While the other Republican presidential nominee candidates for 2012 have a real sameness about them, Ron Paul stands out. Whether that is because, as someone noticed on Quora, his supporters seem to like Star Trek, or for other reasons, social media like/interest data from optim.al (and their new SocialPredict data product) clearly highlights some of the differences. Click on the image to expand:

You’ll notice that Ron Paul supporters like not only Star Trek and William Shatner, but the Colbert Report, Christopher Walken and Guinness. And of course let’s not forget our trusty favorite defender-of-liberty Jack Bauer. However, there are other more real “science-y” things in there that people who like Ron Paul also like – Modern Marvels, the Science Channel, evolution and “the Universe”.

By contrast, Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich are so close to one another in terms of their audience’s interests and likes that they are almost indistinguishable in the interest graph. Rick Santorum is much closer to them but still a little less same. Zoom in on the chart as it makes for some fascinating reading.

Our team put together some global growth numbers for Facebook over the last 1,001 days, including a micro-view over the last 90 days. The part that stood out was the incredible growth coming from Brazil and India over that period. Here is the % of total growth in Facebook users coming from various countries, ordered by size, over the last 3 months:

Facebook added 39.3 million users over this period, of which:

• Brazil was the biggest growth engine with 7.2 million (18.4% of the total)
• India was the second largest with almost 5 million (13% of the total)

Brazil makes up just 2.9% of the world’s population, but made up over 18% of Facebook’s growth in this period. India has a low Internet penetration compared to its overall size: at over 1.2 billion people it makes up 18.3% of the world’s population, so the growth there is not as impressive as compared to what is going on in Brazil.

One of the features I find it ridiculous that is being touted as really new & valuable within the new Google+ service, is the notion of “circles” that allow you to categorize your contacts for selective sharing of stuff. Facebook has had this for a long time.

In fact, Facebook didn’t have this, and Ephraim Luft and Mike Greenfield (formerly a colleague of mine at LinkedIn) built a Facebook app called “Circle of Friends” that let you classify your friends into various “circles” and share messages, and chat with them etc. It got a decent amount of traction (over 6 million installs if I recall correctly, back in the ‘good ol days’ of easy Facebook sharing). Whether Facebook copied their idea or just independently thought of it doesn’t really matter (and who knows?) but Facebook later launched the ability for you to classify your friends when you accept an invitation into a number of groups/buckets. As we know, though, most people are lazy and don’t do this things effectively. Plus since it was a later add-on, lots of users probably saw that most of their existing contacts weren’t classified, so why bother with the new ones?

Google decided to give the user control over this instead of an automated process of grouping users (learning their lesson from “Buzz” perhaps). And since it’s an all-new system, it’s more likely people are going to use this feature than if they’d already started using the service without it embedded. But Google on the other hand recently implemented a suggested “other people to include on the email” feature within their Google Apps email product (I don’t really use Gmail much so I have no idea if it actually is running there too) – which feature is a very nice hybrid of automated suggestion and user selection (to choose to add the users to the email.

There are two questions to ask, though, (1) is whether this kind of feature is truly important to adoption of this system, or if it’s really just a bell that seems like a really good idea but won’t stand the test of consumer adoption in the face of the laziness of users and (2) whether Google should have just held fast to creating a more intelligent system for this instead of caving into the “creepy” police. Google is in a sensitive position with respect to customer data, but they certainly won’t gain ground on Facebook in audience-context products (“social”) if they’re not willing to push the boundaries a little further, faster.

Today Facebook adds over a million users a week, as the poster child of social networking, and companies like Groupon (which claims to be a social product but isn’t really) aim to go public while others like LinkedIn recently have gone public.

