2009: A Year of the Social Network

As 2009 draws to a close, it’s clear that the year was a watershed for social networks and the firms that own them.

The year saw major changes at sites like Facebook and Twitter as millions of non-technical users became regular users of social networks. In 2009, social networks no longer featured posts with reams and reams of drivel — like telling people what kind of sandwich you had for lunch or about the great parking space you grabbed near the gym. Instead, they were used far more to let the world learn about everything from political unrest to plane crashes to political events in real time.

The user base of social networks this year expanded greatly from the traditional teenage and college student set. It now includes many of their parents and even grandparents who now use the technology as a primary mode of communication. While it’s been a bit embarrassing for the kids involved to have their Uncle Fred befriend them on Facebook, the broader audience has been a boon to social networking companies.

Milestone Year

“It looks like 2009 will be known as the year that social networking went mainstream,” said Dan Olds, an analyst with the Gabriel Consulting Group. “This was the year when Mom, Dad, and even Grandma found Facebook and Twitter, and used them to make the Web a part of their lives — often for the first time.”

Perhaps most significant is that companies in various industries started to see how social networks can help boost business even in a recession. While many CEOs may still be a bit disconnected from the social networking phenomenon, many companies, like Zappos.com and Dell Inc., have found ways to draw in new customers using Web 2.0 methods.

“Really, 2009 has been a watershed year for social networking,” said Olds. “Business has embraced both Twitter and Facebook as a way to communicate directly with customers and to inexpensively get their points across to a large number of folks. Much of the fear that business had of social networking seems to have abated as they become more comfortable with the concept and see the advantages. We’re still at a point where only a small number of businesses have social networking strategies, but that number is increasing quickly over time.”

Social Networks Draw Crowds

And several analysts noted that the results of online user counts bear out such opinions.

Earlier this fall, for instance, Facebook logged its 350 millionth user. And this summer, Nielsen Co. reported that In April, Facebook users spent 13.9 billion minutes on the site, 700% more than the year-earlier total of 1.7 billion minutes.

And Twitter hasn’t been a shrinking violet in the social networking scene in 2009. In March, for example, the number of U.S. visitors to the site increased by 131% just from February, according to online researcher comScore Inc. And Experian Hitwise, an Internet monitoring firm reported this fall that Twitter’s September traffic increased by 1170% compared to year-earlier month.

All this growth did have to come at someone’s expense, and that burden seems to have fallen on MySpace. A pioneer in the social networking scene and an early market leader, MySpace’s share fell behind Facebook globally and in the U.S. this year for the first time. Facebook’s share of the U.S. market reached 30.26% in September while MySpace’s September share plunged 55% to 30.26% from a market leading 66.84% share a year earlier, according to Experian Hitwise.

But the expanse of social networking users isn’t just about the sheer numbers. It’s also about the breadth of the users. Everyone from the kid who sat behind you in homeroom during sophomore year to Oprah Winfrey to NASA astronauts orbiting in space are connecting with their fans online this year.

Remaining Challenge: Cashing Out

The task that remains for social networking firms is a big one — finding ways to generate revenue and profit.

Twitter’s leaders have been adamant through 2009 that they are comfortable taking their time to come up with and to implement a viable business plan. Both Twitter CEO Evan Williams and co-founder Biz Stone have said they want to focus first on building out the site’s features, and then focus on the money.

By year’s end, though, Twitter had signed potential revenue generating deals with Google and Microsoft to help them offer users the ability to get real time results from the Google and Bing search engines. And Microsoft signed a similar deal with Facebook.

While none of the companies disclosed the deals’ financial details, industry watchers speculate that both Twitter and Facebook finally hit on a potentially big pay day.

Jim McGregor, an analyst with In-Stat, said the real-time search deals are an indication of what users can expect in 2010. “I think the early adopter phase is over,” said McGregor. “Now, we’ll see more of a judgment period on what the true value is here. This was a big year but, no, there’s definitely more to come.”

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Twitter to introduce live video-tweeting

Twitter users may soon be posting real-time video tweets in addition to text tweets under plans to modernise the site.

The upgrade, which is being discussed by Twitter’s founders, will enable Twitter users to upload brief video snippets to their profiles directly from mobile phones, laptops and other devices.

Third party sites Twiddeo and Tweetube already allow Twitter users to post video tweets but only by creating links to their sites.

Both Twideo and Tweetube have so far failed to gain as much popularity as similar external service Twitpic.

Twitter’s founders hope by adding live video-tweeting it will help boost its prominence as a fashionable social-networking tool again.

