New data from Pingdom on the age of social network users confirms the rumours. They are mostly quite old, or they lie a lot about their age. The smallest group of people using social networks is the 18-24 age group, which rather confounds the idea that these sites are for young people. Across the board, only [...]
February 1, 2010
You’ll have seen this word flying about recently and it’s time for some explanations. Err… don’t you mean ‘publically’? ['publicly' if you're American] No. Well, in some ways, yes, I do. Let me explain. In the past, there has been an assumption that privacy was the default state of human existence. It was only when you, someone or [...]
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 [...]
January 14, 2010
Late December and early January see the seasonal appearance of a popular type of blog post: ‘My Predictions for [Next Year]’. They’re a great stock-in-trade because you can say whatever you like and nobody can prove you wrong until the end of the following year, by which time everyone’s forgotten. I’ve written a couple in [...]
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 [...]
January 6, 2010
Just a quick note to point out the publisher-sanctioned free PDF available of The Art of Community by Jono Bacon. It’s a guide to building and running online communities and social networks. Bacon is the community manager for the Ubuntu operating system, the dominance of which compared to other Linux variants is arguably down to [...]
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 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 [...]
December 22, 2009
In a story from the Onion news network, an archaeologist discovers traces of an ancient network of people known as Friendster. Internet Archaeologists Find Ruins Of ‘Friendster’ Civilization Not so much ‘fake’ news on this occasion. More like news that hasn’t happened yet. I can see this being broadcast 100 years from now.
November 30, 2009
42.6% of respondents say they feel less inhibited interacting online than face-to-face. 20% say they lashed out at companies or products thanks to the anonymity of online interaction. 31.5% say that online interaction let them do something they’d been wanting to do. via marketingcharts.com Research from Euro RSCG suggests (as you’d have guessed) that people [...]
October 27, 2009
Like many people, I’m really looking forward to the UK publication of David McCandless’ The Visual Miscellaneum. This graphic might come as a surprise to some people. If the main way you’ve found out about social media is through conference programmes and the most frequently cited blog posts, you could not be blamed for assuming that [...]
July 14, 2009
I just read this from Brian Mitsoda (ex-Troika) on fave gaming site rockpapershotgun in an article about ‘which games made you the gamer you are’ and I agreed so furiously that a little bit of wee came out: It’s impossible to separate my childhood from Pac-Man. If you were alive in the early 80s, you knew [...]
May 6, 2009
I’ve recently installed a relatively new Wordpress plug-in from the good folk at Backtype. This is what it does: it scans the web, including social networks like Twitter and other blogs, for mentions of your post and draws those mentions in as comments on the post. This is a good thing in many respects. It helps [...]
February 19, 2010