The reality is, most of the big successful consumer-oriented “Web” companies out there today are built on foundations of email, and sometimes of encouraging what some might think of as spam. There’s a fine line but let’s look at a few examples:

Facebook, LinkedIn: Both of these companies rely heavily on user-initiated email to other users for customer adoption, perhaps less so than earlier in their lives, but nonetheless, there was no tremendous organic attraction to visit the site based on advertising or great media stories about the companies, it was all about encouraging users to invite their friends. When I was at LinkedIn, I learned that one of our major growth drivers was encouraging a user to upload their address book and making it super-easy to invite new users. The strongest brand we had at LinkedIn, was that of our users — “John Brown is someone I know and if he thinks this service is great, why don’t I try it out?” — and address book uploads and the resultant email sent out turned many one-connection people into multi-friend propagators. It worked great.

Today the existing networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter with their APIs can perform the same function as the email address transfers, that of pulling user info into an application, but without the email address the system messages in these various services are really not as powerful.

This is obvious in the case of Facebook, which made a major change a few years ago to how aggressively applications could message users. Email went out the window in favor of less aggressive “inbox-style” messages, and app messages were treated as on average far less important than normal friend messages. During the time with its more permissive policies, several companies were able to take advantage and it helped them create big user bases which in turn, had their own gravity to drive other products in their stable – here I speak of course primarily of Zynga. Zynga’s ability to get viral “invite adoption” from users on Facebook was a powerful growth driver.

Groupon too, largely relies on acquiring email addresses to share its daily email updates of deals. According to their S-1, they have over 85 million email addresses today and yet only 15 million people have purchased a deal — so think about an email a day for all of those people and you’ll get an idea of how email drives this and also how they must be sending out a LOT of unanswered, unacted-upon email.

Not that that is bad per se, but anyone who discounts the power of email or argues that email is not still a major driver of user adoption should look at these examples and take heed. With email spam restrictions increasing, email will be more challenged as an adoption vehicle – but it is still the sine qua non of consumer “viral” adoption.

This Google Trends chart says it all. Yahoo!, Google, Twitter – nobody comes close to Facebook.

I’m not sure I understand why I’m seeing double -  are these sponsored stories (a new ad unit created by Facebook that just basically shows up when a friend of yours likes a brand that is advertising on Facebook) that good, that I need to see two of them per this image? Is American Express really that great of a brand that they should get double mention here? I’d love to know how/why this happens…

Something important I’m collaborating on with a couple of other tech people is a Facebook page called “Give, Don’t Get”. The idea is that instead of buying something you would like but don’t really need (like an iPad 2 if you already have an iPad for example) – you’ll instead donate that money to a good cause. Hopefully this page will live on and support all kinds of causes: for right now the main one we’re emphasizing is the Save the Children Japan Earthquake Tsunami Children in Emergency Fund.

Anything helps: just identify something you would have otherwise bought and donate that amount to the charity, and post about it in your social media streams.

1) Figure out how much you want to give, then go to Red Cross or Save the Children (http://bit.ly/givenotget)

3) Visit http://on.fb.me/gAVWhA and post your screenshot to the page’s wall

Give, Don’t Get – Gave: $xxx to Save the Children (Japanese Earthquake Fund). Didn’t Get: xxxxxx. Visit: http://on.fb.me/gAVWhA

for example:

Give, Don’t Get – Gave: $10 to Save the Children (Japanese Earthquake Fund). Didn’t Get: 2 Large Starbucks Lattes. Visit: http://on.fb.me/gAVWhA

XA.net will be running optim.al ads on Facebook for this page as well as a donation, so please even if you choose not to donate please go and like the page today if you can. http://on.fb.me/gAVWhA

Facebook user penetration – percentage of users for each country as a share of the total population. The US doesn’t crack the top 10, but is the biggest overall source of Facebook users with over 146 million now. Conspicuous by its position at the bottom of the list, of course, is China.

Source of the data is http://optim.al

By the team at XA.net‘s count, from Facebook’s own figures, about 495,362,600 users. Still a lot, perhaps the other 4.6mm or so are from other countries than the 186 listed, or people who live on the moon or whatever. Here’s the data in an excel sheet, along with country populations from Wikipedia for all to use as they wish (but please keep attribution intact).

Here’s the top 25 – Southeast Asia has made a big push:

Here is the full data file in Excel. Enjoy!