Facebook numbers suggest Ron Paul is the only one with a chance to beat Barack Obama

Looking at the Facebook fans numbers, it seems Ron Paul is the only one with:

- enough supporters

- enough momentum in supporters’ growth

to have a chance to catch up with Barack Obama.

See the latest numbers on the chart of all US presidential candidates supporters on Facebook.

TripAdvisor sold at the right moment… as competitors close in

TripAdvisor IPO happened yesterday.

Probably a good moment to sell (or partially sell) as competition on the accomodation market are getting closer by the day.

AirBnb is adding 4 times more fans on Facebook as TripAdvisor.

Not clear how profitable AirBnb is compared to TripAdvisor, but their brand might be bigger than TripAdvisor in a year from now, based on Facebook fans numbers.

takethislollipop.com – from nothing to 3rd most shared website in 2 months

The domain name takethislollipop.com was created on 2011-09-28 according to the whois information.

Today it was already shared 11,330,608 times by Facebook users, making it the 3rd most shared website on Facebook behind facebook.com and bandoo.com.

This happened in the space of 2 months.

Congrats to takethislollipop.com!

Alexa stills ranks it as #7,406 globally. Considering the rate at which it is shared, the Alexa rank is probably off. I would bet this site is in the top 100 sites right now.

Though one has to consider this is probably not a site you visit more than 1 or 2 times.

New trackers: music, wordpress themes, US Presidential Elections

We added some new pages, which we call ‘trackers’, that monitor (eh.. track) the Facebook ‘likes’ for handpicked websites for those three areas of interest.

Here are the links to these pages:

http://www.99like.com/music.php

http://www.99like.com/wordpress-themes.php

http://www.99like.com/us-presidential-elections-2012.php

We will add more trackers in the future.

Tell us if you are interested in specific topics. We can make new trackers on request.

Note that these trackers are a way to circumvent the fact that our search engine, although not too bad, is not perfect: there are always a number of “false positives” in the results, and it’s just cleaner to remove them by actually handpicking those that make sense.

Also, our next step is to implement a “what’s hot” chart, which should show the websites (among the 150,000 indexed!) that has the top growth in its ‘Like’ counter.

Monitoring Facebook ‘like’ for 150,000 websites

I realized that I actually never stated exactly what 99like.com does, or at least not in details.
So let's do it here:

99like monitors the number of Facebook 'like' everyday for 150,000 websites.
Additionally we show charts of these 'like' count across time. And we display those for given search terms.

Additional details:
- the 150,000 websites are the top 100,000 websites according to Alexa, plus about

50,000 websites taken from the CrunchBase database. Not all URLs worked because of some

issues either with our script, or with the database information.

- we count the Facebook likes using the total number: Shared + Like + Comment
- we get these counts directly from Facebook using their API

For example, you can check manually the counters using the following URL:

https://api.facebook.com/method/fql.query?query=SELECT%20share_count,%20like_count,%20comment_count,%20total_count%20FROM%20link_stat%20WHERE%20url=%22http://www.99like.com%22&access_token=

which responds:

<fql_query_response xmlns="http://api.facebook.com/1.0/" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" list="true">

<link_stat>

<share_count>0</share_count>

<like_count>6</like_count>

<comment_count>0</comment_count>

<total_count>6</total_count>

</link_stat>

</fql_query_response>

One could argue that the comment count is not as valuable as the 'Share' and 'Like' count. Our view is that a comment increases awareness, and generally shows that the website has some "buzz".

For any question, let me know.

Apple.com facebook likes jumped 1 million in last two weeks

If you are not happy with search engines… create your own

I like my search engine more and more.

Just checking ‘web design’, and I like the results:

How does this compare to Google?

Etsy: already 200,000 Facebook fans, and more to come…

Just reading in the WSJ about Etsy : impressive "11 million registered users in 150 countries".
The article title "Highly Valued Website for Handmade Goods Goes Abroad" suggests Etsy is now going after a bigger audience, which means probably more Facebook fans.

Etsy already have more than 200,000 Facebook fans, and shows a strong growth.

Hottest startups by facebook fanbase growth

Here are a sample of some startups or websites often mentioned on Techcrunch and Hacker News, with their Facebook fanbase growth over the last three months:

Data:

Kayak facebook fanbase to overtake Orbitz by Xmas 2011

In the last 3 months (July to Sept 2011 timeframe):
Orbitz Fanbase growth: from 41,000 to 54,500
Kayak Fanbase growth: from 34,000 to 51,000 in last 3 months

Growth of Fanbase:
Orbitz: +33%
Kayak: +50%

Assuming a stable growth rate, Kayak should catch up with Orbitz by Christmas 2011.

Following chart can be seen with latest data on 99like.com (search for 'flight'):