Orkut which is owned by Google, is way behind Facebook as a social network on a worldwide scale. But in India and Brazil Orkut has so far been the dominant social network.

However, it now looks as if things are about to change in India.

Growth of Orkut v Facebook in India

According to comScore’s findings, in May 2010, Orkut had 19.7 million unique visitors while Facebook had 18 million unique visitors. But the rate at which Facebook has been growing in India is much faster than the rate at which Orkut is growing.

In the previous year, Facebook had only 6.5 million users in India, which means that they have grown by 177%, while Orkut has grown only by 35% in the same time period.

By that yardstick, it is possible that Facebook has already overtaken Orkut by now.

Facebook for their part are leaving no stone unturned to capture the Indian market. They have started operations in India since march this year and the office will be based in Hyderabad.

They are currently on a hiring spree and intend to hire around 500 professionals to work with them.

They have already appointed Kirthiga Reddy as Director of Online Operations and Manoj Varghese as Director of User Operations.

In the entire Asia pacific region, social media has started affecting the buying decisions of users in a significant manner.

Online product reviews have become very popular and are next in line only to recommendations by family and friends. Products such as consumer electronics, cosmetics and cars are frequently reviewed here.

Interestingly however, different countries vary greatly in the way they share reviews. While the Koreans are most likely to post positive reviews the Chinese are most likely to post negative reviews of any product.

The report also shows that blogging is most popular in Japan, with over 1 million blogs being posted there every month. Twitter which had only about 200,000 users in Japan last year now has over 10 million users, which is 16% of the Japanese Internet population.

In China more than 80% of social media content is through bulletin boards, and new comers indulge in social gaming while the more experienced tend to share content. Virtual product placement in social gaming is very popular and social media celebrities like Sister Phoenix and Mr. Yuan are more popular than real celebrities.

Though Orkut is the most popular social network in India, Facebook is fast gaining in popularity. Twitter is also growing very fast and over 57% OF Twitter users in India, have joined in during the last year. Online product reviews are also very popular here.

In Korea, 95% of the Internet population accesses their social site Naver every month. The elections in June also saw the growth of mobile social media.

Australia has the highest global average for time spent on social media with users spending over 7 hours per month. Activities relating to sports and parenting are frequently discussed here. LinkedIn has also grown in popularity by 99% in the last year.

The popular singer now has 11,109,469 fans, while the U.S. President has also crossed the 10 million threshold and now has 10,018,956 fans.

11 million+ people Like Lady Gaga on Facebook

Lady Gaga has more fans than the U.S. President on twitter too.Gaga’s 4.9 million Twitter followers make her the 3rd most popular Twitter user, compared to Obama’s 4.5 million, which rank him 5th, after Ellen DeGeneres.

While Lady Gaga is the first living person to have achieved this record on Facebook, she is at the sixth position in the general category, after, Texas Hold’em Poker, Michael Jackson, Mafia Wars, Facebook and the U.S.  television show Family Guy.

Of these, Texas Hold’em Poker has the largest fan following by far, with over 20 million fans on Facebook. Lady Gaga has a long way to go, if she wants to be at the top of the list.

A while ago, Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, mentioned that Google was working on building a full-fledged social network – Google Me. Kevin Rose says that he got his information from a “very credible source”. His tweet, though, has now been deleted from Twitter.

This information has since been backed up by Adam D’Angelo, who was formerly the CTO at Google.

D’Angelo, who worked for Facebook after he left Google, now has his own site, Quora, where he made this announcement. According to him, the Google Me project is more than just a rumour. He says that a lot of people are working on it, and he is very confident about it. He feels that Google has realised that their site Buzz is not good enough o compete with the very rapidly growing Facebook, and hence they would like to set up a full fledged social network of their own, and this is now a high priority task for them.

According to D’Angelo, Google had earlier assumed that Facebook’s growth would slow down in time, but as there is no sign of that happening, they have decided to take up the challenge and start their own social network.

Also, Facebook has now ventured into search, which is traditionally the strong hold of Google, so Google has decided to enter the field of social networks.

Google had tried their hand at social networking in the past with Orkut and later with Buzz, but for one reason or other, both these sites did not too well on a worldwide level, so now they could be starting afresh with Google Me.

It is also obvious that owning a social networking site would improve their potential for advertising, to a very large extent, which means that they will generate more revenue, hence the rush to start the new social network.

The confirmation came during a Facebook Developers Garage event in London. Zuckerberg said, “We are finishing designing our application soon and hope to offer it soon.”

Ever since Twitter talked about delivering location-based services, there has been speculation about Facebook following their lead and launching some location-based features.

The New York Times was probably the first to report, in March, that Facebook would allow users to share their location details by April. When that did not happen, Advertising Age said in May, that the features would be launched by June.

Facebook reportedly had to put aside several projects that were in the developmental stages, including the location feature, in order to sort out the problems that arose from their new privacy interface.

Now that Twitter has already gone live with Places, the Facebook team has made the time to concentrate on building location awareness. However, there is still no clarity about how the features will function and how they will affect the user as well as the market. If history is anything to go by, it will most likely be very similar to Twitter Places!

Facebook location features will probably link to Facebook Community Pages such as this one.

A study conducted by the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) has found that several people over 50 years of age in the USA are not only using the Internet very comfortably but are also adept users of Facebook and the latest gadgets such as the iPad.

AARP interviewed 1,360 adults over the phone last month and found that 27% of Americans over 50 years of age use social networks. They also found that Facebook was the most popular social site for this age group, ahead of other sites like MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn. eMarketer had also conducted a similar study a while ago and found similar results.

49% of those between 50 and 64 years of age and 40% of all above 50 years said they were very comfortable with the Internet and frequently used it as a means of communication.

It was also found that 47% of these users heard about the social networks from family members and 70% of them did so through their children or grandchildren. Most of these senior citizens use the networks to keep in touch with their children (62%) and grandchildren (36%) and not to spy on the youngsters as some might suppose.

83% of the respondents had also heard about the iPad and while only 2% of them had already bought one, 11-14% of them were planning to do so.

StumbleUpon has, however, chosen not to make a big hue and cry about it. An employee of the site just stumbled the profile of the new entrant and mentioned that he was their official 10 millionth user. He is a 20 year old male from Colombia, and his user name is Nellzom.

In April 2008 StumbleUpon had registered 5 million users and they have doubled that number in the last two years. In fact, the StumbleUpon blog announced that they had 9,908,350 users just over a fortnight ago, which means they signed up approximately 6,500 new users each day in the past 2 weeks.

Statistics released by the company show that they have seen an 118% growth in the number of active users since 2009 and have delivered 5.4 billion recommendations since April 2009, half a billion of which were in March 2010.

StumbleUpon was acquired by eBay in 2007 for $75 million but separated from eBay in the last year. The company is now faring pretty well in its recently re-acquired start-up status.

According to reports published last month, StumbleUpon drove more traffic to third-party websites than many of the other more popular sites such as Twitter, Reddit and Digg.

