We’ve heard of social media mashups before, but this one strikes us as more than just a little odd.

Apparently Friendster maintains an official account on Twitter (which is confirmed through a post on the official Friendster blog). Since Friendster’s operations have been increasingly Philippine-centric, this Twitter account is run out of Manila. The Twitter feed is updated sporadically, as is the official blog.

What does seem strange however, is that three out of the most recent updates were updated from Facebook, as the screen grab above will attest to. It seems that the Friendster tweeter prefers not to open a new browser tab while moseying around the web, so he tweets right from where he is (which unfortunately for him, is an account on Facebook, not Friendster).

Clicking on the Facebook link on the tweets shows the originating application is the Facebook-Twitter connection found at facebook.com/twitter .

Our helpful suggestion: If the official Friendster Twitter-master can’t be bothered to post from the web or a third-party Twitter client, Friendster can at least try to connect to Twitter’s open API so that users can also tweet directly from their Friendster profiles.

That way, a Friendster tweet will be seen as coming from Friendster  -  and not from Facebook.

Here is my contribution to Blog Action Day (October 15). This year’s theme is Climate Change.

I came late into the whole global warming consciousness thing, and it came by way of Hollywood, and partly via science fiction.

The notion of a world ravaged by either a nuclear holocaust, a biological disaster, or an environmental catastrophe was a formula and a post-modern speculative fiction staple. Inevitably this would involve a man who had miraculously survived all that and was chased by aliens, mutant zombies or intelligent apes.

And that man was usually Charlton Heston. And in later times, he was usually Will Smith.

But the notion of the environmental disaster producing something more menacing than zombies had not occurred to me until The Day After Tomorrow, a film much pilloried in its day for its cheesy acting and story line, and much praised for its spectacular special effects. The key horror in this film was global warming induced climate change that proceeded at a breakneck pace. In a matter of days, a series of unfortunate climate events had conspired to bring a slew of storms and blizzards that led to a new ice age.

Real weathermen and climatologists deemed that speed to fast, too fantastic, and laughed it off as a silly film. But the prospect of a climate gone mad due to a line up of disturbances struck a chord in me, and I wondered if it could all really happen.

The second film that made a tremendous impact, is of course the documentary based on Al Gore’s “The Greatest Keynote Presentation that ever lived” – An Inconvenient Truth. In the film, Gore seemed like quite an affable presenter, cris-crossing the world delivering his slide show on global warming. The film’s main thesis was that excessive C02 buildup caused by our burning of fossil fuels and the decline of the world’s forests was causing global warming and the end result would cause the climate to change.

On paper, a film about a guy giving a slide show sounds like a dull premise, and yet I mark this documentary us as one of the most frightening films of all time for the message it delivered. That we had gone so far, so fast, in putting the world on an auto-pilot to destruction.

One of the key sequences in An Inconvenient Truth showed the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina on the city of New Orleans in 2005. The floods, the levees breaking, the looting, the survivors on rooftops, the failure of government relief agencies to respond – all would be replicated in 2009 in the Philippines with the floods due to typhoons Ketsana and Parma.

These typhoons came at us with atypical strength – Ketsana would dump more rain in Metropolitan Manila than had been experienced since 1967, 42 years ago. Parma was likewise atypical, pouring more rain into the northern part of Luzon island than could ever be remembered. In both cases, the water level at dams and reservoirs rose to record heights. While the levees did not break, as in the case of Katrina, water was voluntarily released by government officials to prevent the dams from breaking. And the results proved devastating – much wider in scope than Katrina.

In the mountain ranges of Benguet, the constant rains fell on slopes denuded by deforestation, causing massive landslides that killed entire communities and isolated towns and cities.

In the news coverage, Philippine weathermen from the national weather agency Pag-Asa struggled to find a clue for all this. And the dreaded “C” words were offered as the cause. Climate Change, they said. Climate Change is the villain. Not us.

Ridiculous. By now, we know who is truly responsible for Climate Change.

Cartoonist Walt Kelly (of the comic strip “Pogo”) gave us the correct bogeyman for all of this. In the 70’s he wrote. “We have the met the enemy, and he is us.”

When looking for the root cause, look no further.

Conventional wisdom, at least as far as the local Internet is concerned, would have it that the Philippines is something of an oddball oasis where localized tastes have catapulted obscure web players to top status, while global top dogs trail far behind. We inhabit an alternate universe. In DC Comic book terms, we are Earth-23 in the multiverse of realities. Or the bottled city of Kandor in the Fortress of Solitude.

