Social sites growing

Neilson Online reported significant growth in the number of unique visitors on social networking sites.

Myspace.com - over 58.8 million unique visitors in October. Up 19% over the previous October.

Facebook - more than 19.5 million unique vistors. Up 125% over October/06.

LinkedIn - 4.9 million unique visitors. Up 189% from the previous year.

Club Penguin - 3.88 million visitors. Up 157%.

Buzznet - 2.39 million visitors. Up 117%

Surprisingly, LinkedIn showed the most explosive growth with Club Penguin and Buzznet attracting users almost as quickly as Facebook. On the negative side, Classmates Online (-2%), AOL People Connection (-30%), AOL Hometown (-15%) and Reunion.com (-14%) were on a downward trend.

Yahoo getting structure

We are seeing reports that Yahoo is going to launch a new structured search component to their web search engine.

Web search is typically considered "unstructured," where there isn't a real method of comparing sets of results side by side, in a data comparison grid structure. Yahoo hopes to offer structured search for certain types of queries to help aid the searcher in their information retrieval process.

A Yahoo executive said they will likely start offering structure search for e-commerce sites and similar online applications.

Here's a link offering more information. http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/11/27/yahoo/index.php

YouTube for advertising

The Secret Strategies Behind Many "Viral" Videos is an interesting post with helpful information on increasing the popularity of videos posted on YouTube.

Google continues to rule

Hitwise, a competitive intelligence service, issued its October 2007 statistics. They showed that Google continued to dominate the search landscape with over 64% of searches performed.

Yahoo, MSN, and Ask followed, with numbers at 21.65%, 7.42%, and 4.76%, respectively.

the Face of Facebook

The following link is to an article in the Los Angeles Times November 18, 2007 regarding Facebook.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-fi-facebook18nov18,1,3073382.story

Key excerpts.

"Facebook now has more than 54 million users, second among social networking sites behind only Beverly Hills-based MySpace.

"As Google aims to organize the world's information, Facebook aims to connect the world's people."

"Facebook has become such an integral part of some people's lives that it's replacing e-mail. That's exactly what Zuckerberg has in mind: his site as the starting point and focal point of the Internet experience."

"Members already alert their friends about the things they love and hate, including movies, restaurants, clothing and cars. Now advertisers can feast on all the information they share, and even attach commercial messages."

"advertisers are expected to nearly triple their annual worldwide spending on social networks to $3.6 billion by 2011, according to research firm eMarketer Inc."

"Even nontechies can enroll in a basic programming course, FB101, taught by a Harvard teaching assistant whose artificial-intelligence course Zuckerberg once took. "

What is a twitter?

Twitter is one of several microbogging providers.

Microblogging is a relatively new phenomenon defined as "a form of blogging that lets you write brief text updates (usually less than 200 characters) about your life on the go and send them to friends and interested observers via text messaging, instant messaging, email, or the web."

It is provided by providers such as Twitter, Jaiku, and Pownce.

Compared to regular blogging, microblogging fulfills a need for an even faster mode of communication. By encouraging shorter posts, it lowers users’ requirement of time and thought investment for content generation. This is also one of its main differentiating factors from blogging in general.

The second important difference is the frequency of update. On average, a prolific bloger may update her blog once every few days; on the other hand a microblogger may post several updates in a single day.

Socially speaking

Google’s broad social networking ambitions (OpenSocial) is a set of common APIs that application developers can use to create applications that work on any social networks (called “hosts”) that choose to participate.

As more of these platforms launch, developers have difficult choices to make. There are costs associated with writing and maintaining applications for these social networks. Most developers will choose one or two platforms and ignore the rest, based on a simple cost/benefit analysis.

Google wants to create an easy way for developers to create an application that works on all social networks.

OpenSocial is a set of three common APIs, defined by Google with input from partners, that allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks:

• Profile Information (user data)
• Friends Information (social graph)
• Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

Hosts agree to accept the API calls and return appropriate data. Google won’t try to provide universal API coverage for special use cases, instead focusing on the most common uses. Specialized functions/data can be accessed from the hosts directly via their own APIs.

The benefit of the Google approach is that developers can use much of their existing front end code and simply tailor it slightly for OpenSocial, so creating applications is even easier than on Facebook.

Hosts are the participating social networks, and include Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle.

Google update impacts page rank

The latest Google PageRank update has resulted in some popular blogs and news websites suddenly losing their PageRank. The PageRank penalization looks to be a reaction to websites that use link-building strategies in conflict with Google's webmaster guidelines

Advertising on Facebook

Facebook Inc. wants to turn the 52 million members of its popular website into champions of the brands that advertise there. To do so, the company hopes its "news feed" capability (which shows users a streaming list of what their friends are doing) will help users promote its advertisers.

Facebook is attempting to harness the power of word of mouth among a circle of friends. The most valuable marketing asset is a trusted referral by a friend.

Facebook is letting marketers create profile pages and invite fans of their products to become their online friends. When people declare themselves fans of a particular product, Facebook will alert all their friends on the site.