I got the ten-minute version of his work. For your convenience, here’s a two minute version, covering some of the figures that might be surprising or interesting to readers of this blog.

Q: How big is mobile?

A: Very big.

The population of the world is 6.8bn. There are 4.6bn mobile phone subscriptions. That’s 700,000 more than there are FM radios; three times as many as there are TV sets; four times as many as there are land line phones or PCs; five times the number of cars in the world.

In the Industrialised World, the penetration rate is 133%. In other words, a third of us have two mobile subscriptions.

In the Emerging World, representing 4/5 of the world’s population, the penetration rate is 56%. Not so high, but mobiles nonetheless account for more than double the number of radios; five times the number of televisions; six times the number of PCs. Ahonen states that mobile is the first media in the emerging world; it’s the “only medium able to reach half of the population”.

Q: What makes the most money?

A: Contracts and access, of course, and then voice calls.

Voice revenues – worth $615bn in 2009 and growing.

Messaging (SMS & MMS) is worth $153bn, and also growing. MMS – which I still consider quite niche and unused – was worth $29bn in 2009.

Q: And the mobile internet?

A: It’s growing fast, but even the largest parts of this area don’t do half of the business that ‘lowly’ MMS does.

Mobile data services are worth $98bn in total. The largest segments of this are video ($14bn), music and ringtones ($13.9bn) and video games ($11.6bn). These revenues are growing at 15–25% year-on-year.

The fastest-growing segments of the data market are mobile learning and search, each of which has grown over 200% in the last year. Mobile advertising and marketing is finally starting to happen, too, grossing $5.9bn last year, up 85% on 2008.

Mobile social networking is the fourth biggest earner overall in data, worth $10.3bn in 2009.

Q: Should I make an iPhone app for my publication/brand?

A: If you are looking for reach, no: you should make a Nokia app. Even better, Java or (best) an SMS or WAP-based service.

Overall, Nokia has 38% of mobile device market share. Samsung has 20% and LG 10%. The fourth and fifth place are taken by SonyEricsson and Motorola.

If you restrict the sample to smartphones, Nokia is again way out front with 39% market share. Then it’s RIM (Blackberry) with 21%. Apple has 15% and HTC (Android) just 5%.

Smartphones represent only 13% of the mobile device market. On the other hand, 95% of phones can do WAP and every phone can now do SMS. Over 90% of phones are capable of 2.5G or faster transmission speeds now, so this isn’t the WAP you remember from the nineties. 53% of the phones in use world-wide can do Java apps.

Picture credit: RoamMobility

PS: Tomi has given me permission to pass on the full data he sent me via email, so leave a comment if you’d like this.

Only poor MySpace has a greater proportion of slackers, while Facebook seems like a hive of communal activity in comparison, with a whopping half of the users there accounting for nearly all the time spent on the site. (sarcasm not intended, but may be enjoyed nonetheless).

[Nielsen invokes the ‘Pareto Principle’: the 80:20 ‘rule’ that’s so frequently mentioned nowadays. That 80% of the content/wealth/product/whatever is produced by 20% of the populace. Except, of course, it isn’t a rule. And if it was, it doesn’t apply here. On Twitter, it would actually be a 79:7 rule, which is totally different. And Facebook would have similar figure, which it doesn’t. And there wouldn’t have been a theatre group called 7:84, since 7% of Scotland’s population own 84% of the wealth.

In actual fact, the scientific term for this distribution is a coincidence.]

Moving on, the Times Technology Blog reports today on some research published at the end of January by RJMetrics. Surveying 50,000 users, the report found that most members of Twitter simply do not tweet. Here, around 80% of users have published fewer than ten updates since opening their account.

The issue is not, as you might have imagined, abandoned older accounts, but rather new users who simply never get started. Over the last six months, the likelihood of a new member tweeting in their second month on the site has declined to just 17%. The next graph shows your likelihood of tweeting this month against the date that you joined:

The network – from some perspectives – is also becoming less social, according to this research: “the average Twitter user has 27 followers, down from 42 followers in August 2009”. The new users aren’t tweeting and aren’t connecting either (the two help to explain each other, of course). Around 80% of Twitter members have fewer than eleven followers, with the mega-stars inflating the average figure very considerably.

You might take this as a sign of Twitter’s figures being over-inflated, or of it being a fad of which people have already grown tired. The Times blog sees the figures as evidence that the site is vastly over-hyped and will soon disappear from the headlines, backing this up with its own ‘original’ reporting:

In an unscientific survey of my friends and business contacts here in San Francisco, the home of Twitter, I found that no one not using Twitter felt they were out of the loop. Only those who needed to get a message out there, usually for company reasons, were using it.

Even those in Tech PR are finding it nowhere near as useful as it once was. One told me: “We launched a social media platform for our client but after a few days, once the the spammers had cottoned on to us, it was pretty much a waste of time.”

