25 Random Things about Facebook

On ReadWriteWeb:

According to the latest data from Compete, the '25 Random Things About Me' meme has not only given us access to a plethora of random facts about people we barely know, but this digital fad has also been good for Facebook. According to the latest data from Compete, four times more people than usual visited the 'Notes' section on Facebook in January. Compete estimates that close to 20 million users used 'Notes' in January, while only about 4 million used it in October 2008.

But it wasn't just the 'Notes' section that profited from this meme. Facebook itself saw its traffic grow by 15% in January, which represents the fourth largest single month increase in visitors to the site. In addition, 60% more profiles were created in January than in December.

It would probably be wrong to attribute all of Facebook's growth to the '25 Random Things' meme, but the renewed interest in notes on Facebook is most likely fully attributable to this. Notes on Facebook are basically small blog posts, and represent the only space on the site where you can respond after being tagged to write 25 random things about yourself.

There is something else here too - 25 Random Facts is a datascraper's eclectic dream, a mine of information for marketeers as - by and large - you can assume that most of those random facts have some resonance with the writer. I, the marketeer, have just found 25 ways to strike up a conversation with you, the customer.

Although this one seems to have been vernacularly viral, we can probably expect much more of this sort of thing on social nets that are designed to yield user usage data.

And Facebook has not been tardy in developing datamining and marketing systems. Caveat Memetor