The top 10 social networking sites, 2006 - 2007

Although there was explosive growth in social networking over the past year, a few sites actually lost a significant amount of users over the year: AOL Hometown is down 32%. Ouch. I hadn't ever heard of this site (have you?); when I checked it out just now it had a banner ad for another user-losing site: Classmates Online.

MySpace is still on top, but its user base grew only 9% from 2006 to 2007 -- compared with Facebook's 72% growth during the same period.

It's only a matter of time before Facebook seizes the #1 spot. I mean, my mom is on Facebook, as are two of my aunts. They never hopped on the MySpace bandwagon. Indeed, many people I know have deleted their MySpace profiles.

But MySpace remains popular with the young'uns. T-Mobile's Sidekick, which targets the 14 to 22-year-old set, boasts of one-touch MySpace access. I find that humorous. Then again, I programmed in one-touch Facebook access in my phone..

Tags: MySpace Facebook AOL Hometown Sidekick social networking

Even my mom is on Facebook

Tags: Facebook mom

Social Networking: all over the news

Perhaps it's just the news I follow, but it seems that social networking developments are popping up everywhere in the last few days.

• Pownce is the latest offering from Kevin Rose, founder of Digg. Pownce is described as a

  hybrid site that seeks to combine social networking, instant messaging, and file sharing.


• Google, having failed at its first attempt at social networking, is funding a more ambitious project: Socialstream. Socialstream aims to provide a "unified social network service" that will allow

  many social networks to be linked together, letting them share both content and the nature of the relationships of the people who use them.

• Of course, Facebook has really been stealing the social networking show lately. All of a sudden, it's a given that startup Internet companies need to at least consider if or how they will leverage Facebook's newly open platform.

  Venture capitalists are now quizzing Web entrepreneurs on their "Facebook strategy."

  Facebook includes a few terms -- poke, wall, etc. -- that new users sometimes find befuddling. See the bottom of this article for a handy guide to the Facebook lingo.

Tags: Google Pownce Socialstream Facebook social networking

Linkalicious: 6/26/07

Last summer I was consuming so much new information about internet trends that I often just compiled it all in link-filled blog posts. Happily, I've resumed my news-consuming ways, so I'm going to kick off linkalicious posts again for the summer. I wonder what I missed over the past nine months...

• Basically all teens who are online use social networks. 96% of those aged 9-17, apparently.
• But there appears to be a growing class divide 'twixt MySpace and Facebook.

  those using Facebook come from wealthier homes and are more likely to attend college. By contrast, MySpace users tend to get a job after finishing high school rather than continue their education.


• Plaxo has released Plaxo Pulse, which essentially allows people to build their own private social networks from their address books.
• The video search engine Blinkx is launching speech recognition video search.

  Very much in its beta stage, the technology is designed to help advertisers target ads alongside or in Web videos based on speech-recognition technology. The program allows advertisers to buy specific words spoken in videos as well as categories created by analyzing its overall context.

Tags: social networking teens Facebook MySpace Blinkx Plaxo

MySpace as a promotion vehicle

The ever-informative blog Micro Persuasion features a great link list today, including a link to this news story about young entrepreneurs doing business on MySpace. It's a very smart way to launch a marketing campaign. Indeed, considering the fact that MySpace has become the most popular site on the Internet, it's unwise for a business not to have a presence there. It doesn't cost anything to set up a promotional profile, and MySpace users can quickly spread the word about your business (see the Wikipedia entry on viral marketing).

If MySpace works for business and bands, why not political campaigns? It's already happening, as this article in BusinessWeek describes. In my area, the 43rd district in Washington, state congressional candidate (and friend of mine) Stephanie Pure is using this approach. See her MySpace profile here: http://www.myspace.com/peopleforpure. Using MySpace is a very smart campaign strategy in the young, urban, web-savvy region I live in.

Use of MySpace as a promotion vehicle -- for a growing variety of causes -- will undoubtedly increase.

Tags: MySpace marketing political campaign

MySpace moves into #1 position for all Internet sites

I know, I know, I keep mentioning MySpace. Like it or not, though, it keeps growing in popularity. Indeed, as reported today, MySpace has for the first time become the most visited US Web site, surpassing Yahoo! Mail and Google. Surprised? Yes, me too. As this Hitwise post indicates, visits to MySpace have increased by 4300% in the past two years.

How has MySpace achieved such phenomenal growth so quickly? Hitwise promises to answer this question with an analysis soon. In the meantime, you can read the cover story from the most recent issue of Wired magazine--an interesting discussion of Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of MySpace last year, and his highly successful hands-off business strategy. The article mentions that MySpace might grow out of its core demographic as everybody hops on the bandwagon:

what happens when the audience is part of the show? Participation feeds on itself, cementing established users and drawing new ones. Curious colonists from other demographics are already arriving. Forget the putative horror of being owned by Rupert Murdoch – will a sudden deluge of millions of thirtysomethings send their younger siblings running in the other direction? Senior citizens? Foreigners? (Google’s attempt at social networking, Orkut, has morphed inexplicably into a hangout for teenage Brazilians.) OMG!!! Mom has a MySpace profile!!!!!

As I mentioned in a previous post, however, I don't see this happening. Instead, I believe that social networking sites that target specific demographic groups will continue to appear. Mark my words: we'll see popular MySpace equivalents for 50- and 60-somethings soon. As reported in the Wired Bodyhack blog last week (a post that yours truly was quick to comment on), My Cancer Place has already materialized: "The #1 place to join a community of people with cancer." There will be many more such sites.

Tags: MySpace social networking My Cancer Place Wired web traffic

Enviro-evangelism on Myspace

Looks like this is a fairly new Myspace profile:
http://www.myspace.com/myplanet

It really does seem that "green" is going mainstream this summer. A welcome development!

Tags: myspace myplanet

The future of social networking

Check out this delightful little commentary by a 35 year old geek who doesn't "get" Myspace. I like this bit:

I'm looking at MySpace and I'm a fumbling old colonel struggling to comprehend his nephew's digital watch.

I do see where the fellow's coming from. I kind of hate Myspace, myself (the flash ads drive me insane). This is why I deleted my original account last year. But...everybody's on Myspace. To not participate in Myspace, as garish and annoying as this site is, is to effectively shut oneself out of an environment that is becoming an increasingly important way for people to connect with each other. All the Myspace media coverage over the past year has painted a picture of parents in their 40s and 50s who aren't just mystified by Myspace -- they feel threatened by it. There's nothing really new or interesting about this: teenagers have always wanted to develop their identities independently (to some degree) of their parents, and parents of teenagers have always wrestled with how to best let their progeny do this without irreparably damaging themselves in the process.

So Myspace is the gender gap wedge du jour. I don't think this will last long. Cultivating a "digital identity" is becoming a crucial part of maintaining a happy, successful life in the real world (look at LinkedIn, for example). Social networking sites are here to stay, and more and more people, including the currently suspicious parents, will be joining the bandwagon. There will be social networking sites that cater to them. We'll see a proliferation over the next few years of such sites. This will get pretty confusing, trying to track who's on which sites (for some people, this confusion is already a reality).

This confusion will eventually be fixed by a "grand interoperability" between all sites. A tool or service of some sort will make things easier: you'll be able to have one digital identity, or avatar, and access everything through that. People will still inhabit different digital domains that cater to their interests: there will be a Myspace for kids and a Theirspace for grownups. But disparate groups will be able to connect through public avatars...something you can quickly update and that will auto-populate your various social networking accounts. It will be interesting to see how this evolves.

Tags: social networking digital identity myspace avatar