Regular readers may recall that in February I reported on a Pingdom study that basically said the opposite of this research – that the majority of social network users were much older. The age splits in that study were much narrower than Pew’s and can’t be directly compared, but nonetheless suggested a much more even age distribution in social media usage than this does. One clue as to the disparity comes in a later graph that covers what respondents had done in the last 24 hours.

Here, there’s much less of a contrast between the 18-29 year-old cohort and those aged 30-45. Maybe one thing you might reasonably say from this is that younger people are more inclined to try out new things. Whether they stick with them and use them on a regular basis is much harder to call.

BTW, where did the expression ‘silent’ come from for over-65s? I thought ‘boomer’ and ‘Gen X’ were bad enough, but ‘silent’… I would suggest the author has not met many 65-year-olds.

On a related note, in a research round-up from e-Marketer, using yet a third way of dividing age-groups, there’s the suggestion that blogging is a major force in younger people’s online activity. Apparently, 40% of the respondents who said they wrote blogs were aged 18-25.

Perhaps comfortingly, the main reason given for blogging – by all age groups – is for pleasure: ‘self-expression’ is the #1 answer, closely followed by ‘fun’. Respondents could choose multiple answers, but nonetheless less than a third thought they were going to make money out of their blogs. I’m pleased that most people have woken up from the blogging-for-benjamins delusion. There are two ways to make money from blogging: (1) get someone to pay you to write their blog for them and (2) get a proper job on the basis of your blog. Option 3 – where Google AdSense puts a roof over your head – is not available.

With reports of sackings on account of Facebook profiles and careless tweeting, a lot of people are probably rather worried about the Internet and what it might dig up about them. Everybody has some skeletons in their closet that they’d rather didn’t see the light of day: those pictures from the stag weekend and that drunken debate you got into about Paul McCartney being the best Beatle*. But the Internet is dark and mysterious and it remembers everything, so what chance of absolution for ordinary people?

The answer is good news, Mayfield explains. You don’t need to be a technical genius or have to hack into Google’s servers to make sure that your online representation shows your good side. All you need is to be diligent; create a plan and stick to it. The thing is that Google is desperate for information about you – so if you make it, and it’s well-written, clearly structured, interlinked and kept up-to-date, then that is what will appear in a search result. Slurs and dodgy pictures won’t disappear, but you have every opportunity to become the de-facto source of information about yourself. Then, if you get involved in professional or social networks and offer value, people will link to you and your material, giving even more weight to your credentials as a source. As I wrote recently, yes, there will be pictures that make you look silly, possibly negative remarks and perhaps things you regret – but your online reputation is the balance of positive and negative, and tilted towards the recency of the material and its credibility. Unless you’re a celebrity under daily scrutiny by national newspapers, you’ve got the opportunity to control of all of that.

The first part of the book explains how to find out what the Internet thinks of you, through Google Searches and more specialised tools like Spezify and Social Mention. The second part sets out how you can claim and control your online identity by joining social networks, making sure your profiles are fresh and accurate and possibly starting your own blog or website. The third and final section goes into more depth on how to make the best use of Linked-In, Facebook, Twitter and blogs. At every point, there are well-considered and wise tips on best practise and other sites you might like to explore, as well as advice for problems like negative comments, people who ask too much of you or who post information you’d prefer to remain private. While Mayfield is one of the world’s leading experts on the social web, he maintains a humility and willingness to learn that is not only extremely endearing, but also makes him more credible as an advisor.

So, a thumbs-up. It’s probably not for you, of course. If you read this blog, you’re likely to be well-versed in all of this, but maybe a great present for loved ones who really ought to be more aware of their options. This book is an empowering, well-written and non-technical guide that they will appreciate.

*I once claimed this. In a drunken debate. Sorry, alright. I KNOW.

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 9% of 18-24 year-olds are social network users, according to the research. Even on bebo, the ‘youthiest’, of the networks in the group, the mean age is 28. On facebook, which was originally conceived for college students, the average age is 38.

I have to throw in three cautions here:

1. It’s not clear what counts as being a ‘user’ of a social network. Having an account? More than 5 hours a month? More than 10? If the answer is ‘having an account’, then the mean age will naturally slip to the right as people try things out and then abandon them. Parents might well be expected to create accounts to see what it’s all about or to spy on their children.
2. More than half of teenagers lie about their age online, according to this story [http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/teens-lying-about-age-looks-and-lifes-online/story-0-1225746449526] and some qualitative research by danah boyd.
3. The 18-24 age band is [d’uh] only 6 years, as opposed to at least 9 years for the other age groups in the study. So there are 33% fewer people in the band – of course they’re going to represent lower numbers on social networks.

Notwithstanding, I don’t think this is enough to explain away the figures. Let’s face it: most social networks are more popular with older people than the young.

