Top 10 Social Networking Websites & Forums — November 2009

Facebook gets four times the traffic of its closest competitor, MySpace. Twitter – so beloved of the media and apparently the word of the year – will need to increase its page views forty times to beat the top contender. It will need an increase of 50% to beat Tagged. And when’s the last time you saw that network mentioned on the BBC (five mentions of Twitter in the last week) or featured in the broadsheet press?

I must admit to being surprised to the extent that the big three networks dominate the area. Like many, my impression was that there was much more of a struggle going on.

Bear in mind, though, that this is US-only data. Bebo is more popular than MySpace in the UK and Ireland, while the Google-owned network Orkut rules the roost in Brazil and much of South Asia. In China, meanwhile, 51.com, Xiaonei and QQ have resisted western decadence with home grown decadence of their own.

danah boyd has published a new paper at First Monday, an online academic journal. In it, she examines the concept of Friendship on social networks, as opposed to friendship in the offline world. Briefly, Friends (capital ‘F’) are about ‘identity performance’ — they reflect who you are online and offline — and may arrive on someone’s list for a host of reasons:

1. Actual friends
2. Acquaintances, family members, colleagues
3. It would be socially inappropriate to say no because you know them
4. Having lots of Friends makes you look popular
5. It’s a way of indicating that you are a fan (of that person, band, product, etc.)
6. Your list of Friends reveals who you are
7. Their Profile is cool so being Friends makes you look cool
8. Collecting Friends lets you see more people (Friendster)
9. It’s the only way to see a private Profile (MySpace)
10. Being Friends lets you see someone’s bulletins and their Friends-only blog posts (MySpace)
11. You want them to see your bulletins, private Profile, private blog (MySpace)
12. You can use your Friends list to find someone later
13. It’s easier to say yes than no

While the idea of nine thousand friends seems absurd to non-participants, because Friends are not necessarily friends, but the system provides no other form of relationship, they may be performing other roles in the construction of the MySpacer’s online identity.

Step Two: MySpace announces steps to identify and eliminate copyrighted video on their network. (Nov 17th)

Step Three: Universal Music Group sues MySpace for copyright infringement. (Nov 17th)

It will be interesting to see how this pans out. Techcrunch points out Craigslist escaped prosecution this week over discriminatory housing postings on its site on the basis that it is a conduit, not a publisher. The gist of UMG’s case is that MySpace provides tools for transcoding media — making it easier to distribute illegally, they claim. For this reason, UMG argues, MySpace has become complicit in the distribution of files, thus losing the protection it is allowed as a service provider.

However, the site’s users may well also belong to other networks, which are also showing strong growth. A quarter of visits to the other networks come from MySpace. I expect that this trend will continue and that different networks will come to specialise in different areas. MySpace has always been strong when it comes to music, so it would make sense for others to work on presenting themselves as the ‘place to be’ for nightlife, fashion, sports, movies, games, etc.

The report is available for free here, though you do have to register.

These are the highlights on social networks:

Social networking websites have emerged to become an integral part of web activity for many Internet users – in September 2006, one in every 20 Internet visits went to one of the top 20 social networks, nearly double the share of visits compared to a year ago.

• In September 2006, the market share of visits to the top 20 social networking websites accounted for 4.9% of all Internet visits. This was an increase of 94% compared to September 2005.
• The growth of MySpace has outpaced the category, with its market share of visits increasing by 129% in the past year, and 51% the six months between March 2006 and September 2006.
• Users of social networking sites tend to belong to more than one network: in September 2006, 24% of visits to the remaining 19 websites in the social networking custom category came directly from MySpace. Other fast growing social networks between March and September 2006 were Bolt, up 271%; Bebo, up 95%; Orkut, up 63%; and Gaia Online, up 41%.
• The share of upstream traffic from MySpace to the Telecommunications, Shopping and Classifieds, Banks and Financial Institutions, and Travel categories increased by over 70% from March to September 2006.
• The Shopping and Classifieds sub-categories receiving the largest share of visits from MySpace in September 2006 were Music, Ticketing, Apparel and Accessories, Auctions, and Video and Games, reflecting the interests of MySpace users.

