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
Facebook gets four times the traffic of its closest competitor, MySpace. Twitter – so beloved of the media and apparently the word of the year – will need to increase its page …read the rest of this article

danah boyd has published a new paper at First Monday, an online academic journal. In it, she examines the concept of Friendship on social networks, as opposed to friendship in the offline world. Briefly, Friends (capital ‘F’) are about ‘identity performance’ – they reflect who you are online and offline – and may arrive on someone’s list for a host …read the rest of this article

Step One: MySpace partners with Gracenote to identify and eliminate copyrighted music on their network. (October 30th)
Step Two: MySpace announces steps to identify and eliminate copyrighted video on their network. (Nov 17th)
Step Three: Universal Music Group sues MySpace for copyright infringement. (Nov 17th)
It will be interesting to see how this pans out. Techcrunch points out Craigslist escaped prosecution this week …read the rest of this article

The latest Hitwise Consumer Generated Media Report reveals that MySpace’s dominance over other social networks shows no signs of slowing down. MySpace has a market share of 81.92% among the social networks, with users spending over 30 minutes on the site in an average session. This is the second-longest session time in the survey, with only the more child- and …read the rest of this article

Not really my bag, but Advertising Age has published a free 50-page guide to search marketing. It contains a lot of interesting statistics, though, including the following table of top searches from Hitwise. Something tells me that MySpace should do pretty well this year.

Another interesting feature is the top-ten list of search-engine optimisation tips. They’re totally dominated by the idea …read the rest of this article

The Guardian reckons Web 2.0 is ready for the mainstream with its Weekend section dominated by a 15-page feature entitled ‘A Bigger Bang’. John Lanchester’s article provides the keynote to the section, in a piece which is well-written and clever:

a new wave of innovation on the internet, an innovation focused not so much on new technology as on the way …read the rest of this article

A new report from eMarketer published yesterday suggests that advertising spending on social networks will soar over the next four years. Worldwide revenues over $2bn are predicted in 2010. The report suggests that the most mainstream sites, dominated by MySpace, will grab the largest share of this revenue.

It’s not entirely clear why MySpace’s dominance is predicted to remain unchallenged over …read the rest of this article

The Washington Post has a story about youngsters leaving MySpace in droves that recently hit the front page of digg. And the WSJ agrees with a spookily similar story. Hang on. I recall reading another remarkably similar story four months ago [digg link - the newspaper has moved the piece].
I think these stories are largely based on tenets gleaned from …read the rest of this article