An average StumbleUpon user stumbles about 25 times a day. Users of the StumbleUpon add-on for Firefox stumble sites about 400 times a month.

The growing popularity of StumbleUpon can probably be attributed to the fact that it is very easy to operate. Users can discover new sites with just one click and also rate them with a simple thumbs up or a thumbs down with just one more click.

The service has reportedly been in the beta testing stage since last December. Twitter started testing the service by inviting a few account holders to use the service and give Twitter feedback about it. Once Twitter is satisfied with the results and performance of the service it will be rolled out to all users.

A few business users were sent an email, which informed them about the new “Twitter Toolkit”. To start beta testing the service, users were asked to visit their Twitter account settings and then to click on the new ‘Business’ tab where they could provide information to help Twitter to verify the account.

Once a business activates its account by clicking on the email link, it gets automatically verified. The user can then activate the business features for that account. Business account users can provide information including contact details and size of the business – small, large, individual or group.

Activated business accounts show the verified logo on Twitter, which was. until now, available only to celebrities and extremely popular individual users. The benefit of a verified account is obvious – the follower knows for sure that he / she is interacting with an official company representative and not some imposter.

Verified business accounts show four tabs in the Twitter Business Center:

• Overview – general information about the business account
• Business Info – users can change the information was provided at the time of account verification
• Verification – confirms that the account has been successfully verified
• Contributors – allows the business to directly add multiple users to a business account.

Screenshot of the Twitter Business Center

In addition to the ability to allow multiple contributors within an account – a feature that was quite expected, given the success of coTweet – another notable feature of the new service is that it allows businesses to accept direct messages even from users whom they have not previously been following. This feature could be very helpful to businesses as far as receiving information and feedback is concerned.

Twitter has not given any indication of when it aims to bring the service out of beta and make it generally available, nor have they announced what the cost of this service to businesses will be.

Facebook accounts for nearly half the traffic generated from social networks and other social media sites, contributing to 48% of the total. The next largest referrer is StumbleUpon, which sends 25% of the total social media traffic. Twitter ranks third and accounts for 10% of the traffic sent from social sites.

Top 7 Social Media sites that referred traffic to global websites in Jan – Mar 2010.

StatCounter has arrived at these figures after analysing 13 billion page views from all their member sites. Their CEO, Aodhan Cullen, says, “From a business perspective the findings suggest that there is merit in having a corporate Facebook page or Twitter account.”

Quite surprisingly, StumbleUpon has managed to remain the second largest driver of social media traffic through the last year. In the U.S.A; it was the topmost source of social traffic in March.

YouTube, reddit, Digg and MySpace are next in line, in terms of driving traffic, with 6%, 4%, 2% and 2% contribution to total social media referrals respectively.

However, Cullen warns that the social media market is known to fluctuate quite sharply and during the last Christmas and New Year season, Facebook was not only at the top but accounted for almost 75% of the traffic referrals.

Last year, the top three slots were occupied by StumbleUpon, Facebook and MySpace, in thet order.

Now, with the recent introduction of Annotations and @anywhere by Twitter and the ‘Like’ button by Facebook the situation could change all over again.

The community page is essentially a new version of the Facebook Page. They were created to stop people from building Fan Pages on topics that are neither brands nor famous personalities.

In the past, users have created Fan Pages on trivial topics such as “I bet I can find 1,000,000 who HATE Miley Cyrus”, which should have perhaps been a rant for a celebrity forum or a Facebook group, but should never really have been a Facebook Page.

Now, people who are interested in a topic can network with each other on Community Pages.

These pages are connected with the Bing Maps Platform, so if a particular community page is associated with a geographical location, the place will also be pinpointed on a Bing Map that will be visible on the page.

Community Pages are still in the beta phase. Facebook and Bing aim to turn the new service into a site much like Wikipedia, Squidoo or Mahalo, where shared knowledge is available on any topic. To start with, the page will show information from Wikipedia, but Facebook looks forward to contributions from users on the subject.

In order to drive users to these pages, Facebook will suggest specific pages to users based on their interests, place of residence and other details mentioned on the users’ profiles. Users will always have the option to accept pages suggested or to ignore page suggestions.

Community Pages will be public, so users must keep in mind that any comments they make or pictures they post will be visible to all users.

Facebook Community Page for Johannesburg, Gauteng

Users access various social activities such as social networks, blogs reading a message board etcetera at least once a week. However the site which has really done very well for itself, is without a doubt Facebook.

According to the Nielsen report, commissioned by women-focused blog network BlogHer and NBCU’s iVillage, Facebook is now catching up with TV in terms of popularity in the U.S.

While 55% of the population is believed to watch TV daily, 47% of the population visits Facebook daily. In fact, Facebook is now much more popular than other channels of information and entertainment such as radio and newspapers, which are accessed by 37% and 22% of the population respectively.

One of the major factors which draws people to Facebook, could be social gaming. Nielsen reports that 32.7 million people are now playing social games like Farmville daily. This figure is equal to the number of daily newspaper readers and double the number of magazine readers.

Other forms of social media such as blogs are not so popular, however, and attract only 11% of web users daily.

Even though Ning is believed to have over 20 million visitors a month, and had 1 million uniques a year ago, things obviously have not been going too well for them.

They have announced large scale staff cut-backs following a change in leadership – their previous CEO Gina Bianchini left the company last month and Jason Rosenthal has taken her place.

Ning was valued at $500 million one year ago, based on their then-proclaimed user numbers and estimated ad revenues. Rosenthal decided that they need to re-evaluate their working systems. After studying the business, he concluded that they needed to focus on their premium services business.

Premium Ning Networks drive 75% of their monthly U.S. traffic. Network Creators who use these services will need to pay for many more services and features. They are, therefore, going to change their strategy to devote 100% of their resources to building the bread-winning products.

Ning will phase out free services shortly. Existing free networks will have the opportunity to either convert to paying for premium services or move away from Ning.

In effect, paying customers will be required to pay higher prices and free customers will have the choice to either start paying for services or leave Ning and move their networks over to other sites.

Users on the Ning Creators forum thread where this announcement was made have already started talking about leaving Ning. New threads have cropped up listing a number of viable options, which currently include Grou.ps, Spruz, SocialGO, BuddyPress, Lovd By Less and Elgg.

While it makes sense that those who use Ning to build full-fledged networks for their users should invest in the service, a vast number of networks have been created on Ning only because it was the best free alternative. Most of these networks do not have a financial reason to exist, and when Ning shuts down their free service, they will leave the network in droves.

Google has now introduced another feature, to access whatever data is needed from all the Twitter archives.

Since blogs, tweets and online conversations are constantly adding to the search content, it is difficult for users to access information of some time ago.

With this new feature, it will be possible for people to ‘replay’ whatever was being said on Twitter about a particular topic, at a given point of time in the past.

To do so, users should first click on ‘Show Options’ on the search results page. They must then select ‘Updates’. They will first be shown the latest and greatest short-form updates but they will also see a new chart at the top, from which they can select the date, month and year, and they will see all the Tweets on the given topic from that day onwards.

