Category Archives: social networks

Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and the rest. Digital networks connecting people on a massive scale. Their impact and direction analysed.

Growth of Social Networks (or Not)

By Ian Delaney | Published January 27, 2010

New data from Nielsen confirms what you probably already know. Traffic to and time spent on social networking sites has boomed over the last two years. As the charts below show, people across the world are spending around five-and-a-half hours per month on social networking sites compared to just over two hours at the end [...]

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Wonky Rungs

By Ian Delaney | Published January 22, 2010

Groundswell – the Forrester Research social media blog – has produced an update to its engagement ladder diagram:

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Mobile + Cloud – Gartner’s Crystal Ball

By Ian Delaney | Published January 14, 2010

Gartner’s key predictions for 2010 and beyond contains a mix of ideas. But one thing is clear – mobile and cloud computing are set to expand for some time to come. This post focuses on those areas most relevant to this blog – I’ll leave comment on Green Computing, etc. to those more competent!

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Facebook on Privacy: ‘We’re Finished’

By Ian Delaney | Published January 11, 2010

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is reported as having changed his mind about privacy. The recent set of changes to the site’s T&Cs in December – which rendered members’ names, profile picture, gender, network, fan pages and friends visible to the world unless they explicitly changed their settings – merely reflects societal norms,  Zuckerberg says. People [...]

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Top Social Networking Websites and Forums

By Ian Delaney | Published December 22, 2009

The latest data from Hitwise suggests that the battle between social networks is pretty much a one-horse race. Facebook wins.

Top 10 Social Networking Websites & Forums – November 2009

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The Social Economist

By Ian Delaney | Published December 21, 2009

The FT reports that The Economist plans to make headroads into social networks:
The Economist newspaper plans to acquire 500,000 fans on Facebook and 750,000 followers on Twitter within six months, in another sign that traditional publishers are looking to social media as a substantial source of web traffic and new readers.
via FT.com / UK – [...]

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Add Your Views

By Ian Delaney | Published August 25, 2009

Forgive me if you feel as though I’ve been battering you over the head with this, but NMK is conducting a user survey and I’d really like you to fill it in if you’ve had any dealings with us at all.
The survey is here.
Thank you very much indeed.

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The Consequences of Counting

By Ian Delaney | Published May 28, 2009

(Or, for those enjoying the puns, Nashional Guard.)
Every social media destination has some sort of scoring mechanism:

Twitter followers
Linked-In contacts
Facebook friends
Blog subscribers/comments

Those are the four I personally use most consistently, though I dip in and out of all the others to see what’s happening. They all have an equivalent.
What’s the result of those scores? Bigger is [...]

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Surrender! Foucault and Twitter

By Ian Delaney | Published May 27, 2009

Some of my early hopes for social media, that it represented, like Kevin Kelly reckons, some kind of renaissance for socialism in the western world, are starting to run dry.
There’s a splendid series of articles over at O’Reilly Media concerning the dark side of social media by Joshua-Michéle Ross. The first of these, The Digital [...]

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Islands in the Stream

By Ian Delaney | Published April 29, 2009

Twitter is about the real-time web; being in the flow. Once you’re following more than 100 people, it becomes an entirely different experience to instant messaging or Facebook. It feels like one of those adverts for the Information Superhighway in the 1990s: people and objects and destinations rush by. Sometimes you’ll stop and check in, [...]

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