This is part four of a four-part series. Here are part one (the launches), part two (the panels), and part three (the parties).
So there are just a few hours left before I have to head to the airport and hop a flight to Austin for this year's South by Southwest Interactive Festival, and I wanted to take up just one more blog post to talk about what the week's big trends are going to be. Remember last year when everyone kept asking, "So what's this year's Twitter?" and then it didn't happen? Yeah. It won't happen this year, either.
The breakout Web app at SXSWi 2008 was arguably Sched.org, which one of the founders of music blog aggregator The Hype Machine created as a way to let conference-goers organize their agendas. But its event-centric focus meant that it didn't catch on the way Twitter did in 2007. I'm pretty sure we won't see another Twitter-like breakout this year, and I think most veteran SXSWi-goers would agree. That was a case of the perfect time and the perfect place, and two years later it's still the dot-com du jour. You don't see something like that every year.
That said, we may see some moderate SXSWi stars: Loopt, Brightkite, Whrrl, and FourSquare are all going to be gunning for the top spot in location-based social networking at a conference where finding out where everyone goes after-hours is crucial.
Expect a lot of talk about the future of media and entertainment. Newspapers are dying, Twitter's all over the news as a form of media consumption, and the digital TV and movie wars are raging like 300. You'll be hearing more from me on this one.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I wouldn't be surprised if the economic recession took a back burner at SXSWi. At a more buttoned-up conference like the Web 2.0 Expo, which is happening later this month in San Francisco, I imagine it'll be front and center. But SXSWi is full of innovators and dreamers, and the what's-next focus may mean that many speakers and panelists opt to simply accept the fact that budgets are tight and times are hard, and instead target the future. Whether that comes across as hardy optimism or just out-of-touch, well, we'll have to see.
See you in Austin!
(Credit:
Compete.com)
Unless you have been inhabiting the underground bunker formerly occupied by Dick Cheney, you've probably seen loads of press coverage over a "25 Things About Me" Internet meme that was spreading on Facebook. Basically, members would create a Facebook "note" containing 25 facts about themselves, and then "tag" 25 friends encouraging them to do the same.
Yes, it was a bona fide phenomenon, but I avoided writing about it, because I thought the whole thing was...dumb. Internet memes of that nature have been around since goodness knows when. Breathless press hype over it seemed a tad silly.
But here's something legitimately interesting. Analytics firm Compete.com says that there may actually have been a boost to Facebook traffic as a result of "25 Things," at least in the U.S.: 60 percent more Facebook profiles were created in January than in December. That's not surprising, because Facebook still requires a user account to access all its content--curious newcomers who read about "25 Things" would need to register for accounts in order to explore it.
More noticeably, U.S.-based traffic to Facebook's "notes," normally one of the social network's quieter features, skyrocketed. Four times more visitors than usual hit up the notes feature in January, according to Compete, with 28 percent of Facebook's U.S. users checking them out. (The wildly popular photo-album feature usually draws 60 percent of visitors, for comparison.)
The caveat is that Facebook continues to grow fast and so some of this could be attributed to natural growth rather than "25 Things" momentum. That said, Facebook's U.S. growth has long since started to stabilize--three-quarters of its new users now come from overseas.
Compete has said that its analysts will be posting a blog entry about this later in the week, ideally with some more insight into just how much those annoying "25 Things" lists really did catch on. I've also pinged Facebook to see if they have any internal numbers on the topic.
Here's what'll be interesting to see, at least from my perspective: Will this mean that the newfound popularity of "notes" will last? I post photos, links, and other share-able items to my Facebook profile all the time, but I think I've written a Facebook note a total of once (to alert my friends list that I'd lost all their phone numbers in a personal-electronics mishap). Note-writing always struck me as something that was a little bit too promiscuous for the mainstream Facebook user, the sort of thing that navel-gazing, overshare-prone Twitterers would spring for but which didn't fit in quite as well with the directory-like nature of the social network.
Guess I was wrong. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, after all, likes to say that Facebook has incrementally made the Web's masses more comfortable with sharing more and more information. The success of "25 Things," consequently, must be one of his great triumphs. And now he knows all these useless facts about so many millions of people.
Heaven forbid: Facebook notes could be like a gateway drug to blogging for everyone.
This post was expanded at 9:51 a.m. PT.
Performance-monitoring firm Pingdom thinks we should look at social networks differently.
The popularity of a social site such as MySpace or Twitter is frequently measured in unique users, page views, or user registrations. But a recent ministudy by Pingdom chose instead to look at how much of a proportional lock a given social network has on the countries' Web users. The tool of choice was Google Insights for Search, which was formally launched earlier this week.
Facebook, for example, started in the United States and still has more members there than in any other country. But there's more proportional "interest" in Facebook in Turkey, based on Google searches for the term. In second place is Canada, followed by the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Colombia.
For MySpace, the U.S. ranks at the top of the list when it comes to regional interest, followed by Puerto Rico, Australia, the U.K., and Malaysia. Beyond that, many American-founded social networks are much more popular overseas than at home: Friendster, which recently affirmed its focus on Asian countries, gathers the most "interest" in the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and Myanmar, respectively. The top five Google Insights locations for Hi5, founded in San Francisco, are Peru, Portugal, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, and Costa Rica.
