Andrew Page - The demand for search in a social network

Slide 1: The demand for Search in a Social Network Andrew Page, and Des Traynor National University of Ireland, Maynooth

Slide 2: Background Bigulo was started by 2 programmers / ● PhD students, with no outside funding. To date, we have spent €0 on advertising. Bigulo was launched in September 2006 ● as a solution to an extremely common problem with the Bebo network. Real friends simply couldn't find each ●

Slide 3: Scenario Oh you're on Bebo Too? Yeah, I've been on it for ages Really? Me too! Cool, whats your username de_stra124, actually I can't remember Yeah, I can't remember mine either Ha, I'll send you an invite, whats your email address

Slide 4: Scenario “Whatever happened to all the gang from my old job, I wish I had their email addresses or something“

Slide 5: Our solution We have created a Free form Google style search for the Bebo network, which allows you to search by name, gender , age or location

Slide 6: Popularity of Bigulo Bigulo started in September 2006 with ● approximately 100 users per day Attempts to advertise in colleges were ● mildly successful, however our primary growth came from within Bebo We used 2 tactics to market Bigulo within ● Bebo

Slide 7: Marketing within a social network Our first strategy was to reward users for ● mentioning Bigulo on their homepage. Our reward was to place them on the Bigulo Home page. Since most Bebo users are enamoured ● with their own page views, the chance to increase your page views by being featured on Bigulo was too hard to turn

Slide 8: Creating a Bebo User Our second tactic was to create a character ● called Bigulo! on the Bebo network This proved wildly popular, and within days ● Bigulo had hundreds of friends. This large friends list allowed us to launch our ● new features with a bang, by mailing all our friends, who would in turn mail all their friends. Additionally, it provides us with a good ● relationship with the users. We can test the water for new features etc.

Slide 9: The effect in Bigulo popularity Yesterday, 7,500 Users Bigulo Launched. 90 users

Slide 10: The Spread of the marketing Because of how we grew our data set, ● our initially popular was restricted to Ireland. Since January, thanks to word of mouth, ● Bigulo has started growing worldwide

Slide 11: Bigulo Popularity United Kingdown 38% Ireland 28% United States 13% Australia + NZ 10% Other 11%

Slide 12: Technical Challenges Our primary problems in building Bigulo ● were technical. Performing a rapid search across a ● MySQL database of 5 million rows is extremely difficult. The problem gets tougher every day as ● we continue to grow our dataset. Add to this our increasing number of ●

Slide 13: Technical Challenges Bigulo performs approximately 35,000 searches ● per day. (We have performed 1.5 million searches to date) Each search is usually very not restricted ● i.e. Find me all guys called John (returns 20,000 ● entries from a database of 5,000,000) Our traffic comes in focussed spikes putting our ● servers under heavy load (e.g. Lunch Time GMT accounts for 40% of our page views) The Bebo generation has a very low attention ● span, the results have to be ready quickly, or they will leave

Slide 14: Speed of Searches Whilst Bigulo offers many Bebo related ● features, search is by far our most popular. We have fought endlessly with code to keep ● our search time down. Currently 95% of our searches are performed ● within 0.2 seconds Bigulo has gained many imitators since ● launching We believe that search speed and interface ● simplicity are our main strengths, and the reason we have maintained strong continuous

Slide 15: The future for Bigulo Bebo has grown rapidly in Ireland and ● the UK over the past year. The future of Bigulo is unavoidably ● connected with the popularity of Bebo We are currently considering taking ● investment to enable us to expand our popularity in the U.K.

Slide 16: The future of Bigulo Additionally there are many more ● features on the whiteboard which we're sure will be hugely popular. More details about these closer to their ● release date. Until then, thanks for listening, please ● spread the word :)

Slide 17: Thanks for your time http://www.bigulo.com “It's like Google, but just for Bebo“