More surprises about what young people do and don’t do comes via the Guardian this morning. The following graph shows the percentage of people who have paid, or are willing to pay, for media products, by age:

Across every media type, teenagers claim that they are more willing to pay or have paid than people in their forties.

If you combine the two pieces of research together, you discover that most social networks appeal to a demographic that is significantly less likely to pay for anything than teenagers. More headaches for Mr Zuckerberg.

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 something else acted on that state that your privacy was broken. You did something ‘in public’, ‘went public’ or ‘published’. But if that was ever really the case – I’d argue that it’s partly a symptom of late C20th urban living – then it most certainly not true at this point in the early 21st Century. There’s a database entry just a few seconds after your birth that stays attached to you for the rest of your life. Everyone has got information on you – lots of it – from the government to the police to the supermarkets you use. And they’ll probably lose it or allow it to be stolen at some point.

Things get even worse when it comes to the Internet: your ISP is monitoring your data stream; Facebook is keeping your teenage indiscretions alive forever; Google is retaining your search history. Our brave new world of mobile applications sometimes seems particularly geared to recording (and judging!) your location to within a few yards using GPS.

So one part of the meaning of publicy is this status of not having privacy, for which historically we haven’t had a single word, so strong is the assumption that privacy is the natural state of affairs.

People aren’t entirely happy about this being the case, of course. And that draws in the second part of the meaning of the word. But first, some background…

We have strong personal, social, professional and political reasons for having an attachment to secrets and lies. While we’re told that we have nothing to fear from lack of privacy; unless we’ve done something wrong, in which case we deserve what we get. That’s not really true. In fact, it’s not true at all.

Secrets and Lies

Most religions and philosophies suggest that ‘telling the truth’ is a moral necessity. But this isn’t entirely the case. Secrets and lies are arguably essential to our psychological well-being. Certainly, they’re essential to everyone getting along without a fight every two seconds. By some accounts, we lie 200 times a day just to keep the peace.

Personal lies: ‘No, of course you’re not fat’; ‘No, it’s great that your mother is coming to stay’.

Social lies: ‘How am I feeling? Really good thanks’, ‘Oh yes, how is [child-name]? Do you have any more pictures?’

Professional lies: ‘great work, Bob’; ‘it’s been a pleasure doing business with you’; ‘we have the utmost respect for [competitor company]’.

Political lies: ‘We will cut taxes and maintain quality of public services’.

Secrets – probably best not to tell your mum that you take drugs, your wife that you fancy one of your colleagues; your boss that he stinks; your wartime allies that you think they are crass vulgarians. The place of secrets in our lives is more difficult to describe than the necessity of lying, but rather than dredge the literature right now, I think we’ll agree to agree (won’t we?) that we all have secrets and that their remaining secret is important to us.

The other difficulty is that this rise in public information has happened a lot more quickly that our society’s ability to come to terms with the consequences of that. We’re not especially good at forgiving and forgetting, for example, preferring instead to remember forever and condemn you for that one stupid thing you did five years ago.

So… Publicy?

Ah yes. The other part of the meaning of the word is very much akin to ‘publicity’. You see, there are two common tactics to coping with the loss of privacy:

Disinformation. Some 50% of teenagers post false information about themselves onto the Net. It’s been observed that if you look at the registration data, 10% of MySpace users are aged over 100, which seems rather unlikely, unless you factor in that you’re not supposed to register unless you’re 14 or over. [see the video below for more on this and other stats I cite]. Apparently, everyone lies on dating sites (men say they’re more successful; women that they’re younger and slimmer). If you counter the number of true facts about you that exist on record with a similar number of complete lies then the reliability of all the data is seriously compromised.

Curation. We make sure that the information that appears is, to the best of our ability, sanitised, presenting our ‘best side’. We untag drunken pictures of ourselves on Facebook; we don’t check in to FourSquare when we’re in McDonald’s and do when we’re in the Ritz; we remove ‘dodgy’ music from our Last.fm profiles. We use pseudonyms when we’re on networks that don’t reflect what we want to be part of our professional reputation. If someone or something is producing information about you, then you make sure to produce more, better quality information.

From the Economist’s report this week on Social Networks:

Research published last year by Pew showed that some 60% of adults are restricting access to their online profiles. In an earlier study the institute had found that, contrary to received opinion, many teenagers and young adults are also using privacy controls to restrict access to online information about them. Nicole Ellison, a professor at Michigan State University who studies social networks, says that over the past few years she has noticed that her students have become steadily more cautious about whom they share information with.

This corruption or correction of the information available about ourselves is the other side of the idea of ‘publicy’. Publicy isn’t the opposite or the death of privacy: it is the way we live when it is less available.

These ideas aren’t yours, are they?