The rest of Pingdom's results can be found on the company's blog.
Each month, I get a fun little e-mail from Nielsen/NetRatings, the online division of the big-name metrics firm, with some tracking numbers for unique visitors at social media sites--namely, social networks, blogs, and video-sharing sites. They're pretty anecdotal as far as traffic metrics go, but it's still fun to see who's losing and who's gaining--you know, like sports. And each month, I eagerly open the e-mail (no, really) to see if there are any juicy surprises in store. This month's version, which includes numbers for August (percentage growth from August 2006 to August 2007, is sadly low on the juiciness factor. The numbers largely aren't that different from July's.
First, here's the social network lineup. In short: Facebook's growing fast, but LinkedIn is growing faster. MySpace is growing, but not as fast. AOL's social networks are suffering. Music site Buzznet is riding the early adopter wave, and the Disney-acquired kids' social network Club Penguin hasn't run out of momentum yet. Classmates' growth has slowed a bit, perhaps as the gossip about its potential IPO wanes. All in all, these numbers are almost identical to July's, with no new entrants on the list whatsoever.
Next month may prove to be more interesting for Facebook, to see if there is a spike in September growth as new university students enroll for the site (which started, as you probably recall, as an online replacement for college heralds). Will it grow at an even faster pace than we're already seeing, or are enough high schoolers using Facebook so that they already have accounts when they arrive on campus? In either case, we'll probably see more use of the site now that the school year has started anyway. As any member of the "Facebook generation" could tell you, it's a great time-suck, especially when there's a paper due the next day.
The "top blogs" list continues to bizarrely index blogging platforms like Xanga and Blogger alongside media titles like TMZ.com and Perez Hilton. It would be much easier if these were differentiated into separate categories, but I suppose we'll have to settle for the combined list for now. Like the social-networking numbers, the blog numbers haven't changed much: Google's Blogger is still on top, WordPress is still growing really fast, Xanga continues to shrink, and celebrity gossip still dominates the blogosphere. Geek staples Gizmodo and Engadget have dropped off the list, maybe because August was a quieter month for iPhone news than July had been; we'll see if they jump back up in this month's numbers when those come out.
On the video-sharing rankings, Atom Films has replaced Funny or Die in the bottom notch, and Veoh and Yahoo Video continue to grow much faster than YouTube, whose growth has slowed a bit (81 percent in July's numbers down to 66 percent in August's). It looks as if MySpace's video market share is shrinking, but interestingly enough, it is still using the vids.myspace.com domain for tracking rather than MySpaceTV.com, which launched this summer. Google Video's growth is slowing (down from a 69 percent growth rate in July), perhaps because its parent company has pulled it out of the spotlight in favor of its YouTube purchase.
We'll have to see when the September numbers come out next month if social media patterns have changed along with the season.
Clearly, social-networking metrics are the new black. It seems like just about everyone wants to know whether Facebook will pass MySpace--or whether there are any trendy, fast-moving start-ups that you ought to be monitoring so that you can start up a profile and amass a healthy friends list before it gets too trendy.
Last month, ComScore released numbers pertaining to social networking's worldwide growth. Now, Nielsen/NetRatings' PR team has released its latest set of figures that track how quickly the top social-networking sites are growing. The results are divided into three different categories of social media: social networks, blogs (and blog platforms) and video sites.
It looks like Nielsen has tweaked its criteria over the past month, because the lists are strikingly different from analogous ones it released for June: in those, sites like YouTube and Blogger were included among social-networking sites as well as in the "top blogs" and "top video sites" categories. It made for a rather confusing list, seeing as you had TypePad alongside Facebook under the "social networking" umbrella. Now, it looks like the main social-networking site list consists exclusively of community sites.
A couple of the names on the July list are riding the word-of-mouth wave: kiddie network Club Penguin, for example, was just purchased by Disney; Classmates.com is rumored to be heading for an IPO; and newcomer Buzznet, a music-based site, is just making its debut. Facebook, of course, is on the rise, but interestingly enough the results indicate that LinkedIn has grown twice as fast over the past year.
The aforementioned second category, "top blogs," is still a little bit confusing because it does indeed include destination blogs (like TMZ.com, Perez Hilton, and Engadget) and the major blog host platforms like Six Apart's TypePad and Google's Blogger. So there's a little bit of disconnect, but it does give you the gist of things: Xanga's shrinking, WordPress is growing fast, and way too many people read Perez Hilton and TMZ at the office. But we knew all that already.
Then there's the third list, of top video sites. In the top spot is (who else?) YouTube, followed by the MySpace video platform in its older form. I'm guessing that the new MySpaceTV portal hasn't been around for nearly long enough to be included in the figures. Also in the rankings are the corresponding video portals for major tech hubs' home pages (AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft) as well as big-media-backed start-ups like video-sharing site Veoh and comedy site Funny Or Die.
Update 12:20 p.m. PDT: The headline on table No. 3 says "June 2007" but those figures are in fact for July.
Don't you just love statistics?
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