The chart will also show all the spikes and dips of Twitter activity on that subject.

This new feature will allow users to go back in time to study the opinions on the subject at that time.

The feature is just being rolled out in English initially, and will allow people to go back to the Tweets up to February 11 2010. Later of course, it will be possible to go back to the starting of Twitter, way back on March 21 2006.

Executive Vice President, Jon Broad, stated in a memo to employees, “Bebo, unfortunately is a business that has been declining and as a result would require significant investment in order to compete in the competitive social networking space. AOL is not in a position at this time to further fund and support Bebo in pursuing a turnaround in social networking.”

AOL has recently separated from its parent company, Time Warner, and is itself struggling to compete against other dial up services.

A strategic evaluation of Bebo is underway, and the results are expected to be out by the end of next month. It is  reasonable to expect that the estimated selling price will be much lower than what AOL paid for it.

According to comScore, Bebo had 5.8 million users at this time last year, but has only 5.1 million users at present, which itself is a bad sign. Compare this with the hundreds of millions of users that other sites like Facebook and Twitter have gained, and Bebo’s figures seem miniscule. It is highly likely that Bebo has been a casualty of the growing popularity of Facebook and Twitter.

It is also possible that AOL may eventually decide to abandon Bebo, instead of selling it. This would allow AOL to avail of certain tax incentives, rather than selling Bebo at a very low price and showing a capital loss on their accounts.

In terms of actual numbers, that is 240.3 million unique visitors to social networks.

Among all the networks, Facebook held the top spot in most of the countries in the region, with a few exceptions such as India, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

Users spent an average of 2.5 hours each on the social networks in the course of the month, and each visitor accessed a social network about 15 times in the month.

The Philippines was found to lead the way for social network penetration, with 90% of its online population visiting social networks in February 2010. They were closely followed by Australia, which has 89.6% penetration and Indonesia, which had 88.6% penetration.

It was also found that the Philippines had the highest level of engagement, with an average of 5.5 hours and 26 visits per user. Indonesia had an average of 5.4 hours and 22 visits per user. Australia had 3.8 hours and 20 visits per user. Malaysia had nearly 3.8 hours and 22 visits per user.

Facebook was the most popular social network in places like the Philippines (84.5% market share), Australia (69.4%), Indonesia (84.9%), Malaysia (77.5%), Singapore (72.1%), New Zealand (63.6%), Hong Kong (62.6%) and Vietnam (18.4%).

In other markets, several other networks had the lead. In India, Orkut was the leader with 46.8%. Wretch.cc in Taiwan commands 62.5%, CyWorld in South Korea has 54.2% and Mixi.jp has 18.9% of the Japanese market share.

Social media will help the parties get the attention of the public and, in turn, garner more supporters.

Facebook has about 20.9 million users aged 18 and over in the United Kingdom, which is almost the same as the number of people who voted in the last general election.

At the time of publishing this article, the official Labour Party page has 11,922 fans on Facebook. The Conservatives have 31,745 fans and the Liberal Democrats have 11,550 fans.

YouTube, Twitter and Facebook feature prominently on all three major parties’ websites. RSS feeds are just as prominently available for subscription and blogs are widely used.

The extent to which the Internet is expected to help in the U.K. is less than in the U.S. as it is a much shorter campaign and the level of fund raising is much lower.

It is rumoured that the Conservative party’s digital team is spending as much as 20% of their time on Twitter. Sarah Brown, the wife of the current Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has a follower count of over 1.1 million on Twitter – which should be a reason for the Tories to worry, as they only have a little over 23,000 followers!

Channels such as YouTube, Delicious, Livestream, podcasting and even email are also expected to play an important role during this election.

This is the first time the Internet will play an important part in the U.K. election process especially by allowing the party leaders to communicate directly with the younger generation – usually the most politically indifferent demographic.

Political parties will be able to show highly targeted ads to the users, which will be much cheaper and more effective than traditional newspaper ads.

The down side of such an increased network presence is that the slightest mis-step by a party leader can go viral and be broadcast to millions of voters in no time. All candidates now need to be more aware than ever of the fact that they can now be tracked almost all the time and their privacy is something they can never be entirely sure of having.

Liberal Democrats on YouTube

Common sense would probably indicate the same without the need for research. If a consumer elects to receive a brand’s messaging on their Facebook news stream or Twitter feed, that consumer is already likely to be a champion of the brand. It is just natural that such a consumer would then be more likely to buy that brand’s products.

Assuming that social media prompts consumers to buy would be a leap of faith not justified by this research. The only role it plays, according to this piece of research, is to prompt consumers who already like a brand to buy more of its products.

iModerate Research Technologies and consumer market research firm, Chadwick Martin Bailey, conducted the survey on the effect social media has on brand followers in February 2010 across more than 1,500 adult respondents in the U.S.A.

The study reveals that 60% of Facebook fans and 79% of Twitter followers are more likely to recommend brands that they follow or become fans of. Similarly, they are more likely to buy products of those brands.

51% of Facebook fans and 67% of Twitter followers said they were more likely to buy from the brands that they follow.

Vice President at Chadwick Martin Bailey, Josh Mendelsohn says, “Companies not actively engaged are missing a huge opportunity and are saying something to consumers – intentionally or unintentionally – about how willing they are to engage on consumers’ terms.”

Consumers of both sexes and various age groups who participated in the study also felt that brands that are not involved on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are either unaware of the opportunity they are missing or are not very interested in interacting with their consumers.

Considering that Facebook has over 400 million active users and 50 million tweets are posted on Twitter every day, the brands that are not on these networks are certainly missing the opportunity to reach a large audience.

According to eConsultancy, most consumers follow a brand to get discounts, but about 2% of them said they follow the brand to show support for it.

The information was given to The New York Times by unnamed sources who have not yet been authorised to talk about the upcoming feature.

It is likely that Facebook may announce this feature at f8, their yearly developer conference, which is due to be held next month.

One of the reasons why rumours about this feature sound more credible could be the fact that Facebook changed their privacy policy last November. The policy now says, “When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post.”

However, in anticipation of protests by the advocates of user privacy, Facebook also said, “If we offer a service that supports this type of local sharing, we will present you with an opt-in choice of whether you want to participate.”

It is believed that Facebook has been working on this location sharing feature for almost a year now. However, when questioned about the service, official spokeswoman, Meredith Chin said, “We’re constantly experimenting with new things around here, but we don’t have any details to share right now.”

The location sharing feature will supposedly be offered directly by Facebook to its users and will also have a set of software tools for developers to offer location-based services.

The fact that 50% of Facebook users log in at least once a day and 100 million users (25%) use their mobile phones to do so, makes location sharing an important feature for Facebook.

While this feature will give competition to smaller location-based networks like Foursquare and Loopt, it is more likely to compete with Google for a share of the revenue from the small business local advertising sector.

The results show that 55% of mobile social networking users are women and only 45% are men.

While there are many who may be surprised and may even disagree with the findings at first glance, it seems quite likely on second thoughts, as women are generally known to be far more social than men and they like to keep in touch with their friends and family more frequently.