No, ‘course not. To my knowledge, the word was coined by Laurent Haug, who founded the Lift conference among other achievements. Stowe Boyd wrote about this being the decade of publicy last month, with some great examples of the way different cultures accept certain pieces of information as ‘naturally to be disclosed’ or private. PR-man Brian Solis wrote about it last week, together with some fascinating data-points (taken from this study) about people’s attitudes to social networks that I’m still digesting. e.g.:

How do you pronounce it?

I don’t know: it’s that new. It’s either ‘publicky’ or [more likely] ‘publissy’. I quite like this ambiguity because it reinforces the dual meaning of ‘living in public’ and ‘generating publicity’. I also like that while it’s an utterly ugly word, this ugliness communicates its modernity rather well.

Anything else to say?

Maybe. Disinformation and curation both seem like coping mechanisms, both of which have drawbacks. Disinformation leaves a trail of lies and half-truths that might make a person seem like some sort of Walter Mitty fantasist when subjected to scrutiny. Curation requires time, judgement and skill – while it’s well-suited to a seasoned PR professional, it’s perhaps less so to those vulnerable people who will suffer most from complete disclosure.

Elements of society move at different speeds, as I’ve already remarked. Until we’re able to guarantee an internet Statute of Limitations on how long being an idiot lasts and under what circumstances it counts, then there will be a disconnect between the abilities of technology to record us and the abilities of the people we deal with to cope with that data. My belief is that it takes several decades – maybe two generations – for this sort of change. Until then, we’ll have to suck it down.

I don’t make any judgement on the fact that we now live publicy and not privately. That’s like railing against the incoming tide.

And this video?

It’s Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist working for Intel, talking about secrets and lies on the Internet at the 2008 Lift conference. I’ve cited it before, but it’s well worth a second look. Don’t forget to leave a comment, though.

As you will be equally unsurprised to learn, Facebook remains the front runner, with 206mn unique visitors in December – 67% of all social media users.

While the rate of growth is impressive, there’s another side to these figures which is rather less so. Five-and-a-half hours over a month? Pathetic! People in the US spend four hours a day watching television.

Of course the figures are slightly meaningless, except as a comparison to the same measure over the previous period. The figure of 5h30 is arrived at by dividing all the time spent online by the number of people using social sites during that time. In truth, there’s probably a very stark differentiation between people who spend hardly any time at all on social sites and those who are never off them.  Nonetheless, a bit of a reminder that social networks have quite some way to go before they rival more traditional media for consumption rates (although – interestingly – their reach is pretty similar).

Another interesting chart shows the differences in time spent across different countries. Australians appear to be the most socially active, with the Japanese bringing up the rear. Presumably interactions using mobile devices weren’t measured? We in the UK come third – another Bronze for the plucky Brits. I’d love to speculate further, but wouldn’t be able to resist national stereotypes.

picture credit: Avlxyz

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 the past, but refrained this year, leaving the task to wiser heads than mine.

Heads such as those at analyst firm Gartner, which has just produced its own variation on the theme:  Key Predictions for IT Organizations and Users in 2010 and Beyond. Since they get paid thousands of pounds by businesses to be correct about the future, Gartner doesn’t offer many 12-month predictions, with several stretching to the six-year level – even high-paying subscribers won’t remember by 2015. ;-)

Anyway, the bold bits are from the press release. The regular text is my attempt at a quip or reaction.

By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets.

Quite a lot of businesses own very few IT assets right now. The phone is still the key communications tool for plenty of bricks-and-mortar firms. But what Gartner is talking about is the Cloud, of course, or – more prosaically – leasing arrangements. I’m not entirely sure I buy this. I can see that there will be fewer server rooms, more leasing and more thin devices, but no IT assets is quite a stretch. As I understand it, most leased IT at present is basically the big printers that have come to replace photocopiers, which were always leased anyway.

By 2012, Facebook will become the hub for social network integration and Web socialization.

A safer bet here, I think – with 350mn subscribers already, Facebook could already make this claim to some extent. But Gartner is bolder than this looks – it means all web socialisation. That other social networks and websites will have to offer Facebook integration to survive. This goes against the common wisdom that the incumbent dominant social network will eventually go the way of Friendster, Six Degrees and Friends Reunited as fresher networks attract the restless young.

Nonetheless, I’m relatively happy with the suggestion that Facebook will remain a dominant force. I see more and more websites with Facebook Connect installed. I even installed a module allowing users to log into this site to make comments using their Facebook account. Albeit an open-standards model that will work with other OpenID providers.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out internationally, though. While Facebook dominates in English-speaking countries, there’s considerably more flux and variety elsewhere. Maybe Gartner meant “in the US”, though the text doesn’t say that.

