective country. The reverse is true for the developing economies i.e. Indonesia, Philippines, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Pakistan, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, where more than half of Facebook population is below the age of 24.

Facebook’s Asian engines of growth: College students in developing countries and working adults/professionals in developed countries. Some possible explanations: (a) youth population in developing nations is far more than the developed ones (in other words, developed nations with relatively aging population), and/or (b) working adults are more web 2.0-savvy in developed economies. What do you think?

All the above figures were extracted from Facebook Advertising page, over a period of two hours on March 01 2010. ¶ @zhiQ

Facebook in Asia: Total Users and Age Groups [Latest STATS] originally appeared on GreyReview on March 2, 2010.

Vrroom! Vrroom! At 600 Tweets Per Second originally appeared on GreyReview on February 24, 2010.

According to the article, Facebook said the acquisition as “talent acquisition”. Octazen’s two employees will join Facebook as engineers and remain in Malaysia (Octazen with an office in Taman Melawati, Kuala Lumpur), making them social network’s first Asia-based full-time employees of Facebook.

Screenshot of the announcement on Octazen Solution’s website:

¶ @zhiQ

UPDATE: For more details, read Michael Arrington’s posting here.

Facebook Acquired A Malaysian Startup originally appeared on GreyReview on February 20, 2010.

Second is gestures, where users interact with onscreen elements using gestures. Patents filing: Multi-Touch Gestures Dictionary that “..include a variety of motions associated with the chord and the meanings of gestures formed from the chord and the motions” and Swipe Gestures for Touch Screen Keyboards which “allow for a user entering text using the virtual keyboard to perform certain functions using swipes across the key area rather than tapping particular keys.”

Let’s wait and see if these features are available in Apple’s latest creation. ¶ @zhiQ

Swivel Screen and Stylus Are Ancient; Get Ready to Hover and Gesture originally appeared on GreyReview on January 27, 2010.

Local Trends is a natural evolution for the Twitter’s Geotagging, which “attach a longitude and latitude to all of your tweets” and was released in August 2009. Prior to Twitter’s geotag APIs, there’s already an application (one of a handful) called TwitterLocal that filter tweets by location, by “caching all tweets with valid location.” Now, Twitter goes meta with Trending topics for each location.

With its API, Twitter is already making it easier for people to publish status and follow updates. To date, there are 50,000 apps have been developed around Twitter platform. These days, it’s about organizing and making sense of streams of chatters, rants, etc. Google’s goal is “to organize the world’s information to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” For Twitter, it’s about enabling the emergence of the real time web and now, organizing the real time web’s information and making them useful. ¶ @zhiQ

Twitter “Local Trends” Not Localized for Asia Yet originally appeared on GreyReview on January 27, 2010.

comScore reported the total global unique users of Twitter.com has reached 60 million. However, Fred Wilson argued that “Twitter ecosystem is about 3x Twitter.com.” Twitter ecosystem refers to all interactions with Twitter APIs, via the plethora of third-party Twitter apps i.e. Tweetdeck, bit.ly, Facebook, iPhone apps, etc. Wilson went on to summarize:

You can talk about Twitter.com and then you can talk about the Twitter ecosystem. One is a web site. The other is a fundamental part of the Internet infrastructure. And the latter is 3-5x bigger than the former and that delta is likely to grow even larger.

Let’s assume that Twitter ecosystem is 3-times the size of Twitter.com. With comScore’s 60 million unique visitors worldwide at Twitter.com, the Twitter ecosystem is estimated at 180 million. The total Twitter users across the globe (Twitter.com + Twitter ecosystem) is 240 million!

The table below weaves together Sycomos’ report, comScore’s estimate and Fred Wilson’s Twitter ecosystem. The “% Twitter Users” is derived from Sycomos’ report and the total Twitter users is based on 240 million users worldwide. Indonesia with 5.6 million users, followed by Japan (3.5 million) and India (2.3 million). Malaysia with 6th largest Twitter population in Asia with estimated 1.1 million users (and this is far, far, far more than my previous estimate of Twitter population in Malaysia). And the estimated total Twitter users in Asia is 18.6 million.