Another interesting feature is the top-ten list of search-engine optimisation tips. They’re totally dominated by the idea of embracing social media and Web 2.0 technologies. The guide suggests that getting involved with blogs, bloggers, RSS, tags, wikis and the long tail are the way forward if you want to be seen.

a new wave of innovation on the internet, an innovation focused not so much on new technology as on the way people are beginning to use existing technology…

Quite a reasonable way to begin to describe these new sites and services, I would say. A certain degree of vagueness is almost inevitable given the breadth of quite different services that are described with the 2.0 label.

There’s also a certain amount of conventional wisdom in place, I felt. The idea, for example, that because certain properties have raised a lot of money then we are definitely in bubble 2.0 conditions. The ‘huge amounts of money’ ‘thrown at’ web startups nowadays are often fairly small compared to the hundreds of millions raised for dotcoms in the late nineties:

From the business point of view, the defining feature of this new goldrush is that established companies are throwing huge amounts of money at upstarts who have three things in common: they have grown from nowhere with astonishing speed; they have no revenue stream to speak of; and most of their content is provided by their users.

He goes on to divide this new wave into two rough categories. There are collective sites — such as digg and Wikipedia — and personal sites, focusing on ‘me media’, such as MySpace, del.icio.us and flickr. He allows that there is a lot of blurring between the two. Flickr, for example, is not just a gallery of your photos, but of everybody else’s. The distinction is reasonably useful, though, and allows for an excellent gag:

One way of putting it is to say that collective sites are useful (except when they’re not) and personal sites are interesting (except when they’re not).

The piece continues to describe the ‘800-pound gorilla’ that is MySpace. I got the feeling that Lanchester fundamentally dislikes MySpace and other social networks, though its size means that it’s certainly a subject of some awe: “if it were a country it would be the 10th biggest in the world, just behind Mexico”.

The piece ends on a melancholy note. For Lanchester, the social networking phenomenon is symptomatic of loneliness rather than the celebration of connection that others might see:

Sit someone at a computer screen and let it sink in that they are fully, definitively alone; then watch what happens. They will reach out for other people; but only part of the way. They will have “friends”, which are not the same thing as friends, and a lively online life, which is not the same thing as a social life; they will feel more connected, but they will be just as alone. Everybody sitting at a computer screen is alone. Everybody sitting at a computer screen is at the centre of the world. Everybody sitting at a computer screen, increasingly, wants everything to be all about them.

If you’ve got the morning off, check out the interviews and profiles with some key players: Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Craig Newmark & Jim Buckmaster (Craigslist), David Sifry (Technorati), Caterina Fake & Stuart Butterfield (flickr), Evan Williams (Blogger/Odeo), Joshua Schacter (del.icio.us), Tariq Krim (Netvibes), Martin Stiksel (last.fm), Kevin Rose (digg), Sam Schillace (Writely) and Michael and Xochi Birch (bebo).

It’s not entirely clear why MySpace’s dominance is predicted to remain unchallenged over the period. After all, wasn’t everyone suggesting the network was doomed just a couple of days ago? Like a lot of analysis of internet trends, there’s a certain amount of ‘wave a finger in the air’ here. It’s pretty hard to predict what’s going to happen next week, never mind in four years. Put the numbers in a table and charge $695 for the full report and somehow that makes it true.

There’s an interesting comment at the end, suggesting that the winners and losers will depend on who does the best job of profiling and measuring visitors. Social Networks are still often seen as risky and unresponsive by advertisers. Those who are able to prove they’re not will be the ones that will quickly assume dominance. That, to me, would suggest that vertical networks stand a better chance than the generic networks championed by the report.

While many marketers are rushing to experiment with social networks, in order for serious ad dollars to continue, adequate measures of return on investment need to be in place, says Debra Williamson, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the report.

“The longer existing social networks take to develop adequate ROI metrics, the bigger the opening for a next generation of networks that are built from the ground up to accommodate advertising,” Ms. Williamson says.

(via Mashable)

I think these stories are largely based on tenets gleaned from wishful thinking and accepted wisdom, plumped up with an anecdote or two:

(a) big, successful things are bound to fail sooner or later;

(b) teens are so fickle, always looking for the next big thing.

