Archive for Social
Has Facebook peaked?
October 11th, 2007 • Social
Tags: facebook, Social
According to Om Malik, the latest comScore figures from the US seem to suggest that the world’s most hyped network is losing audience. So has FB caught the Icarus virus? Not according to Marketing Pilgrim, who say that the exact same dip happened last year - and Facebook duly recovered.
Podcasts: not so cool in Yahoo’s world
September 27th, 2007 • Social, Video
Tags: podcasts, Video, web2.0, web3.0
The video boom appears to have claimed another head - podcasts. As part of its ‘100-Day Review’ instigated by its new(ish) CEO, the company has decided to pull the shutters on its podcast search service…
The podcast section will be silenced Oct. 31, according to a notice posted on Yahoo’s Web site. It joins several other features that Yahoo has scrapped as it tries to snap out of a financial funk that has depressed its stock price and triggered a reshuffling of top management.
Jabber Watch: ‘What the hell is a Social Graph’
September 20th, 2007 • Internet, Social
Tags: Social, web3.0
The internet has always been keen to house games of B*llsh*t Bingo. Only recently, the concept of the ‘social graph‘ caught a fire - mostly in discussions around the freedom to move from Facebook to MySpace to some other virtual coffee shop.The term has obviously attracted the anger of Dave Winer:
So if you don’t want to sound like an idiot, call a social graph a social network and stand up for your right to understand technology, and make the techies actually do some useful stuff instead of making simple stuff sound complicated.
How to avoid sounding like an monkey (Scripting News)You can see his point. The term was coined in the midst of a perfectly valid debate (imagine trying to leave Facebook today - that’s an awful lot of contacts and exchanges to lose), but is fundamentally no different to ’social networks’. The only angle it brings is one of movement - ’social network’ is static, while ‘graph’ places an emphasis on growth.
Google to ’sort’ Facebook? Outside, now…
September 20th, 2007 • Google, Social
Tags: facebook, Google, Social
Put a tick in your diary for November 5 - TechCrunch claims to have a leak from a secret squirrel briefing held deep within Google, aimed at addressing the “Facebook issue”.
The meeting was so secret that all attendees had to sign confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements strictly forbidding them from discussing what was shown to them at the meeting. Notwithstanding that NDA, I’ve now spoken with three of the attendees off record to get an understanding of what Google is planning. Google’s goal - to fight Facebook by being even more open than the Facebook Platform. If Facebook is 98% open, Google wants to be 100%.
Google unveils online PowerPoint
September 19th, 2007 • Google, Social
Tags: Google
So here it is: the final link in the Google Office chain. Presently aims at creating fairly slick presentations, and goes live today within Google Docs. I’ve yet to cook a full presentation using the newcomer, but everything seems to be there - including a whole bunch of themes that, while not fit to lick the boots of Keynote, appear perfectly workable.
Presently deserves to make friends: I’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve lost versions of PowerPoint presentations as they pass from author to author. The new Google service wants to put pay to that - you can share your presentation with others (who can edit it), and you can even discuss the thing as you edit using Google Talk. Fast, clever, and free… what more could you want?
Facebook: makes you more popular, but no more likely to meet people
September 9th, 2007 • Internet, Social
Dr Reader at Sheffield Hallam University is a top bloke. While the rest of us sludge through life’s daily mud-fest, Dr Reader does things. Things like researching the average person’s number of friends - and whether social networking sites have changed that figure in recent years.
According to Reader, the answer is… no. Turns out that each of us has five close friends, and 150 acquaintances. Apparently, our peanut brains cannot handle any more than this. Or maybe they can: Reader’s research has discovered that users of MySpace and Facebook boast of up to 200 acquaintances. But here’s the rub - even these doyens of the social avant garde (did I really just type that?) still have 5 close friends.
So, as today’s Guardian concludes, social networking doesn’t improve your chances of gaining real, share-everything chums.
The team found that although the sites allowed contact with hundreds of acquaintances, as with conventional friendship networks, people tend to have around 5 close friends. Also, 90% of contacts that the subjects regarded as close friends were people they had met face to face. “People see face to face contact as being absolutely imperative in forming close friendships,” added Dr Reader.
Social networking sites do not deepen friendships | Science | Guardian UnlimitedAs a colleague so beautifully put it the other day, “No shit, Sherlock…”
MySpace: has the bubble sprung a leak?
September 9th, 2007 • Internet, Social
This Web 2.0 social media lark can be a thankless mistress. One day you’re on top of the world, drawing countless plaudits and being praised as the future of, well, everything. The next, they’re all predicting your imminent demise.
Take MySpace. As Max Freiert over at Compete points out, Facebook may at last have found the chink in the MySpace armour. In terms of pure page views, MySpace is down a nagging 20% from July 06 to July 07, while Facebook has scored a 5% rise over the same period. 
And Facebook enjoyed almost 16 billion page views in August alone. However, there is one figure that puts the entire show in context: in terms of unique visitors, MaySpace scored over 69 million in July 07 - nigh on three times the number using Facebook. In other words, we’re looking at a slow transition, not a coup d’etat.
‘Get famous - don’t upload to YouTube’
September 9th, 2007 • Internet, Social, Video
Interesting take from Business Pundit, where the team have been running checks on the popularity of their videos across several of the major video portals.
The results? Blip performed best for resulting views on their site (a whopping 50% returns), with Metacafe and Revver coming a relatively lowly second and third. And the joint holders of the Wooden Spoons? Yahoo, and… YouTube. The latter pair delivered a paltry 7% and 3% respectively.
Considering YouTube’s current sky-high equity with the mass media (if you’re a regular reader of the tabloids, you’d be forgiven to believing that YT held a monopoly), this is something of a shock result. But Business Pundit has a theory as to why…
“So if you produce video content, the way to get the most people to watch it is to submit it somewhere other than the most popular video site on the web. Counterintuitive for sure, but on closer examination, it makes sense. When you are a needle, and you want to get the word out, don’t start by jumping into haystacks.”
Digg-a-like Netscape to bite the dust
September 5th, 2007 • Internet, Social
That’s that, then. Netscape is officially planning to ditch the social news network that currently occupies Netscape.com, in favour of good, old-fashioned editorially-led news.
According to today’s announcement on the official Netscape blog, the social news experiment will continue, albeit using a different URL:
We received some feedback that people really do associate the Netscape brand with providing mainstream news that is editorially controlled. In fact, we specifically heard that our users do have a desire for a social news experience, but simply didn’t expect to find it on Netscape.com.
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