In recent weeks both British singer Lily Allen and Hannah Montana actress Miley Cyrus have snubbed the site by closing their Twitter accounts. Allen’s last tweet read: “I am a neo-Luddite, goodbye.”

Some of Britain’s biggest tweeters include Stephen Fry with 810,000 followers, Sarah Brown, the prime minister’s wife, with 840,000 followers, and rock group Coldplay who have more than two million followers. Sarah Brown’s Twitter following is already believed to be five times larger than the entire membership of the Labour party.

Although many tweets describe mundane activities, the site has played a role in news events. Twitter was an active platform for protesters during the Iranian elections and in January, a ferry passenger was the first person to post pictures of people being rescued from an airliner in New York’s Hudson River.

Twitter has also been used as a campaign tool by Barack Obama and British politicians in support of the NHS.

The site has yet to make a profit or find a way of making money but has been valued at £603m. Twitter has 54 million users around the world every month.

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Yahoo GeoCities Dies This Month

If you happen to be one of the early adopters of the Internet, chances are high that you might have come across at least one whacky Geocities’ hosted website. The once dominant, free web hosting service was home to the first websites of a host of users – who later became techies and moved on to other platforms.

In fact, even before the term “blogging” was coined, Geocities was the place to be back in the 90’s if you needed a place to voice your opinion – in your own maverick style, of course! Geocities pages was the MySpace of the 90’s with the a plethora of absolutely whacky user web sites complete with an overdose of primary colours and glittering text hosted on it.

Originally created by David Bohnett and John Rezner back in 1994, Geocities was bought by Internet giant Yahoo in the late 90’s in an astronomical $2 billion dollar deal. That was in 1999.

Fast forward to 2009 and almost 10 years after the buyout, Yahoo seems to have had enough and is on the verge of shutting down Geocities. It was in April 2009 that the first signs of Geocities breathing its last came to fore. Yahoo just gave its users a hint that the service will be shut down and that people might want to “relocate” their stuff to other locations – preferably Yahoo’s own hosting service. While they had not given a last date back then, three months later, Yahoo has finalized Oct. 26 as the day when one of Internet’s most used, and loved website goes offline. Forever.

To state that Geocities is a part of the world wide web history would be an understatement. As CNET writer Don Reisinge said that the closure of Geocities is definitely marks the ‘end of an era’ – and we can’t help but agree. But life goes on! So long old, friend!

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Facebook going Lite to take on Twitter

Seems a lighter version of Facebook is on the cards. The world’s no. 1 the social-networking site has sent out invitations to select users to beta test the site, termed Facebook Lite.

According to TechCrunch, it has been inundated with social networkers who have been asked to try out Facebook Lite saying that, surprise, it is more Twitter-like.

The message sent out to beta testers reads, “You have been selected as a beta tester for Facebook Lite! We are building a faster, simpler version of Facebook that we call Facebook Lite. It’s not finished yet and we have plenty of kinks to work out, but we would love to get your feedback on what we have built so far.”

Check out Facebook Lite now at http://lite.facebook.com.

Facebook recently announced that it is buying FriendFeed, an up-and-coming social media startup, that allows people to share content online in real time across various social networks and blogs.

The service is similar to, though less popular than Twitter, the microblogging site that Facebook tried to buy for $500 mn in 2008, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Terms of the deal have not been disclosed so far, but Facebook said FriendFeed would operate as it has for the time being as the teams determine long-term plans.

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Google invites feedback on super-secret search upgrades

Google is upgrading its search infrastructure and it’s being really shady about it.

In a post on its Webmaster Central blog, however, Google engineers Sitaram Iyer and Matt Cutts insist that ordinary users won’t even see the difference.

“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search,” the post reads, making it all sound vaguely like some kind of elf workshop. “It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.” The user interface is unchanged.

Developers are encouraged to try out the new technology on a “sandbox” page and then offer feedback by including the word “caffeine” in Google’s feedback text field, secret-password-style.

The company acknowledged that “some parts of this system aren’t completely finished yet.” But the industry buzz is obviously a huge part of it: There’s a legitimate new contender in the search engine market, Microsoft’s Bing, which is fueled by heavy marketing dollars and has begun to inch its way up in market share since its debut earlier this summer.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt gives the impression that he isn’t particularly worried about Bing. But it’s hard to not look at a shadowy blog post about under-the-radar upgrades to Google’s search index and not take it as a Googly way of saying, “game on.”

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Google Earth Admits Goof-up on Arunachal Pradesh

Google has admitted that it committed a mistake by wrongly depicting certain parts of north-east India’s Arunachal Pradesh as Chinese territory, and promised to correct the maps soon.