What is really surprising about this study, though, is the user demographic distribution by age.

The study shows that social networks are accessed through mobile devices most often by women in the 35-54 age group, (36%) and they are followed closely by the 25-34 age group(34%)

While most people would assume that teenagers or young adults would dominate the scene here, those in the 13-17 years category account for 7% and those in the 18-24 years category account for just 16% of mobile social network activity. Though teens do use the mobile a lot, it is mostly for the purpose of text messaging.

With the use of social sites like Twitter and Facebook having increased significantly in the last year, the use of mobile phones to keep up this activity even on the go is certainly expected to increase, especially due the the mobile’s inherent ability to help people stay in touch, at all times, in a variety of different ways.

U.K. based insurance comparison site, Confused.com has warned users about this eventuality.

Another site, PleaseRobMe.com has been actively trying to create awareness among people about how using social media sites like Twitter, Facebook etc. makes them vulnerable to burglars.

The simple fact is that when users post updates, on these sites regarding their current location, daily schedule etc. they are obviously informing people that they are not at home. This information can easily be abused by miscreants.

In other words, people are making their homes more vulnerable to robbers. Insurance firms surely won’t ignore this.

Darren Black, head of home insurance at Confused.com says, “I wouldn’t be surprised that as social media grows in popularity and more location based applications come to fore, insurance providers consider these in their pricing of an individual’s risk and we could see hikes of up to 10% for people who use these sites.”

It does seem quite surprising that the advocates of user privacy, have not yet raised objections to the location based apps on social media sites, even though they had been quick to object to services like Google Maps and Street View etc. as they had then rightly pointed out that burglars are getting more and more sophisticated, where planning and execution of their attacks is concerned.

In view of these facts, it seems reasonable that insurance firms have started taking note of these factors, while providing insurance and assessing claims. After all home security is more than just putting up sophisticated locks on the door.

Facebook Zero will be a stripped down, text-only version of the original social network. It will run on a lower bandwidth. The site will not allow access photos or videos. It will be a text-only site.

The popular social network, which has been growing rapidly, claims they now have over 100 million users a month on mobile alone, and this figure is expected to grow even further. This new version will help Facebook to free-up a lot of critical bandwidth.

Facebook Zero is likely to be offered to users free of charge, and then interested users can change over to a paying model with a multimedia service.

Almost half the time spent by users online on their mobiles is dedicated to Facebook. In December 2009, users in U.K. spent 2.2 billion minutes on Facebook through their mobile phones.

According to Brandee Barker, a spokesperson at Facebook, “[Facebook] are discussing it… as an option to make Facebook on the mobile Web available to everyone anywhere and allow operators to encourage more mobile Internet usage.”

A slimmed down version of Facebook, called Facebook Lite, is already available in places with slow Internet connections, such as in third world countries.

Facebook Zero will be launched in the coming weeks.

In 2008, 45% of users thought that the opinion of their friends was trustworthy. Now, only 25% of them think so.

Other sources that have lost credibility in varying degrees are TV (lost 23 points), radio and newspapers (lost 20 points) and company spokespersons (lost 6 points). The employees of various companies who engage in discussions with consumers about their products have also lost credibility (lost 3 points).

Quite surprisingly, the CEOs of various companies, who are now coming forward to speak about their companies and products, are now gaining the trust of users (up from 17% to 26%).

Other sources showing an increase in consumer trust are government officials, analysts, NGO representatives and academic authorities.

Part of the reason for users losing faith in word-of-mouth advertising could be the greater awareness about spokespersons receiving compensation from the companies.

Richard Edelman, CEO and President of Edelman thinks this a sign of the changing times. People now need endorsements from several different sources before they start believing in a product.

Marketers who have started devoting a lot of time and money, to these social networks may now have to rethink and change their strategy before it is too late.

Currently, ‘staying connected’ means having to check status messages, tweets, update streams etc. all of which can be pretty time consuming and at times confusing for users.

Google is making use of its experience in the field of organising information, to sort out the mess that users often find themselves in.

Google Buzz has been launched as a news service built into Gmail on PCs and mobiles. Buzz makes use of the users list of contacts, in their address book, and thus automatically lets users follow the people whom they email or chat with most often. The service integrates photos, videos and links that can be shared in real-time, either publicly or privately as per the users requirements.

Buzz, when first introduced a few days ago, did not give users a choice, thus inviting criticism regarding the lack of privacy, since users do not always want all their contacts to receive all their updates and vice versa. Google has now introduced an auto-suggest feature, instead of the earlier auto-follow feature.

Other services like Flickr and Twitter can also be accessed through Buzz.

While it seems like an interesting service, there are many who feel that Google Buzz will not really simplify the process of social networking. Moreover, the poor choice of name – Google Buzz sounds like a rip-off of Yahoo! Buzz – and the initial teething problems seem to have put people off the service already.

The fact that Buzz is integrated into Gmail, though, might make it win fans and users in the long run, simply because it’s already there , so long as Google continues to make improvements and doesn’t alienate any more users.

Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, will now be providing Facebook users with a more detailed search experience. Facebook users will now have full access to several features that are available on Bing, instead of just a few links as they previously had.

This means that Facebook users will get better search results, with the use of the new tools now available to them.

Microsoft has a 1.6% stake in Facebook, which they had bought for $240 million about two years ago allowing search integration between Bing and Facebook in the U.S. This search integration will now be available to Facebook users all over the world.

So far, Bing has been providing display ads on Facebook, but it has been mutually decided that from now on, Facebook will provide their own display ads. They can better decide what ads will be best suited tot heir website. Microsoft will, however, continue to provide search ads to Facebook and Facebook search results will of course continue to be powered exclusively by Bing.

This has been a good time for Facebook, as they will not only earn more revenue through the display ads, but they are also completing six years of social networking. They now have about 400 million users, which is a landmark in itself, and the figure has almost doubled over the last year.

It is also expected that Facebook will set up its own full-fledged webmail product, and with more and more people spending so much time on Facebook, they could soon become the top news source on the Internet.

The GSMA is the industry association for mobile phone operators. It carried out a study on mobile Internet use in December 2009. The study showed that almost 16 million people in U.K. spent nearly 4.8 billion minutes on the mobile Internet and generated 6.7 billion page views between them. Of this, nearly 50% of the time people spent on the mobile Web was on Facebook.

The total number of mobile Internet users is likely to be much more than 16 million, as T-Mobile and 3 were not included in the survey. This data will be published shortly.

While Facebook was visited by almost 5 million users, it was closely followed by Google, which was used by 4.57 million users. Users did not spend anywhere near as much time on Google, though, as they did on Facebook.

The figures were released by the Mobile Media metrics service, which has been recently launched by the GSMA and comScore, to help various brands and agencies to set up their mobile ad campaigns and to judge the response they receive, to these campaigns.

Mobile marketing has definitely been on the upswing lately. Mobile commerce showed significant growth in the 2009 holiday season and reports predict that mobile Internet access will overtake PCs in 2013.

