Happy Thanksgiving! This is quite a memorable Thanksgiving, too – our first! That’s right. Face US is celebrating its first Thanksgiving today!

Now, I may be American, but this is Philip’s first ever Thanksgiving. So when the office (which includes our sister companies here in New York) decided to put on a Turkey Day potluck, he got a full introduction to what exactly goes into a Thanksgiving spread.

It all started with an office conversation, as so many great things do. Someone suggested that we celebrate Thanksgiving the Friday before with a potluck. Then someone else wondered if it wouldn’t be nice if we all brought traditional Thanksgiving dishes. And finally a third person insisted that we all make, not buy, these dishes.

So last Friday the whole office sat around our big conference room table, which was expertly decorated by our fantastic Office Manager, Jen. We piled our goodies on the table and prepared to dig in!

The most impressive part is that most of the dishes on the table really were homemade. I had discovered a recipe for candied sweet potatoes from allrecipes.com and brought that in. There was homemade string bean casserole, homemade stuffing, and plenty of other delights. As you can see, most of that table was covered with food! About the only things store bought were the turkey and some corn bread.

Even though this wasn’t Thanksgiving Day, that was a traditional Turkey Day dinner. For lunch! We had all agreed on a two hour lunch, and a good thing, too! As per Turkey Day tradition, we all stuffed ourselves silly. Well, at least I did. I think at one point I had not one, not two, but three plates full of food in front of me.

And of course, at the end, a lot of the food was gone. But not all!

We had all cooked so much food that we just couldn’t eat it all. One of us had made somewhere along the lines of three pounds of baked macaroni and cheese! I’m sure many of you reading this will agree that after any holiday dinner, the best part is the leftovers. This was definitely true here, but for different reasons.

Rather than greedily hoard our leftovers, or divvy them up so we could each take some home, we decided to get into the giving spirit of the season. We donated the leftovers to a nearby soup kitchen. Most don’t accept opened food or leftovers – and for good reason – but some soup kitchens do. After all, why let good food go to waste? One such kitchen is close by our office, and that’s where the remainder of that huge amount of macaroni and cheese, as well as my sweet potato casserole and everything else, went.

I hope someone enjoyed that dinner as much as I did. And today, both Philip and I get to enjoy it again! Even our home office in the UK got into the Thanksgiving spirit with some pumpkin pie in the office.

Happy Thanksgiving, wherever in the world you are!

As you may already know, Face just opened an American branch, Face USA. We’re currently in a snug little office right by Penn Station. The view outside the window, as you might be able to guess, is quite different from the view in London. In London the building we’re in is maybe 4 stories tall. In New York we’re on the 11^th floor, and that’s not even the top!

So besides height and the views being different, how else is New York different from London?

New Yorkers are really, really into their neighbourhoods.

To answer this question I first turned to Facebook Ads. I created a mock ad targeting people who live in “London” and people who live in “New York” to see how the two Facebook populations differ. Turns out they differ quite a bit in Facebook presence in relation to their actual population.

Facebook Ads relies on self-reported data, for the most part. If you live in a small town just outside of a big city you might simplify things – and try to seem a bit cooler – by saying you’re from that city on your profile. I know that’s what happens in my hometown of Phoenix, Arizona. Everyone says they’re from Phoenix, but they’re really from the cities that surround it. Heck, I just did it right there. I’m really from Scottsdale, right next to Phoenix.

Phoenix isn’t the only place with this trend, either. London, according to the government website, had 7,830,000 people in the city in 2010. On October 11^th I checked the London Facebook population and came up with 8,116,740. Now that just doesn’t add up.

Meanwhile the New York Facebook population was 3,850,260 while the actual population of the city is 19,378,102, according to the US census. So apparently most New Yorkers are not on Facebook. Do I believe this? Not really. New York, by all accounts, is extremely techno-savvy. This is, after all, the city that gave rise to Foursquare.

A bit more digging shows a trend opposite to that of London’s. People are identifying with even more granular locations rather than rounding up to the largest metropolitan area. Facebook allows you to select any of the five boroughs of New York as your current city, and New Yorkers are taking advantage of that. 164,600 people alone claimed to live, not in New York City, but in Manhattan specifically relative to an actual population of 1,634,795 (as of 2008).

This completely fits the location conscious New Yorker stereotype. Just talk to any New Yorker about New York for five minutes and you’ll hear something like, “Yeah, that place on 32^nd and Park? It’s completely different from the other place on 14^th and 9^th.” They are so location conscious that every little region has its own name. Even larger regions are split into smaller regions. Ever heard of the East and West Village? Well, inside East Village there is “Alphabet City.” And that’s by far not the only example. Perhaps it has to do with the city’s long history?

Probably not. London is, by far, older than New York, yet they do not seem to be as nit-picky about locations. Let’s take Camden as an example. It’s similar to a borough of New York. It’s a trendy area of London with cool bars and my personal favorite open-air market. How many people claim residence? 2,060. That’s it. Or we can take Islington, another “borough” where I lived. A sizeable area with a nice little down-town. It has only slightly more Facebook citizens with a total Facebook population of 2,420 & an actual population of nearly 200,000.

New Yorkers Like to Talk About New York

Well, saying that New Yorkers love New York is a bit of a cliché. That someone from Brooklyn gets poetic when talking about Brooklyn is commonly known. That Manhattanites think the island is the only “true” New York is self-evident (I live in Manhattan. I get to say that). But is this indicative about the city’s culture?

To test this out, I decided to look at the types of startups the two cities have given birth to. The website areastartups.com lists the various startups based in cities around the world. Below are the top 15 startups for London and New York, apparently chosen based on size. I took the liberty of sorting them into categories.

Right off the top of my head, I want to say that Londoners love to network (notice the prevalence of startups connected to social networking) and New Yorkers like to talk (see all those content creation sites). But of course that probably has more to do with when the companies were founded and the fact that New York is home to Madison Avenue, land of the advertising giants who fund content sites.

Rather I’d like to point out that none of the London startups are expressly about London. Meanwhile two of the New York companies are about New York. I think this shows rather neatly that New Yorkers love New York. They love delving into this concrete jungle so much they will not only create businesses about it, but they will then purchase those products.

Oh, and do you remember how I said Foursquare was invented here in New York? What else is Foursquare than a handy tool to delve into your city?