I’d suggest that there are at least a couple of reasons why newer users aren’t following or tweeting as much as older users, and neither of them are that Twitter is a fad or a failure. First, if you join Twitter now, it’s all rather odd and intimidating. Every other user is seemingly more popular and interesting than you are. There are no instructions about what to do – why would anyone be interested in what I’m doing right now? Even I’m not interested in that. Then a bunch of marketing bots will start following you. The people you know who are already on Twitter are following too many people already and, as nice as you are, don’t want more on their list. 

Second, and more importantly, there’s more than one Twitter. Here are four:

• there’s the one where geeks swap links and chat;
• there’s the one where people make thinly veiled boasts about their professional success;
• there’s the one where marketers and publishers spurt content blips at people;
• there’s the one where you read celebrities’ micro-blogs.

And there’s plenty of other use cases as well, and many people will probably fall into more than one category. In each case, the criteria for the site delivering a useful experience to its members is slightly different. If I joined Twitter because I am a devoted fan of Lindsay Lohan, then it’s more than likely that I am following one person, am followed by nobody and am saying nothing. It’s quite possible that I don’t even open my own account, preferring to bookmark Linday’s page like my other websites. I’m not a bad user or behind the curve: I’m using the site my way to achieve my aims. Twitter is represented in the press as a celebrity micro-blog site. There is a book about it. No, wait, there’s two. If the site is represented as an online companion to Hello magazine and reality TV shows, it shouldn’t really surprise anyone that a lot of people join in order to consume celebrity lifestyle information.

I think that this is why the usage figures are so different for Twitter and Facebook. Facebook tells you what to do on the site and then gives you multiple ways to do it. Twitter is a blank canvas in comparison: the way you use can be totally different to the way everyone else uses it. To many people, that’s an invitation to their creativity or to their egos; to others it’s an invitation to spend their time on a more obviously useful site.

It also shows us how meaningless averages and per-user figures are in social media. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to lump the Lohan fan in with the geek early adopters. It is a different site with different purposes.

As you will be equally unsurprised to learn, Facebook remains the front runner, with 206mn unique visitors in December – 67% of all social media users.

While the rate of growth is impressive, there’s another side to these figures which is rather less so. Five-and-a-half hours over a month? Pathetic! People in the US spend four hours a day watching television.

Of course the figures are slightly meaningless, except as a comparison to the same measure over the previous period. The figure of 5h30 is arrived at by dividing all the time spent online by the number of people using social sites during that time. In truth, there’s probably a very stark differentiation between people who spend hardly any time at all on social sites and those who are never off them.  Nonetheless, a bit of a reminder that social networks have quite some way to go before they rival more traditional media for consumption rates (although — interestingly — their reach is pretty similar).

Another interesting chart shows the differences in time spent across different countries. Australians appear to be the most socially active, with the Japanese bringing up the rear. Presumably interactions using mobile devices weren’t measured? We in the UK come third — another Bronze for the plucky Brits. I’d love to speculate further, but wouldn’t be able to resist national stereotypes.

picture credit: Avlxyz

Pew Research Center reports that older people are almost as likely to embrace technological change as young people:

…innovations in cell phones, email and online shopping are seen as changes for the better by most Americans with positive views reaching well beyond the youngest Millennial generation. These kinds of change are viewed at least as favorably by Americans in their 30s and 40s as they are by those in their late-teens and 20s and, in many cases, it is only those 65 and older who have less enthusiastic views of these innovations.

This is hopefully the beginning of the end for the remarkably widely rehearsed ‘digital natives vs. digital immigrants’ argument.

It’s not all good news for the digital evangelist, though. There’s a considerably more stark – and perhaps depressing – contrast in opinion when it comes to approval of some of the newer web innovations: blogs and social networks. Only a quarter or fewer over-50s see these things as a positive change.

Just 15% of over-65s think the arrival of blogs is a change for the better, compared to 44% of 18–29 year-olds.

However, this lukewarm response to web innovations is likely to be the result of a lack of familiarity rather than experience. In the UK, around 25% of over-50s and 70% of over-65s have never used the Internet (caveat: these are 2007 figures — I’d guess it’s less now, and perhaps less in the US than the UK, anyway). It’s hard to imagine those people giving a positive appraisal of blogs and socnets, when they’ve never read, written, used or been a part of one. Given their response to mobiles and email, they’re as likely to enjoy these things as anyone else, given the opportunity.

(via. Josie Fraser)
picture credit: Tiago Rïbeiro

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.

• A low-cost global network will be thriving and creating new opportunities in a “flattening” world.
• Humans will remain in charge of technology, even as more activity is automated and “smart agents” proliferate. However, a significant 42% of survey respondents were pessimistic about humans’ ability to control the technology in the future. This significant majority agreed that dangers and dependencies will grow beyond our ability to stay in charge of technology. This was one of the major surprises in the survey.
• Virtual reality will be compelling enough to enhance worker productivity and also spawn new addiction problems.

