Category — News

Well, I hate reporting this, seeing as though this is Social Platform Journal and all but the web analytics outfit comScore says that social networks are staring to lose their appeal, particularly MySpace, Bebo, Friendster and even the social network darling Facebook.

From Creative Capitol:

But the pain is not just a MySpace problem. It seems to be an industry-wide issue. The total audience of U.S. social networks seems to be stuck at a low-to-mid-single digit growth rate, while the engagment metrics are falling for just about everyone. Time spent on Bebo.com has been sliced in half over the last four months, while Friendster’s time spent has plummeted nearly 75% in the same time period. Overall, minutes spent per site fell 5% in December 2007 compared to the year-ago period.

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It’s interesting enough to know that when we type updates into Twitter that people all over this world can see what we’re thinking in real time, but you might not have realized that your tweets were also reaching the citizens of the virtual world of Second Life.

New World Notes reports:

created by UK developer Daden Limited, the Twitter Fountain of Second Life takes the public feed from the Web 2.0 site, converting each Tweet into a literal thought balloon that burbles up from a koi pond located on Daden’s SL island. (Visit the Twitter Fountain by clicking the SLURL teleport at this link)

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I bet when you woke up this morning, you thought to yourself, “Today feels like it’ll be a special day in social media history!”

Well, it could be, depending on how many MySpace users Simon Owens has managed spur to action. Today is the day that Owens has declared “International Delete Your MySpace Account Day”.

Owens says of his initiative:

The idea quickly caught fire, being linked to on hundreds of websites spanning from Digg to Fark to MSNBC. Several journalists interviewed me about the day, including live radio and television interviews. I was also interviewed by a journalist at the Washington Post. A Myspace spokeswoman even responded to the event.

Regarding the event, MySpace spokesperson Rebekah Horne, vice president of Fox Interactive Media and MySpace in Australia and New Zealand, had this to say:
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According to TechCrunch:

Mig33 is a downloadable mobile social networking application with a bunch of utilities mixed in. Users can not only do the usual profiles and friending, but also includes VoIP calls, instant messaging, e-mail, text messaging, picture sharing. Long distance calls can be made by using pre-paid Mig33 minutes. They have an affiliate program for selling minutes and have even launched a calling card business in South Africa. Users have been signing on for more than a total of 2 million sessions per day, sending more than 45 million messages each day, and share more than a million pictures a month.

Mig33 has users in 200 countries and has an increasing customer base of 9 million + users.

Hmmm, I did not know that so many people accessed social networks via cell phones, so this is enlightening. I guess it makes sense though–not everyone has an iPhone or a laptop, but most folks have cell phones.

Kristin Gorski has a fascinating article at techPresidents about a new town in Twitterville called Politweets.

Gorski says:

A new website called Politweets gleans the “tweets” which mention political candidates’ names and then displays them on its site in real time. What Politweets captures hints at public opinion and trends regarding the election. It has also become a news outlet, where private citizens, traditional media, and even the candidates’ themselves tweet about facts, opinion and web links to anyone who reads.

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A recent survey of U.S. journalists by Brodeur reveals that over 75% of reporters turn to blogs for information when doing research for stories and that “blogs are not only having an impact on the speed and availability of news, but also influence the tone and editorial direction of reporting.”

I find this easy to believe! The news content that social media produces is very different that information a reporter would find by doing old school offline research. Blogs as sources are attractive to journalists because:

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Simon Owens has had it with MySpace and has declared January 30 “International Delete Your MySpace Account Day”.

If you’ve experiences the annoyances of MySpace, you probably don’t need much convincing to delete your account, but in case you’re still teetering on the verge, Simon’s outlined his main motivators for giving MySpace the boot:

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Ashley Spencer, age 29, passed away on Tuesday, January 8 in a car crash, leaving her husband (Peter), brand new baby (Lucy) and a toddler son (Toby).

Almost immediately word spread throughout Ashley’s Twitter community and with shock and grief her online friends rallied together to do what they could for Ashley’s family. Together, in only 10 days they raised over $8,000 to help with the funeral costs and any other needs her family may have.

It’s amazing that so much can be done in such a short about of time. What is even more amazing is that most of the people involved in this initiative were either online friends of Ashley’s or didn’t know her at all, but only heard about her death through the web grapevine.

Some people may be wondering– “Why would you do something like this for someone you only knew through Twitter?”

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Every one who has done some reading in the area of SEO knows of the supposedly magical properties that .edu domains have with search engines such as Google. The theory being that Google weights .edu domains a little more heavily, since they are less likely to be commercial, and thus less prone to abuse.

Digg (not surprisingly) doesn’t care about the TLD extension of a domain, as I found out this morning when I tried to submit this humorous series of Lyndon Johnson Pictures that had already done quite well at Reddit:

I have seen this happen quite often lately when trying to submit things to Digg that are front paged at Reddit. There is a large and ever growing list of banned domains at Digg (for spamming the submission process or for being a constant source of duplicated content), but this is the first time I have ever seen a .edu get the banned treatment.

There is obviously opportunity here if you happen to find popular content at Reddit (that happens to fit your business or niche of course, unless you have a catch all site where anything would fit) that resides on a domain that is banned by Digg. Of course, beware of content theft, but that goes without saying. = )

Compete has just released a list of the top moving sites of 2007.

From the social platform genre, we have CafeMom, LinkedIn, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Squidoo, Webkinz, Six Apart, and WordPress, among others.

Are there any surprises in this list?

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