According to a statement by a Google spokesperson, “Earlier this week, as part of routine update to Google Earth, we published new data for the Arunachal Pradesh region that changed the depiction of certain place names in the product. The change was a result of a mistake in our processing of new map data.”

There was speculation in media circles that Chinese hackers had attacked Google Earth which led to the wrong depiction of Indian territory as Chinese in the maps on google Earth. “We would like to clarify that this issue did not impact our depiction of international borders,” the Google spokesperson said.

Google Earth is a service offered by Google that lets users to view satellite imagery, maps, terrain and 3D buildings.

Google Earth had earlier been in the center of another controversy when Indian security agencies had complained that Google Earth exposed Indian defense and other sensitive installations.

Source: CXOtoday.com

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Kerala gets stronger in fighting cyber crime

Stepping up its combat against cyberpunks, Kerala police has decided to set up cyber cells in all districts, state DGP Jacob Punnoose said today.

The state government has already provided Internet connectivity in all police stations. So the move comes as a logical next step for the government. “Cyber cells alone are not sufficient, we should have cyber crime fighting tools and interaction facilities with other states. Everyday new forms of cyber crimes are being discovered,” Punnoose told reporters.

Speaking after inaugurating the national seminar organised by the City Police to mark the Cyber Safety Day, he also said police personnel should change their attitude and be technologically competent to fight the cyber crimes.

He further said that cyber training facility for police personnel would be started in the near future.

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Flickr Updates Its Search Feature

Flickr is one of the largest and most used photo sites, but its search function hasn’t always been the most intuitive. This week the company announced a noteworthy redesign that makes searching for photos easier.

Forstarters, the new “View” control (located at the top of the page, just below the search box) will display results in a thumbnail gallery view across different sizes and formats (small, medium, detail, slideshow). As Flickr’s blog states,”both small and medium views have an ‘i’ icon on every thumbnail.” Clicking on it will generate a full-sized image of the photo, which means you no longer have to navigate away from the page to get up close and personal with your favorite photos.

Flickr has also added a new sidebar with links to groups, photographers, tag clusters, and more. All in all, a much-welcome set of tweaks.

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Wikipedia Sees a Drop in Contributions

Wikipedia has become one of the biggest sites in the world and many users rely on it almost everyday either for school and even research, but also other less educational purposes. It’s hard to imagine how the web looked like before Wikipedia, but a new study revealed some troubling statistics showing that the site had mostly stagnated in recent years, with contributions dropping about a third since 2006 when their numbers peaked.

“It’s easy to say that Wikipedia will always be here,” Ed Chi, a computer scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center, told New Scientist. “This research shows that is not a given.” Eight years after it launched, the web resource houses some three million user-contributed articles. But the growth in the number of new articles reached its peak three years ago, when 60,000 new pieces were submitted per month, and the trend has since turned negative, with about 40,000 new articles being added today.

The number of edits to current entries flattened out in 2007, when they reached their maximum, and have since stayed at about 5.5 million per month. The number of active editors also peaked that year and has since stayed at about 750,000 per month.

The research also provided a possible explanation for the waning interest, as regular contributors have become more important both in the number of contributions, but also in exercising their powers. The data showed that “occasional” contributors, those with just one edit per month, had their changes reverted or deleted 25 percent of the time, and the number has risen for the more frequent contributors as well, with those making less than ten changes per month having their edits reverted 15 percent of the time.

However, while the data may be accurate, the interpretation may not be the only one, with others attributing the high number of deleted or reverted edits to the increasing level of spam on the site. The decreasing number of new articles may also be a natural effect of the size of Wikipedia, as new content is becoming increasingly scarce, while also increasing the importance of edits versus new entries.

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Businesses advised to use SMS marketing

Text-based marketing could be a good way of engaging with members of the public, experts have suggested.

According to Opus Research, the number of text messages being sent in the US is now outstripping the amount of phone calls that are made, reports MediaPost.

The organisation has therefore encouraged businesses to respond to this trend by engaging in SMS marketing strategies.

Greg Sterling, senior analyst at Opus Research, said text-based marketing has been largely overlooked by many firms because of the emergence of devices such as the iPhone.

“While much of the ad industry is focused on smartphones, they currently only represent about 15 or 16 per cent of total handsets in the US,” he commented.

Opus Research added that while options such as the mobile internet could offer lots of potential for marketers in the future, SMS marketing is already established and does not depend on smartphones to succeed.

A study by uSwitch recently found that text messaging is just as popular among Britons, as about 60 billion texts are sent in the UK every year.

Does your brand make use of SMS marketing? If not then Hurry Up and start doing it now.

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