Thus, Friendster and Multiply were considered the top names in social networking, while the Canada-based Plurk.com lorded it over the microblogging category. This was typical for the ASEAN region, particularly in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines – the so-called “SIMP” countries.

In other words, Friendster was widely known to be #1, trumping Facebook. And anecdotally, Plurk was considered more popular than Twitter. This constituted conventional wisdom, and that notion has been challenged by new data.

The latest Alexa rankings for the top websites in the Philippines now show the following results for these specific players:

1. Facebook
3. Friendster
9. Multiply
11. Twitter
39. Plurk

Note that Facebook is not just the #1 social network, it is now listed as the #1 website in the Philippines, period.

Elsewhere on Alexa, you’ll find that Facebook is now ranked #1 for the rest of SIMP – Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. Facebook’s dominance in the region is now a fait acompli.

According to the Alexa website, the rankings are “calculated using a combination of average daily visitors and pageviews over the past month. The site with the highest combination of visitors and pageviews is ranked #1.”

While Friendster comes in at a respectable #3 position (just after Yahoo), what might be giving it cause to worry is that Facebook’s incredible growth may be siphoning off its traditional base among the mass based CD segment.

Data released by Facebook in September 2009, show the Philippines ranked at #13 in terms of Facebook users, with 4,832,040 registered users. In Asia, we are second only to Indonesia, which registered 8,786,920 users.

But the growth period from January to September 2009 shows Pinoy Facebook population growing at a whopping 1136.76%. That is the second highest rate in the world, second only to Taiwan.

Current estimates of Philippine Facebook registered users put the number at around 5.7 Million.

This still pales in comparison to Friendster’s claims of 40M registered Philippine users. But let’s look at a comparison of Philippine data for September 2009:

Facebook:
Unique visitors (users) – 6.6M
Page views – 4.9B
Total visits – 200M
Avg visits per visitor – 30
Avg time on site – 33:20

Friendster:
Unique visitors (users) – 5.5M
Page views – 3.6B
Total visits – 100M
Avg visits per visitor – 18
Avg time on site – 25:00

In other words, not only does Facebook now have more Philippine monthly unique visitors, Facebookers are more engaged, spending more time online than their Friendsterian counterparts.

The source for all this tantalizing info is the research section of Google Ad Planner, which uses data supplied directly by the web publishers.

In the Philippine Twitter versus Plurk face-off, the tale of the tape reads as follows:

Twitter.com
Unique visitors (users) – 1.1M
Page views – 66M
Total visits – 7.9M
Avg visits per visitor – 7.2
Avg time on site – 13:50

Plurk.com
Unique visitors (users) – 320K
Page views – 34M
Total visits – 3.9M
Avg visits per visitor – 12
Avg time on site – 23:20

All this and there’s even a possibility that the amount of Twitter traffic may actually be understated, since these figures only account for traffic on the Twitter.com site. Not included are the multitudes using desktop and mobile clients that access Twitter via its API, such as Tweetdeck, Seesmic, Twitterberry, Tweetie, and so forth.

In the final analysis, what this all means for sites like Friendster and Plurk is that they need to notch up their game if they want to regain their leadership positions in this country.

This was especially visible during the recent typhoon crisis in the Philippines, where social networking was documented to have played a major role in disseminating information about relief efforts.

In an informal scan of the local and international media coverage of the typhoon relief efforts, the brand names of Facebook and Twitter were always mentioned. I saw Plurk mentioned just once, in a piece in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. And though Friendster did put up a Friendster Cares special page to centralize their online efforts regarding this crisis, this got hardly a peep in the media.

All this, despite the fact that Facebook and Twitter have no on-ground presence in the Philippines to do their marketing or events (unlike web brands like Friendster, Yahoo, and Multiply).

For Friendster – and maybe for Plurk – perhaps a review of their feature offerings are in order, as well as a user study to explain the shifting of the tides. On second thought, this appears to have already begun.

Related Posts:

• Why and How Facebook should come to Southeast Asia
• Friendster bets its future on Southeast Asia
• From Friendster to Facebook

There have been countless stories about how social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter were instrumental catalysts in getting information across during the first hours of Typhoon Ondoy/Ketsana (and later, Typhoon Pepeng/Parma). Here’s one such inspiring story from the Philippine Red Cross.

Dennis Mendiola, Governor of the Philippine Red Cross (and also known as the co-founder of instant messaging giant Chikka.com), posted this account as a comment on my Facebook wall, which details how an RT’ed Tweet with Dick Gordon’s number ended up saving lives. Gordon in this case is of course the Philippine senator and head of the local Red Cross.