The survey was answered by 800 teenagers between 12 to 17 years of age and 2,253 young adults between 18 and 29 years of age. This is the section of the population that is a key indicator of future technology trends.

The study reveals that while blogging was a popular activity in 2006, with about 28% of the users indulging in it; in 2009, only 14% of teenagers and 15% of young adults were participating in blogs.

In the past, MySpace, which was then the most popular social network encouraged blogging, but Facebook which has now taken over the number one spot among social networks, advocates the use of short status updates. It has been found that in 2009, only 48% of young adults used MySpace, compared to 73% who used Facebook.

The study also reveals that Twitter has not yet caught the fancy of teenagers like Facebook has managed to do. Only 8% of teenagers use Twitter and the vast majority (66%) of teenagers prefer text messaging.

That social networks are growing, in general, is obvious from the fact that in 2008, about 42% of those surveyed used more than one social network, while in 2009, 52% did so.

Among adults aged 30 or more, only about 40% used social networks in 2009, while blogging activity among them increased marginally from 7% to 11%.

Social search started as an experiment in Google Labs, undertaken to try and make search more social and personalised. Based on the number of sign ups to try this feature, Google has now released it in beta on their regular search results in the USA.

With this new feature, when users query Google, they will receive all the relevant results as usual. Google will additionally search for information on the subject that has been posted by the users’ contacts on their blogs and social networks and add that information as “Results from your social circle” in the search results page.

Users might give more weight to these social results in some cases, as they already know and trust the opinions of the contacts these results were based on.

The social feature has now also been implemented for Google Images. When a user does an image search, Google will include photos from the user’s contacts’ accounts on public sites like Picasa and Flickr. These results will also be shown under the heading “Results from your social circle”.

Two new links are visible alongside every set of social search results – “My Social Circle”, which shows the extended network of the user’s online contacts and how they are connected  and “My Social Content” which lists the user’s public pages that might appear on other people’s social results.

Where Social Search Stops Being Social

The last point mentioned above, though, might be the single biggest shortcoming of social search. Google relies on social information that is public. Unfortunately for them, the largest social network in the world, Facebook is largely closed off to search spiders. Public information on Facebook is sparse, at best.

Since these services are still in beta, Google probably expects to be able to improve upon them further in due course. If social search is to be truly social Google’s improvement efforts might need to focus on obtaining content from Facebook without violating user privacy.

Using Social Search

To start using social search, a user must first create a Google profile, and then add links to his / her other public online social network accounts.

During the week ending on 26th December 2009 social networks and forums took a lead over the search engines, in terms of number of visit, for the first time ever.

This peak over the Christmas holidays was followed by a dip in social networking, but the sector has already recovered and social networks and forums are once again showing a definite upward trend.

During the week ending on 16th January 2010, visits to social networks in Australia were only 0.4% behind search engines.

Another trend, which has been visible over the last three months, is that social networking shows a significant rise during the weekends, especially on Sundays. This was first seen by Hitwise on Sunday the 15th of November 2009 and then again on Saturday the 21st and Sunday the 22nd of November 2009.

One remarkable finding pointed out by Hitwise was that while social networking reached its highest point for 2009 on Christmas day at 14.8% share of Internet visits, search engines reached their annual peak on 10th January 2009 at 14.5% share of Internet visits.

Facebook and YouTube both had their highest number of visits on Christmas day with 8.0% and 2.2% of the market respectively.

Search engines still dominate the market in the U.K. and U.S.A. However, if the trend in Australia is an indicator of the future, social media marketing might be set to increase in importance a whole lot more.

Every change made by Facebook seems to upset privacy pundits. The latest changes in their policy have once again not gone down well with the advocates of user privacy. EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) and nine other groups filed a complaint against Facebook with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

The FTC is now looking into the matter and has asked EPIC to arrange a meeting. They have, however, refused to confirm or deny whether an investigation is being conducted on the issue or not.

David Vladeck, the FTC’s consumer protection chief wrote in a letter to EPIC, “As the amount of personal information shared on social networking sites grows and the number of third parties and advertising networks with access to such information grows it is important that consumers understand how their data is being shared and what privacy rules apply. The commission staff believes it is critical that companies provide transparency about how this data is being handled, maintained, shared and protected and what steps consumers can take to control the use of their information.”

Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, said, “people have already gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect, what the current social norms are.”

In other words, Zuckerberg claims that the increased acceptance of social networking gives Facebook the right to decide how much of their users’ information can be shared and with whom. This stance is likely to invite the ire and criticism of the FTC.

As if to add insult to injury, an unnamed employee of Facebook allegedly said, “we track everything. Every photo you view every person you’re tagged with, every wall post you make and so forth.” He also says that all information is stored in a database, even if a user tries to delete it.

The new service will enable third-party websites to integrate features of Twitter directly and easily into their own websites.

This description of the yet-to-be-launched service sounds suspiciously similar to Facebook Connect, which was launched in 2008 and has been responsible, to an extent, for the massive growth that Facebook has continued to enjoy in the last year and a half.

According to reports from Facebook, Facebook Connect has been integrated into 80,000 different websites, resulting in Facebook receiving 60 million users who connect to Facebook through these websites every month. In fact, for many of these websites, Facebook Connect is the only means for new users to create an account and then log into it.

Facebook Connect has a lot of widgets, through which Facebook features are brought directly to these sites.

Twitter too has a good few features offered to users via the Twitter API, which allows other sites to authenticate users and pull and publish data. The process of doing so, is however not as simple as that of Facebook Connect.

With the introduction of the new system, the process of integrating Twitter will become easier for webmasters, thereby spurring the growth of Twitter further.

Update: Facebook Mimics Twitter Right Back

In a comical twist of strategy, Facebook has just launched a feature very similar to Twitter’s retweets. Users can now “retweet” updates from their friends by clicking on a ‘Share’ link in their Facebook news feed.

Now, whenever Facebook users receive a notification email regarding a friend’s status update, photo upload, wall post, video etcera the user can send their reply to Facebook via email, without actually having to sign in to their Facebook account.

Facebook has also implemented some special features within this functionality that will enable filtering out all unrelated text, such as the user’s email signature.

This feature will be particularly useful to those who want to check their Facebook status while they are at work, or through their mobile phone, while on the go, as this facility will allow them to do so without signing in to Facebook, thereby bypassing any restrictions set by IT departments.

When the user receives an email notification, he or she just has to click ‘Reply’ and then type a comment at the top of the email received. Clicking ‘Send’ will automatically direct the email to a Facebook service that will add the main email contents as a comment on Facebook.

Visits to Facebook by individual users could fall, as a result, though the added interaction this prompts could keep Facebook atop of user’s minds longer. Advertising could very easily be integrated into email notifications if Facebook wanted.

Users who don’t currently receive email notifications can simply visit their account settings and choose to receive email notifications through the ‘Notifications’ tab.

Hollesley Bay prison, where Lynch was being held is an open, or minimum security prison. Moreover, Lynch was near the end of his sentence and was out on a day pass to help him integrate back into society. The act of escaping was not particularly daring.