Asian Countries, by % of Twitter Users and Total Users

Mashup of figures from different reports to derive estimates potentially lead to inaccurate conclusions (different reports with different sets of assumptions and methodologies). However, Sysocomos’ “% of Twitter users” gives us some ideas on Twitter use across Asia. With the percentage, at least we can derive Twitter population size by country, using the conservative comScore’s 60 million, plus-ecosystem’s 240 million or any other estimates out there. ¶ @zhiQ

UPDATE Feb 20 2010: Based on Google, the estimated, unduplicated number of people who visited Twitter.com over a 1-month period:
1. Japan: 9.9 million users
2. Indonesia: 5.1 million
3. India: 4.2 million
4. South Korea: 1.5 million
5. Philippines: 1.3 million
6. Thailand: 910k
7. Malaysia: 910k
8. China: 680k
9. Singapore: 240k

Image from textually.org.

Twitter in Asia: Total Users, by Country originally appeared on GreyReview on January 26, 2010.

Competition is intense in Malaysian cellular market. Pricing no longer an effective competitive advantage; price war can only go so far. Mobile Number Portability (MNP) has eliminated the hassles of changing carriers. Differentiation takes different forms. Tactics are being deployed by three key players – Maxis, DiGi and Celcom – to enhance its ecosystems and content play is a popular one – DiGi with its DiGi Music, Maxis with Music Unlimited and Celcom with Channel [X].

Maxis venturing into applications with 1Store, quite similar to the strategy adopted by smartphone makers – Apple with App Store, Nokia’s Ovi, BlackBerry’s App World and Google’s Android Market. Smartphone players use the apps to enhance the perceived value of their phones and enhances lock-ins; Maxis is planning to use applications to enhance the perceived value of the Maxis ecosystem and ultimately, increase subscribers and decrease subscribers’ churn rate.

Expect Maxis to continue to use its scale to corner the market with first-mover advantage and DiGi with late-comer strategy i.e. let the market play out and then find missing gaps to position itself. Think Broadband Done Right campaign. DiGi is a late-entrant in the Malaysian mobile broadband market but the company is gaining market share with its pricing and service quality. For DiGi, it’s launch-and-learn strategy with a twist – let-others-launch-first-and-learn-from-them approach. As for Celcom, it will continue to position itself as No. 1 in all Celcom territories.

Maxis Unveils Its Platform Play originally appeared on GreyReview on January 25, 2010.

Also, the press release mentioned about 120,000 Twitter users, as of July 2009. The figure is misinterpreted. In July 2009, there were only over 200 users tagged with ‘Malaysia’; as of today, there are 377 users. The 120,000 figure is the total number of Followers of the then 200+ “Malaysia-tagged” Twitter users. WeFollow has since abandoned the display of the confusing stat, and now opted for a more straight-forward one – total number of users with a specific tag.

Nevertheless, DBI is somewhat an interesting survey to see brands people talk about online. Only 40% in the Top 10 Buzziest Brands in Malaysia are local brands – Maxis, Celcom, DiGi and Packet One (all are telcos companies). The survey monitors brands in these categories – Internet and Software, Consumer Electronics, Mobile and Telecommunications, Business and Consulting, and IT and Technology.

The DBI 2.0 was released yesterday and the full press release here

Over 3.5 Million Users and Facebook is Still Not Malaysia’s Buzziest Channel originally appeared on GreyReview on January 21, 2010.

Southeast Asia countries are Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Brunei, Laos, Cambodia, East Timor and Myanmar. Countries like Malaysia and Singapore are already with over 100% mobile phone penetration rate. And with the proliferation of mobile broadband adoption and popularity of smartphones, the next growth engine for the mobile industry is indeed, the mobile web.

Source: State of the Mobile Web, November 2009

Mobile web image: Taken without permission from World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

Southeast Asia Is The Epicenter of Mobile Web: Opera Report originally appeared on GreyReview on December 22, 2009.

Fans Growth of AirAsia Facebook Fan

On December 8, 2009, Southwest started its Fans Fly Free campaign. With less than 100,000 fans beginning of December, Southwest is currently galloping ahead and fast approaching 600,000 fans. That’s half a million new fans in about 2 weeks! Not bad for sweepstakes that offer only 100 pairs of roundtrip air tickets. With the sweepstakes ending December 31 2009, Southwest will possibly breach the 1 million mark before New Year 2010. What do you think?

Southwest’s Campaign on Facebook

Anyway, here a rundown of the top 5 most popular pages by Airlines on Facebook (as of December 20, 2009):

1. Southwest Airlines – 584,219 fans
2. AirAsia – 109,496
3. JetBlue Airways – 98,922
4. Royal Caribbean International – 89,548
5. Onur Air – 80,203

(Source: Inside Facebook)

AirAsia the First Airline with 100,000 Fans on Facebook; Southwest Will Be the First with 1,000,000 Fans originally appeared on GreyReview on December 21, 2009.