• Tech “refuseniks” will emerge as a cultural group characterized by their choice to live off the network. Some will do this as a benign way to limit information overload, while others will commit acts of violence and terror against technology-inspired change.
• People will wittingly and unwittingly disclose more about themselves, gaining some benefits in the process even as they lose some privacy.
• English will be a universal language of global communications, but other languages will not be displaced. Indeed, many felt other languages such as Mandarin, would grow in prominence.

Om Malik comments that these predictions are surprisingly pessimistic, and I completely agree. Nearly all of the negative issues highlighted in this precis — lack of control, privacy, addiction, luddism — are already very apparent. It seems a bit bleak to suggest that we won’t do anything to address problems that are staring us in the face over the next 14 years.

If you look further into the report, though, its findings become less startling. The respondents were presented with headlines with which they could either agree or disagree. This is a good way to generate headlines, but not a way to explore original thinking. And the 304 experts polled were very much less than unanimous. Only 56%, for example, agreed with the first point on the list, with similar divides throughout.

I need to clarify that (before the divorce papers are filed). This is the top result for the search term ‘woman’, ranked by interestingness, that I found in a search on flickr this afternoon.

The picture was taken by the very talented Babeffe.

What makes for interestingness on flickr? It’s an aggregation of the number of notes, comments, favouritedness (sorry) and links to a submitted image.

The photo itself has been annotated a number of times by users. They point to the slight inequality between the eyes, the shape of the lips and the relationship between the woman, the photographer and the second woman in the picture. The comments are nearly all in Spanish, but my tourist-level translation skills suggest that she’s thought of as very beautiful by a lot of people.

But ‘interesting’? What does that word mean? (adjective 1. arousing curiosity or attention: arousing curiosity, attracting or holding attention, or provoking thought 2. not boring: enjoyable because of being varied, challenging, stimulating, or exciting). Thank you, Encarta.

Yes, she’s interesting. But the definition gives no idea of how to rank interesting things. In fact, it appears to be an entirely subjective quality, judging from that definition. That’s true in normal life too, of course. I tell people that I am interested in Web 2.0, and they tell me to grow-up and get a life. Does the fact that the vast majority of comments are in Spanish not suggest that there is a very strong cultural weighting to the idea of ‘interesting’?

I raise this because my new pal, Tim O’Reilly, has recently written on the subject:

Google made a breakthrough in web search with its original idea of links as citations (i.e. PageRank), and they are still the undisputed leader in general web search, but they haven’t done as well in searching rich media. I think they have some things to learn from Flickr. More specifically, web search innovators all need to think through what makes results “interesting” for a given domain. I like what flickr has done in calling out “interestingness” as a quality worth searching for, and leaving it as a playground for exploration.

I kind of agree. Interestingness is a quality worth searching for. I don’t want the most popular links on the subject I search for, say “mashups”, like Google gives me. I want the most interesting and informative one or two. Oh… hang on… that’s exactly how interestingness on flickr is calculated.

We don’t have agreement on the philosophical meaning of beauty, but we do have computer algorithms that will calculate it according to most people’s criteria. Again, we have a populist interpretation of very personal values. So by that scale…

Picasso is more interesting than Mondrian. That picture of dogs playing poker is more interesting than either. Still interested?

• Technorati is now tracking over 50 Million Blogs.
• The Blogosphere is over 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago.
• Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size every 200 days, or about once every 6 and a half months.
• From January 2004 until July 2006, the number of blogs that Technorati tracks has continued to double every 5–7 months.
• About 175,000 new weblogs were created each day, which means that on average, there are more than 2 blogs created each second of each day.
• About 8% of new blogs get past Technorati’s filters, even if it is only for a few hours or days.
• About 70% of the pings Technorati receives are from known spam sources, but we drop them before we have to send out a spider to go and index the splog.
• Total posting volume of the blogosphere continues to rise, showing about 1.6 Million postings per day, or about 18.6 posts per second.
• This is about double the volume of about a year ago.
• The most prevalent times for English-language posting is between the hours of 10AM and 2PM Pacific time, with an additional spike at around 5PM Pacific time.

Sifry notes that English has become the number one language of the Blogosphere with 39% of the posts. However, 31% of posts are in Japanese, and large parts of the French and Korean blog community are not tracked by Technorati.

Currently, just 12% of blogs are in Chinese. However, by the end of 2006, it is predicted that China will have more broadband lines than the US, which ought to redress the balance somewhat. Currently, no Indian languages feature among the top 20, but again, I would guess that rapidly growing access to computers in India over this year will soon change that.

I find it interesting that the blogging phenomenon does not appear to be culturally specific. It has clearly taken hold in countries like Korea and Japan to a greater extent than many Western countries, but few areas with reasonable technology penetration are missing. It seems that the technological drivers for blog use (access to IT, easy tools, broadband, free hosting) are far more important than any of the cultural drivers that have been suggested to me — dissatisfaction with mainstream media, desire for self-expression, etc. Unless, of course, those things are universal.