What is really daring, however, is the fact that instead of trying to stay out of the limelight he has drawn a lot of media attention towards himself.

Lynch keeps posting recent pictures of himself, along with details about his meals or his plans for the day. He also makes rude comments about the police regularly on his Facebook Page.

During Christmas, he wrote about how he would take his “little princess” to a particular mall, so she could meet Santa Claus. Some time later, he added another update saying that he was already in that mall and was walking around with a big Winnie The Pooh in his hands. He later mentioned his plans to attend a New Year’s Eve party to be held in Lowestoft, Suffolk.

The police, on their part, have claimed to be working with Facebook to track down the IP address from which he operates and hope to catch him soon.

What seems really appalling however, is the fact that he has collected over 40,000 fans who regularly view his profile page and send him fan mail. People have even designed T-shirts and a song in his honour!

Some other Facebook users have been sending him hate mail, and trying to remind his fans that they are honouring a criminal. On his part, Craig Lynch has asked these “haters” to get off his back and to stop saying that he hit and robbed an old lady, as he claims to have done no such thing.

Facebook Page for Craig ‘Lazie’ Lynch

This information was revealed to Rory Maher a research analyst with TBI by sources close to Facebook. According to eMarketer, Facebook has become “the premier destination for marketers who are using social media.

A major factor in this super success of Facebook is the fact that they have concentrated on building ad technology, and this has let Facebook leap ahead of its rivals like MySpace in a relatively short time.

Due to the up-to-date technology which they offer, Facebook is able to charge its advertisers at premium rates. Facebook’s rate card shows that they charge $20 per CPM (Cost per 1,000 impressions) which is much higher than what most other social sites are able to charge. Facebook has also set a minimum spend limit of $50,000 for agencies.
Facebook also offers a CPC (Cost per click) basis service which ranges from $0.15 to $1.10 per click depending on the product being advertised.

They have also greatly increased the use of their self-serve advertising platform. Another important reason for their sudden growth is the fact that their audience has now crossed the 350 million mark worldwide.

Facebook also allows their advertisers to target their audience in a very precise manner, using any number of criteria they want.

Facebook also forms a very crucial part of every viral campaign. Advertisers are allowed to create fan pages, or connect to Facebook Connect, thus notifying all the contacts of Facebook users about the products they are advertising.

Facebook has also recently struck a deal with Microsoft, to incorporate their feeds into the search results on Bing.
All this indicates that Facebook is likely to continue growing next year as well.

This integration will allow users to access Friend Connect directly when they log in to their Twitter account. In other words, a user will have access to any of the over nine million sites using Google Friend Connect, through their Twitter accounts.

The Twitter profile of the user will be automatically linked to Friend Connect and it will be possible to tweet about the new site membership, without leaving the site. Users will now be able to hold discussions by posting comments on third-party sites and they will also be able to invite new friends to join the site / group through Twitter.

If a site is already linked to Friend Connect, users can now access it via their Google login as well as through Twitter.

This move will now make Friend Connect fairly similar to Facebook Connect, and it will also provide some competition to Yahoo!, which has recently announced integration with Facebook Connect.

Yahoo! users will be able to view the activities of their Facebook friends on Yahoo! and at the same time Yahoo! content will be accessible on Facebook.

This integration will make it possible for Yahoo! users (500 million across the globe) to keep in touch with all their friends and access their social activities from a single site.

Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! Finance and Flickr will all be accessible directly through Facebook Connect and users will have the choice of updating their status messages either from Facebook itself or through any of the Yahoo! sites.

Due to this integration users will be able to add comments, share news with each other or access their friend’s news feeds by accessing Facebook through Yahoo!, thus giving a much larger audience to Yahoo!

For a while now, Yahoo! had been discussing the possibility of integrating their social features such as email, address book and messenger with each other, but as of now they have decided to simply outsource these services to Facebook. They have thus lost the opportunity to monetise their own social network.

Ikea came up with an innovative and yet extremely simple way to use the popular social network, Facebook, to promote their new store in the town of Malmo, Sweden.

While using a social network to promote a product or brand is nothing new, the way they have done it is commendable, simply because the idea is so simple and inexpensive.

Forsman and Bodenfors, Ikea’s marketing agency created a profile on Facebook for the manager of the new store, Mr. Gordon Gustavsson, and then they uploaded pictures of several pieces of furniture in the store in his photo album.

Facebook users were then informed that the first person to tag their name to any piece of furniture in any of the pictures could take that article home for free!

The brilliance of this simple campaign lies in its intrinsically viral nature – when someone tags themselves on a photograph, all of their friends see the photograph, and therefore find out about the campaign. These friends then try to find a piece of furniture to tag themselves by going through the other photos in the album.

Certainly not wanting to lose out on a good opportunity, Facebook users started flocking to the profile at a feverish pace, as word of this campaign got around to more and more friends via the profiles page and Facebook news feeds. In fact users have been asking Ikea to upload more and more pictures so they can get some more freebies.

Ikea is, of course, enjoying all the publicity that is being generated for their store as a result of this campaign.

The site, which was first created way back in the 1990′s, was one of the world’s oldest Internet neighbourhoods. Most new surfers built their space on sites like GeoCities and Tripod, marking their space on the Internet long before the arrival of social networks and social media profiles.

Yahoo! bought the site almost a decade ago, for a whopping $3.57billion, in stock.

All the data and information on GeoCities, which was stored on Yahoo! servers has been deleted. Some sites like the Internet Archive and the newly formed The Archive Team have tried to retrieve and store some of this data but have probably not managed to save all of it.

Yahoo! had stopped accepting new users for this site last April itself, as they were considering this move, and in June they announced that the site would be closed on the 26th of October 2009 for good.

A spokesperson for Yahoo! said that they will now “focus on helping [their] customers explore and build new relationships online in other ways”.

As with previous occasions, when the homepage was redesigned, this time too several groups of users have formed to object to the recent changes. One group called ‘PLEASE GIVE US OUR OLD NEWS FEED BACK!’ is over 500,000 members strong.

Some of the complaints these users have raised are as follows:

• The Live Feed is not “live” enough
• Alerts are not shown when new content is posted
• While the alerts are actually being posted on the News Feed, they are not very prominent
• The news feed is not very good as some of the stories are almost one day old
• This time, Facebook did not give them enough notice about the impending changes and suddenly incorporated them in the homepage.

To be fair, Facebook has made these changes only to correct some errors in their previous design, like adding information about friends of friends, and placing the events and birthdays column above the fold.

Facebook has also improved some of their features like the ‘Share’ button. Facebook will now be able to provide detailed analytics to their publishers, so they can find out how popular a particular link is, and how many actions have taken place on Facebook, how many comments have been received etc. This feature is quite similar to the retweet counters that work with Twitter.

They have also updated their APIs to allow for the building of new apps.

In spite of the large number of protests, the allegations are not really serious and Facebook is sure to be able to survive and continue growing.

