Thanks to Tamar Weinberg for alerting us to an update by Peter Corbett about Facebook demographics for the US. The main learning there is that the number of 55+ year-old users has increased by 513% since the last check six months ago.

I don’t know if similar Australian stats have been published yet, but I just compiled them using the same Facebook source – compose a dummy ad, then you get the screen where you can view statistics by selecting or unselecting various parameters.

I was unable to see the Interests data but I have placed Peter’s latest data to the right of the Australian figures. While Peter’s total count of the US user population is almost 72M, today I see just under 70M for the US. Did 2M close their accounts within the past five days?  Were they fake accounts that were cleaned up? Just in the past 30  minutes the US total has shot up by about 300,000 people. What gives?

Australians on Facebook

About 6M Aussies are on Facebook or at least have opened an account. The gender breakdown is almost identical to the US. The age distribution in the US steadily increases between 18 and 54, whereas Australia peaks in the 25 to 34 range.

The user distribution among the Australian cities follows roughly the population distribution patterns, but we have a large number of Unknowns (and/or country residents). When you look at the small size of the San Francisco user population you wonder if these locations are based on what the user selected (I believe this is the case), or Facebook knew which locations to group into the closest metropolis. In most social networks I enter “Melbourne” as my location, not my suburb; however, if I were entering my postal address (at some trusted site and I could see some point to it), then the stats would be more accurate. In Australia, few people live in the central business district, which bears the name of the city, so that may explain Australia’s large number of Unknown locations in FB.

We are either coy about our education or are less educated than the Americans. The spread between singles, marrieds and in a relationship is almost equal, but those currently engaged seem to have very little representation on Facebook.

Bear in mind the probability that some people enter bogus details at such sites, and some nations more so than others. So treat the analysis accordingly. In my limited experience of my own network, Facebook users interact largely with their real-world friends and are less likely to fake too much.

Check out Peter’s post for a detailed insight into the US figures.

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As of today, you can search for your next house on Google Maps.  To do this, begin at http://maps.google.com.au. Click the link to the right of the Search Maps button, labelled Show Search Options. Once you do so, the link will change to Remove Search Options and you will see a drop-down menu, where you should choose Real Estate.

You can refine the search by the usual controls you see at a traditional real estate site, such as Rent/For Sale, type of dwelling, type of bedrooms, number of bedrooms, car parking spots, area, and so on.

If you are browsing, just enter a street or suburb and you will see balloons indicating properties for sale.  When you drag the map, the listings on the left will change to reflect the map window. You can explore any of them.

Google Maps real estate search

Clicking More Info in the speech bubble leads to detailed information about a specific property. Google has partnered with numerous real estate agencies to obtain the listings. Undoubtedly, the incumbent real estate website companies will be wondering how their traffic and revenues will be impacted by this Google innovation.

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I must credit my friend Prashant Karandikar tipping me off to an intriguing post entitled “Many SEO Experts Give Wrong Advice Regarding WordPress Permalinks” by Weberz-Rob. That’s a great linkbait title if you ever saw one, particularly when he began naming these well-known SEOs who gave this “bad advice”, such as:

• Matt Cutts
• Joost de Valk
• Michael Gray
• Aaron Wall

For good measure, he also listed other well-known SEOs who weren’t giving this “bad” WordPress permalink advice but had “bad” URLs, e.g.

• Danny Sullivan
• Stephan Spencer
• Vanessa Fox

So how does this unknown (to me) person presume to give advice to the A-list of SEOs? Read his post for the details, but he has WordPress Codex on his side. It says:

For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields. The reason is that these are text fields, and using them at the beginning of your permalink structure it takes more time for WordPress to distinguish your Post URLs from Page URLs (which always use the text “page slug” as the URL), and to compensate, WordPress stores a lot of extra information in its database (so much that sites with lots of Pages have experienced difficulties). So, it is best to start your permalink structure with a numeric field, such as the year or post ID.

The permalink structure of this blog used to be:

/%category%/%postname%-%post_id%.html

So, this was not the optimum URL structure according to the WP Codex, as the code would waste time evaluating whether a URL is a post or a page. Now this blog is not heavily visited enough for me to care about fractions of a second, but I like to use best practices. I have opted not for the advice of Weberz-Rob or the WP Codex, but the following:

/%postname%-%post_id%.html

I agree with Andy Beard‘s comments in that post and have also settled on the filename ending in .html because I’d like an easy .htaccess solution for my indexed pages that would otherwise lead to 404s. Removing the %category% from the URL was easy.

Revised .htaccess

This is what my .htaccess file looks like:

Options +FollowSymLinks -Indexes
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
 RewriteEngine On
 RewriteRule ^[^/]+/([^/]+)\.html$ http://www.netmagellan.com/$1.html [NC,R=301,L]
 # BEGIN WordPress
 RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f
 RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d
 RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
 # END WordPress
</IfModule>

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