Guess how the Red Cross saved lives on Sept 26 – the height of Ondoy’s rage? Someone tweeted Gordon’s cellphone. Then it got RT’d all over. People in need of help sent text messages to friends and family who were on more stable grounds and many overseas.

Then help requests came gushing in the thousands into Gordon’s phone, prompting him to replace his phone three times (because Nokia e90s get painfully slow at 1,000 unread messages with endless more streaming in).

Then cries for help were also being RT’d. Then they found @philredcross and @redcross143 on Twitter and the email address rescue@redcross.org.ph. The same got reposted on Facebook. At the end of the 12-hour marathon session of coordinating rescue efforts with our 7 teams of rescuers, hundreds were saved…

JG (Puzon) was there. He was in charge of farming out each request for help to the rescue teams while we peons did write each SOS on Post- Its. TRUE STORY.

The Philippine Red Cross is still accepting online donations via Paypal on its website. And if you think the urgency has past, just take a look at this video:

Spotted on Facebook today was this photo (the original photo poster was Tina Bustamante Tubongbanua) of a truck with an enormous banner on its side advertising presidential aspirant Manny Villar’s smiling mug. The truck was en route to some relief operations.

Add this to the photos that have been spotted of Villar campaign slogans plastered on typhoon relief meals, bottled water, and even instant noodles, and you have another twist on the old saying, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” In this case, Villar has a penchant for making typhoonade.

We just signed up to support World Blog Action Day 2009 on October 15. This year’s theme is to bring awareness to the problem of Global Warming.

On this day, participating blogs from around the world will be creating and posting blog posts to highlight the biggest challenge posed to mankind today – the issue of climate change. In the Philippines, the two major typhoons that ravaged our country in 2009 – Ondoy and Pepeng – have already been publicly declared by the leading local meteorologists to be quite possibly a direct result of global warming induced climate change.

Here’s the Blog Action Day web site, which tells all.

I recently gave a presentation on Twitter techniques (and Twitter in the Philippines in general) at the recent SEMCON 2009 conference at the Intercon in Makati.

The presentation was entitled “Hardcore Twitter” and I’ve posted the deck on Slideshare. Of course it’s also embedded in this blog post, thanks to Slideshare’s WordPress.com friendly tags.

The basic idea behind the presentation is to illustrate that social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have become so pervasive that if you’re considering any form of online communication strategy nowadays, you will have to include them. The old idea of developing a website and letting the campaign end there is simply not enough, no matter how SEO-optimized the site is. In order to maximize the reach of your digital strategy, you’ll need to craft a Facebook/Twitter strategy as well, and integrate these into the overall plan.

And if you want anything to go viral, the optimum point of infection is within these social networks themselves. Because of the way Facebook and Twitter are set up, viral memes usually start on these before infecting the rest of the web.

So I’ve covered some of the techniques you could use in the Twitterverse to do site promotion. The presentation explains all of this pretty well, so I suggest you go through that.

Part 2. Slideshare cometh. The second part of this story has to do with the reception the presentation got after the physical conference was concluded and I uploaded a PDF of the Keynote presentation to Slideshare.net. This was actually my first ever upload to the web service.

As is my usual practice with blog posts, immediately after I uploaded the file, I did the usual short message blast on my Twitter and Facebook accounts to publicize this, and then walked away and forgot about it.

I was unprepared for what happened in just a few short hours. In no time, the presentation appeared on Sldeshare’s front page flagged on the “Hot on Twitter” (possibly due to a number of retweets) and then the “Hot on Facebook” sections.

By the end of the evening, “HardCore Twitter”  had cranked up enough page views to be selected as Slideshare’s “Presentation of the Day”. It actually lingered at the top of the heap for a couple of days before sliding down to fourth position. Even as a I write this, “Harcdore Twitter” is still listed on the “top presentations” list, and after 5 days online it has  generated (as I write this) 1,252 views.

I’m still wondering how it happened. Perhaps the provocative title was key (maybe the implication of kinky sex in a presentation sells just as well as in a streetcorner) or anything with the hot keyword “Twitter” in it gets immediate attention nowadays. In a very small scale, the presentation itself became as viral as the case studies it tried to explain.

At the end of the day, a lot more people ended up seeing my presentation online than they did on the day it was originally presented.

There’s a lesson to be learned somewhere in this case. I’m not sure what it is, but I’m definitely going to be using Slideshare a lot more now.

While scanning through videos covering the recent FOWA (the Future of Web Apps) 2009 in London, I chanced on this reportage of a “Facebook Developer Garage” event held somewhere in the vicinity of the conference. It would be cool to have something like this in Metro Manila.