To understand this phenomenon better, Nielsen carried out a study across 1,800 participants in August 2009. For this study, users were categorised into 3 groups. Those who used mainly search engines (searchers), portals (portalists), and social media (socialisers) during their research operations.

The study surmised that approximately 18% of people used social networks as their primary source of information. Although this amount is smaller than that of search engine users (37%) and portal users (34%), it is nonetheless significant and growing constantly.

A major cause for this change could be the fact hat the internet is literally flooded with information on all subjects, thus making it difficult for the average user to decide what part of the information to trust, thus creating more confusion, rather than clarifying matters. On the other hand, when they go to the social networks, there is a lesser amount of information available, and equally important is the fact that this information is provided by ones friends and family, which reassures the user that he can trust the matter provided there.

Another factor in favour of social networks like Twitter and Facebook is the fact that they provide information in real time, while the search engines take a while to get updated.

In spite of these facts, social networks have a long way to go before they can overtake or replace the search engines for search. For one thing, social engines are more useful for information like local recommendations etc. while information about general topics is more easily available on the search engines.

Also the search engines are already working on systems for better filtration of the information available, so that users are not overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of content.

The survey shows that on weekdays most people spend about 5 hours online, of which 2 hours are related to work while the remaining 3 hours are for personal reasons including emailing, shopping chatting socializing etc. Even over weekends users spend 3 hours a day online. Youngsters between the ages of 18 – 24 years of course spend much more time online.

The time spent by users online is put to various uses. The vast majority of internet users (93%) now do their shopping online, which serves the dual purpose of saving time, as well as offering the best bargains available without having to move from shop to shop. This means that an estimated 38 million people spend up to 2 hours every week shopping online.

82% of users are believed to now manage their finances online, for which they spend anywhere up to 2 hours a week online.

At least 25% of people are quite addicted to the social networking sites and must access theses sites at least once every day. Amongst the elderly and senior citizens there is some resistance tot his trend as 67% do not use social networks at all, but 30% of those between 18 – 24 years of age spend over 5 hours a week on these sites.

A communications expert at uSwitch, Jason Glynn says, “this research shows the huge impact that the internet is having on British life. Broadband is rapidly becoming a necessity – as important as gas or electricity”. He further indicates that this trend is only likely to increase even further in times to come.

Well, there is an old proverb, which says that too much of anything is bad. Addiction to the Internet is bound to bring its own set of problems, most notably poor health due to lack of physical activity and being cooped up indoors.

Users would do well to guard against going to such extremes!

The latest statistics, collected by Brian Solis of Google Ad Planner, and published on Information is Beautiful, show that women also dominate the social web.

While the numbers seem to be more or less equal on a few of the social sites like LinkedIn, DeviantArt and YouTube, it has been found that the men are far outnumbered by the number of women on most of the other sites like Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter, MySpace etc.

The percentages of women using some of the popular social sites are as follows:

The only site on which men were found to outnumber women was Digg, which has 4.7 million more men (64% of the user base).

While there will definitely be those who say that women dominate the social Web because women often have more time to spend on unimportant matters, like chatting with their friends, because more women stay at home all the time as compared to the number of men, it is also very possible that women spend more time on social networks than men because they are the ones who really care about people and like to nurture and strengthen relationships.

Whatever the reasons for this difference, these demographics will certainly be very useful to marketers, as they give a very good indication of what sort of products and campaigns should be displayed on the social networks in order to get good conversion rates.

LinkedIn is now going a step further to endear itself to its identified niche market segment by helping corporations recruit appropriate people for various positions. Until now, human resources personnel had to bookmark the portfolios of candidates who seemed to be appropriate or interesting for a particular post, and then save these for reference at a later date when required.

Now LinkedIn has started a new service for their Premium users, called ‘Profile Organizer’. As the name suggests, the service will allow users who pay for advanced features on LinkedIn to bookmark and save the profiles that they find interesting.

Not only can users bookmark interesting profiles, but they can also create files to categorise their contacts. This way, users can have different folders for personnel in different departments, such as manufacturing, sales, marketing etcetera for easy reference at a later date.

These folders can be categorised under different headings such as occupation and location. The details stored in the folders are not accessible to others, so users can make their own notes about each applicant. Details such as the hobbies and interests of a candidate, as also the details of any interaction with them can be stored here.

The service will be available to regular LinkedIn users for a 30 day trial period. Business members will be allowed an upper limit of five folders, while Business Pro and Pro members can create up to 25 folders. Users can test this new service on:

LinkedIn.com/organizer

The new service being provided will be called Nielsen BrandLift.

Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook says, “Nielsen is the leader in measurement and is an excellent partner for us as we look to provide marketers with richer ad effective data”.

BrandLift will make use of opt-in polls on the Facebook homepage. The poll will help marketers to understand the opinion users have of a particular brand and thus the likelihood of purchase intent.

According to John Burbank, the CEO of Nielsen’s online division, Facebook has now become a vital link between consumers and brands, and with this partnership Nielsen will be able to add tot heir knowledge of media measurement. He further says, “we will be able to provide the missing elements to clients seeking better understanding of how web content and online advertising affect consumer behavior.”

This survey will help marketers to receive better market data and it will be made available to them sooner which is a great plus point for them.

Facebook will take care to see that individual users are not flooded with too many polls at once. Also no personal identification will be gathered through this poll, thus maintaining user privacy, which should please users.

The survey will consist of two questions put forward to consumers in standard ad positions. The survey will help advertisers to measure brand awareness, ad recall, message association, brand favorability and purchase consideration.

The service has already been used by a few brands such as Proctor & Gambol, and Sony Pictures on a trial basis. They have reported encouraging findings.

The service will be made available to all marketers in due course.

Several advertisers have admitted that of late, the results they get from advertising on Facebook are better than those achieved from advertising on Google, and that is in spite of spending less on Facebook than on Google.

According to several advertisers and marketers, the response they have been getting from Facebook has improved substantially in the last 6 months, and due to this, more and more businesses are buying ad space on Facebook.

Tim Kendall, director of monetization at Facebook, however, maintains that the advertising growth curve at Facebook has maintained a steady pace and there has been no sudden jump in the demand for ad space on their site. It is true, though, that the number of advertisers on Facebook has tripled over the last three years.

One important factor for this growth surge at Facebook is the ability of advertisers to find their target audiences accurately from the profile data available about Facebook users. Facebook has always been very strict about users using real names and information on the site, and has often deleted profiles that posted false information. As a result, demographic data on Facebook is more reliable than on other networks.

When a Facebook user likes a product they are likely to recommend it to most of their friends, who are already on Facebook. This feature has certainly attracted a lot of marketers to Facebook.

While Google has not commented on this topic, Facebook has announced that they have logged annual sales to the tune of $500 million. Coupled with Facebook’s fast growing user base, it may only be just a matter of time before the social networking leader out performs Google on the advertising front.

First they added real time search to Facebook, soon after it was incorporated into Twitter and then they acquired FriendFeed.

Their latest move along this path is the incorporation of @mentions on their status updates, which allows users to respond directly to various comments, event announcements and so on.