MySpace usage ramped up heavily during its first year and a half, hitting 2 hours and 25 minutes in October last year. Then it dropped to about 2 hours and held relatively steady there for the past year. Facebook, a younger networking site, is still on a gradual incline, reaching 1 hour and 9 minutes last month. […]

Right, so setting up your MySpace profile is quite time-consuming. Maintaining it is not.

“They’re not loyal,” Ben Bajarin, a market analyst for Creative Strategies Inc., said of the youth demographic. Young audiences search for innovative and new features. They’re constantly looking for new ways to communicate and share content they find or create, and because of that group mentality, friends shift from service to service in blocs.

Not exactly scientific, eh? nor is the remaining ‘evidence’. Personally, I think a lot of journalists and media analysts are the ones always looking for the next big thing. Valleywag seems to agree.

Madeline Dell’Aria, another high school junior, has fallen in and out of love with a number of sites. In middle school she started avidly blogging on Xanga. Last year, after most of her friends abandoned Xanga and migrated to MySpace, she followed. “No one was using Xanga anymore,” she said.

Initially, MySpace drew her in, and she spent lots of time looking at her friend’s photos or leaving comments on their pages, she said. Now, only a year or so later, ennui is setting in. She spends a lot less time on the site, instead listening to music or talking on the phone, she said. […]

So it’s become one among a number of communications media used by this person. No real surprises there. The MySpace spokeswoman seems to offer some conflicting information:

“There will always be anecdotes of people that love MySpace and people that don’t,” a spokeswoman for the site said, but the site is adding an average of 320,000 new profiles every day and continuing to go mainstream. In the past year it launched new services such as mobile and video channels, and expanded internationally.

This is what I think. MySpace remains massive, ten times bigger than any competing network. At the same time, there is a lot of churn –the 100mn+ profiles on the system are nowhere near all in use. A lot of them might have been created by curious adults, for example. Others belong to users who have migrated elsewhere but haven’t deleted their profiles, perhaps because they still use MySpace for music and for certain friends.

So what’s new and why is this such a hot topic? There have been widespread adoption of broadband connections at home, school and work. The technology is easier to use. Usage started with academics, business, then moved to hobbyists and then the general public and now teens.

One important recognition of the explosion of social media use among teens and children is that the MacArthur Foundation just made a huge announcement that it would commit $50 million over five years to “fund research and innovative projects focused on understanding the impact of digital media on our youth and how they learn.”

Wikipedia, the “encyclopedia” whose “editors” are mostly unqualified teenagers and young adults is touted by Google as an authoritative source of information. In search results, it is placed well ahead of sources of veritable information such as universities, government institutions, the home pages of recognized experts, the online full-text content of peer-reviewed professional and scholarly publications, real encyclopedias (such as the Encarta), and so on.

MySpace whose 110 million users are predominantly prepubescent and adolescents now dictates what Websites will occupy the first search results in Google’s search results. It is very easy to spam MySpace. It is considered by some experts to be a vast storehouse of link farms masquerading as “social networks”.

Google has vested, though unofficial and unannounced and, therefore, undisclosed interests in both Wikipedia and MySpace. Wikipedia visitors end up on various properties whose search technology is Google’s and Wikipedia would have shriveled into insignificance had it not been to Google’s relentless promotion of its content.

I’m not totally convinced by all of this. Though I do see the main point. I just don’t think it’s an issue.

(a) I’m not sure what Google’s vested interest is supposed to be in Wikipedia. I haven’t ever heard it mentioned before. However, we’ve all probably noticed that a Wikipedia link tends to be the first or second result on Google searches. I took that to indicate that people were linking to Wikipedia a lot, because it’s an easy way to gloss unfamiliar terms. The average net user probably doesn’t bother with academic publications and real [sic] encyclopaedias.

(b) I don’t know who these ‘experts’ are that say MySpace is a link-farm. I hadn’t noticed that.

© The age of MySpacers is in dispute, despite what Dr Vaknin says. Also, Google’s interest in MySpace is very much disclosed.

(d) No numerical evidence about the MySpace link is presented at all. No evidence for the claims about Wikipedians being teenage.

Ultimately, this piece smacks me as a bit paranoid. Young people use the web a lot and create a lot of content. Google works by measuring value through in-bound links. Of course young people are going to end up influencing search results.

P.S. There seems to be some sort of ongoing feud between Vaknin and Wikipedia. See here and here.

(via. Micropersuasion)