What attracted it to me was:

1. I’ve become interested in Facebook as a marketing and apps platform, and a networking opportunity for Facebook dev geeks like this would be very appealing.

2. It really did look like it was held in a garage.

The regular Roofcamp sessions held by Jay Fajardo of ProudCloud are supposed to approximate this “unconference” vibe. I’ve been meaning to drop by one of these soon – the only thing that holds me back is that Jay holds these at his place all the way in Calle Industria in Pasig. But someday.

Now here’s a news graphic that made me sit up, take notice, grab my mobile, take a photo, and upload it to Twitpic. While waiting my turn at a waiting room, I was thumbing through today’s issue of the Asian Wall Street Journal and this photo of a bug-eyed Jeff Bezos of Amazon grabbed me.

The item talked about the availability of the so-called “International Kindle” in Asia, and listed a number of countries in the region.

Big surprise: The Philippines is listed. Along with other dubious “hotbeds of tech” like Bhutan, Laos, Mongolia, and Myanmar.

Not on the list are our ASEAN neighbors : Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. And while Australia makes the list, New Zealand is excluded.

Heck, in North America, Canadians won’t be able to order one.

I’m not going to scratch my head too long and worry about about Amazon’s criteria as long as I know that since I live in one of the lucky “preferred countries” and  if I really wanted one to curl up with a Kindle at the nearest Starbucks, I am now legally allowed to order it, have it shipped to my digs, and use it to download books wirelessly.

There are some questions about how Amazon’s Whispernet wireless service is going to work in the Philippines. As near as I can figure out while nosing around Amazon’s vague wireless terms of service, AT&T is their main GSM/HSDPA operator partner for this. So if you’re in the Philippines, you are going to get your 3G or 3.5G signal from an AT&T roaming partner.

I asked around if this was going to be SMART or Globe, and the answer appears to be that both are partners, so what operator you latch on to will depend on the Kindle’s druthers – unless there is a way to manually select a network.

The International Kindle goes on sale on October 19 for $279.

By the way, is it just me or does “Whispernet” sound like a lady thing?

This just in from Ateneo Task Force Ondoy as of 3:30PM, Tuesday, September 29, 2009:

The Ateneo is accepting donations, both in kind or in cash/check. The center of relief operations is the Ateneo College Covered Courts. Items most needed as of this writing are:

• bottled water
• rice
• toiletries
• canned goods
• mats, blankets
• clothes

Those who wish to donate or volunteer for Ateneo Task Force Ondoy are welcome to go to the College Covered Courts, where they will be directed, assisted, and briefed.

For cash donations, direct deposits can be made to:
SIMBAHANG LINGKOD NG BAYAN (Account Name/Payee)
Bank of the Philippine Islands (Loyola-Katipunan Branch)
BPI Peso Checking Account Number: 3081-1111-61
BPI Dollar Savings Account Number: 3084-0420-12

Checks may be addressed to Simbahang Lingkod Bayan as well. For GCASH users, you may send your donations by typing: DONATE_<Amount>_<4-digit pin>_SLB and send to 2992.

Instructions for monetary donations from overseas sources are being sent out separately.

Operations start at 6AM daily, and deployment to the areas start at 1PM. Volunteers (mostly students so far due to the cancellation of classes) are welcome to help by signing up for three-hour shifts each, starting at 6AM ending at 12AM. For easier monitoring, people are highly encouraged to come at the start of the three-hour intervals. For volunteers, please wear comfortable working clothes. Bring umbrellas, jackets, extra shirts, and water. Please wear blue.

We are also consolidating a list of missing people and evacuation centers around Metro Manila. Please visit and update http://ateneotaskforceondoy.misa.org.ph. If you know people who are missing or who are at evacuation centers, please add their names and contact information at the website. The site is currently still down, but please check back in an hour or so. We are still finishing uploading files into the site.

Relief operations have covered the following areas:

1. Ateneoville, Nangka Marikina
2. Pentecost Parish, Katipunan
3. UBB (Urban Bliss), Barangka Marikina
4. Montalban
5. GK sites (6)
6. Banal na Sacramento, QC

For inquiries, please contact:
Chris Castillo (OSA), 0920/913-6404
An Manapat ( OSCI), 0917/738-5108
Bro. Weyms Sanchez, SJ (SLB), 0908/891-8848
Gio Tingson (Sanggu), 0917/880-7427
Kacci Morales (Sanggu) at 0927/981-8811

Thank you to all who have generously contributed and continue to contribute their time, effort and resources to this relief operation. Thank you too for the continuing prayers. God bless.

The Ateneo Task Force  Ondoy