To use this feature, the user has to type the ‘@’ symbol in the status update box, and a drop down menu then allows the user to tag friends, groups events etc. The concerned party will then receive a link to this post. This procedure is expected to simplify the use of Facebook.

@mentions, which were earlier called @replies are an extremely popular feature of Twitter. In fact, @mentions are one of the main reason behind Twitter’s popularity as a quick  communications tool.

Several Facebook users made use of Twitter for their status updates. With this new feature, users will no longer need to access Twitter to message their friends. Facebook users will now be able to tag and chat with each other directly on Facebook. It will, in fact, be possible for users to update Twitter through Facebook, instead of the other way around, which has been the case so far.

Marketers and advertisers will also now be able to communicate and interact with their clients through Facebook as they will be able to follow each comment attached to their name. This will be beneficial for them as Facebook has 250 million users and Twitter has only 10 million.

Another major advantage for Facebook will be the ability this feature gives users to broadcast breaking news on Facebook instead of on Twitter.

Though all these changes are likely to have an impact on the numbers of Facebook and Twitter users, one thing to be remembered is that most users use Facebook only to communicate with a group of known friends, whereas Twitter is used to follow the comments and opinions of people with a common interest, even if they are complete strangers in the real world.

According to comScore research, the total number of ad impressions on all social sites put together accounts for 21.1% of the total online ad displays in the U.S.

The most popular social sites, MySpace and Facebook, together received the vast majority of ad impressions. Individually, MySpace received 9.2% and Facebook received 8.2% of all online ad impressions.

Less popular sites like Tagged.com, Hi5, Bebo, Classmates.com and many others account for the remaining 3.7% of all online ad impressions. Each of them receives about 0.1% of the total, with the exception of Tagged.com which has 0.6% and MocoSpace.com which has 0.2%.

The popularity of social networks has increased rapidly in the last few years, so it is quite natural that advertisers would try and make use of this medium to reach the maximum possible target audience. Another motivating factor for using the social networks is the high reach and frequency of usage among target segments against low costs .

Jeff Hackett, Senior VP at comScore, says, “Social media is becoming an increasingly attractive vehicle for major advertisers seeking to optimise campaign reach and frequency, and small advertisers desiring to reach a highly targeted audience.”

One should, however, note the fact that although the number of ad impressions on social sites is over 20%, the actual number of clicks and conversions received from social networks could be significantly lower. If that is the case, social networks are no more than excellent branding channels.

In January 2009, Facebook Mobile had a respectable 20 million users, which it had amassed since its launch about three years ago, in 2006. Now, they have suddenly accumulated 65 million users, as reported on The Facebook Blog.

This growth does not look likely to slow down, either, as Facebook has recently introduced Facebook Connect on mobiles.

Logging in on various websites, which is never easy on a mobile handset, will now be made much easier for Facebook users, just as it is on their computers.

Facebook Mobile was first launched as a very basic mobile service in the English language only, with basic features like status updates and photo uploads. The service is now available in more than 60 different languages and has features such as Facebook SMS and several others incorporated in it.

Facebook mobile has two portals – m.facebook.com, which can be used on any handset and x.facebook.com, which is to be used on touch-screen handsets such as the iPhone, Android G1 and Palm.

According to Nick Halstead, the CEO and founder of TweetMeme, they have served 1.6 billion impressions of their retweet buttons in the last month, and are seeing an average 20% growth from one week to the next.

One of the reasons for the popularity of TweetMeme could be their reliability and innovativeness. The features they currently offer include one-click retweets, RSS and email buttons, a range of plugins and 11 URL shortening services. The retweet functionality comes with basic analytics showing who retweeted and linked to a particular story. This functionality is planned to be expanded in a soon to be launched service that will allow their users to judge the performance of a story.

Among those who currently subscribe to TweetMeme are Mashable, PerezHilton and Techcrunch.

1.6 billion impressions, however, means that the buttons are only viewed 1.6 billion times a month, not actually clicked. The number of clicks on a retweet button are substantially lower.

Halstead informed TechCrunch that the actual number of clicks on the retweet buttons was estimated to be in the region of 6 million a month, which amounts to a click-through rate of just 0.375%.

Retweets have become so popular due to the fact that it is much easier to retweet an article than to actually type out a new tweet or a comment.

Blog owners and publishers use retweet buttons partly to show-off the number of times their article has been mentioned by others, but also to prompt more readers to discuss the post on Twitter.

This second reason, though, seems questionable, given the low click-through rate on these buttons. If, in fact, the retweet button gets clicks from only 3 out of 1,000 viewers on average, it could hurt small blog owners more than help them as it would only serve to highlight the low number of retweets.

Through FriendFeed, it is possible for users to share all sorts of social media updates, such as those on Facebook, Twitter and blogs from one site itself. It will now be easier for Facebook users to access updates from other platforms. Users won’t need different applications or APIs to access updates, as they had to do earlier.

Facebook has already started rolling out FriendFeed features to users and it should be available to all Facebook users within the next few days. Then, users will be able to see live activity feeds from all their friends who allow their updates to be publicly accessed.

Facebook has been trying to compete with Twitter as far as real-time indexing of search results is concerned, but have not yet been very effective there. FriendFeed has already incorporated this feature in their site, so it is now readily available to Facebook users.

Now Facebook can use this feature to serve ads for various brands while giving its 250 million users access to a very vast amount of data.

Many have argued that Facebook probably bought a much better deal than Twitter, as the latter is currently riding high on a surge of popularity and would probably command much more than its true worth from any prospective buyer – possibly the reason why merger talks failed back in March.

Twitter-esque feeds and functionality are already available on Facebook and their new iPhone app. They need not acquire Twitter to mimic that functionality. Facebook’s user base is also much larger – 250 million and counting!

The speed with which Facebook has rolled out the real-time search functionality, though, indicates that rather than combat Twitter’s micro-blogging dominance, their main objective is dominance of the real-time search space, which could then turn into yet another giant’s battleground, this time between Google, Microsoft and Facebook.

The study was conducted over a period of two weeks, between Monday and Friday and during the hours from 11:00 am to 5:00 pm. 200 English tweets were randomly collected on each of the 10 working days, resulting in a total of 2,000 Tweets.

The tweets received were then analysed and divided into 6 categories. These were – news, spam, self promotion, pointless babble, conversational and pass along value.

Spam and self promotional were expected to be the most common tweets. However, this was not the case. Of the 2,000 tweets the distribution among categories was as follows:

Considering the fact that Twitter has recently changed their home page, changing their tagline from “What are you doing now?” to “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world”, it is quite surprising that news based tweets ranked last in the group. It probably means that the new direction that twitter plans to take has not yet really caught on.

Also, one expected the self promotional category to be more frequently used, but that is not so either.

While there are those who would be too happy to run down Twitter because the vast majority of tweets are pointless babble, Twitter loyalists would be quick to point out that the ability to post some useless statements and comments about oneself, were the whole purpose of Twitter when it was first started.