I must admit that I have always considered Facebook as a college focused social network and did not pay much attention to its marketing potential beyond that specific target audience. However a few events and stats caught my attention recently:

Facebook’s is expanding rapidly in corporate social and knowledge networks. According to Rahul, CTO of our gaming business, the HP Facebook network grew from 2000 people to over 3300 in May 07 alone!! One of the reasons are the great crowdsourcing features included in the Facebook platform – you can form special interest groups (I was recently invited to become part of HP’s gaming group reserved to HP employees only) and ask questions to your groups. I was interested by Loic Le Meur’s use of his Facebook network as a virtual advisory board.

I have been very impressed by Facebook’s viral features, which allow you to build up your network very quickly and tap into your friends’ knowledge. For example, Facebooks’ excellent news feed allows to track on one page all the actions that your friends are taking and for example discover new friends, networks or applications, adding to the viral effect.

According to Trend Catching, Facebook has 25m users, growing 3% per week, which is 100,000 new users per day, projected to reach 50m by end of 2007. The fastest growing demographic is the 25 and over age group and 50% of registered users come back to the site every day. 1 bn photos are hosted on the site, 6m uploaded each day, 70k photos served per second, making facebook the biggest photo sharing site on the web.

Facebook’s new developer platform is promising. Facebook recently opened up its platform to third party developers, allowing all types of information and applications to be disseminated through your friends. I am following with great interest some of the more marketing oriented third party applications such as Red Bull’s Roshambull, an online version of “rock, paper, scissors” (also known as “Roshambo”) that you can add to your Facebook profile. You can also check your friend’s stats to see if he/she chooses rock more often! According to Craig Kohtz, 20000 users downloaded the application in the first days.

We are in the very early days, but I will keep an eye on Facebook’s developments. Let me know what you think and join me as a friend on Facebook!

Technorati tags: Hewlett Packard, hp, Eric Kintz, marketing, facebook, viral marketing