Internet marketing will be regulated by 2015, controlling more than $250 billion in Internet marketing spending worldwide.

Woah. That’s a big push – but remember they’ve got six years for it to happen or for us all to forget. There are a couple of problems with Internet marketing regulation: (1) it already is regulated. Companies have to operate to the same standards they do in offline dealings. (2) But it’s regulated by local laws.Suing a dodgy dealer in Timbuktu in a UK court is all very well, but you still won’t get that herbal vi-gr- you ordered. (3) Increasing local regulation tends to be unpopular because it puts local businesses at a disadvantage compared to those in Timbuktu.

By 2014, over 3 billion of the world’s adult population will be able to transact electronically via mobile or Internet technology.

I can buy this. If anything, I think it will happen quicker. There are already 4bn mobile phones in use. The next iPhone is tipped to incorporate near-field communications. People change their phones at least every 18 months – so now everyone’s got at least a cameraphone with bluetooth. Chip-readers should surely become standard within two generations.

By 2015, context will be as influential to mobile consumer services and relationships as search engines are to the Web.

Pretty vague, but context here means the use of location, time, the accelerometer, near-field communications etc. So if I am walking into Tesco at six-o’clock, the phone loads an appropriate shopping portal that I can wave at the things I want to buy and reminds me to get washing powder, that sort of thing. And why not? Tesco has already got this sort of thing for desktops and dedicated appliances. If my mobile is four-generations better, then I don’t see why I shouldn’t have it there.

By 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide.

As I’ve mentioned above, there are already 4bn mobile phones in circulation, versus about 1.5bn PCs. If those phones are two generations better, then they can probably do an OK job of rendering the web, maybe through micro-projectors and gesture recognition.

I’ll finish, though, with this video of mobile guru Tomi Ahonen about the next 4bn mobile users. One key point he makes is that the next 4bn are probably in developing nations and that they’ll still be using SMS and WAP for some time to come (he’s not very sanguine about the mobile web, full stop) – thus the biggest revenue opportunities for businesses aren’t the mobile web at all, but in far more down-to-earth, but universally usable applications.

photo credit: Panoramas

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 aren’t that worried about privacy any more, he claims:

…in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

“We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.

“A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change – doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.

Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over

As Read/Write Web points out, the suggestion that blogging and possibly Twitter have wrought a worldwide alteration in people’s attitudes to privacy seems disingenuous. While both are quite popular, neither forces people to reveal their identity to the extent that Facebook does. With 350mn users, largely concentrated in Western Europe and the US, the network holds considerably more sway over cultural mores than blogs. Facebook is not following changes in society, it is creating them.

And what is this suggested link between blogging and giving up privacy? There are plenty of anonymous blogs and pseudonymous Twitter accounts. Heck, there are plenty of personal blogs and Twitter accounts that don’t show as much personal information as a Facebook account. There’s nothing inherent in either blogs or Twitter that forces the disclosure of your friends, gender, appearance and affiliations, while it’s the raison d’être of Facebook.

The other thing is that right or not about social norms, Facebook has changed the rules mid-game. You’ve already disclosed whatever you decided to disclose to your friends on the network under the old rules. You didn’t opt-in for greater visibility than you initially signed-up to. While Zuckerberg may be cultivating a ‘beginner’s mind’, that might be less true of the people who joined the network before last December.

To be fair, Zuckerberg’s point of view, as expressed in this interview, is no different to that of most web-savvy people. If you go on the Web, then you leave an indelible digital trail – so get used to the idea and act accordingly. We’ve all known that for years. However, it is rather surprising to find Zuckerberg both acknowledging and promoting this view. The normal line taken by social network execs is ‘don’t you worry your pretty head about privacy – we’ll keep you safe.’ There’s commercial advantage in this. If people feel safe, then they’ll be more open about what they reveal about themselves. If people are more open, the social network will be able to better target users demographically and behaviourally. Its advertising will be more effective and thus more easily sold.

This new approach – ‘no-one cares about privacy any more: get over it’ – seems like a mistake to me, unless he is thinking that the traffic uplift from search engines will raise enough revenue to allow a swift IPO and exit before anyone realises what’s happening.

picture credit: Max-B

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 the strength of its online community.

The download was actually released in September, but I only found it today. I assume some readers have been similarly remiss.

I may write a little about its content later, but for the moment, a note on the publishing strategy.

O’Reilly is undoubtedly a little more progressive than most publishers, for whom giving away versions of their properties for nothing would seem like madness. It’s also released under a Creative Commons license that allows sharing and remixing of the contents – I could, for example, produce a 20-page ‘version’ of the tome and give it away here for free. (I won’t, though – I may have some time on my hands, but I’m not mentally ill).

Why should/would publishers do this? It’s actually a really shrewd commercial move. Think about the upsides:

1. People on the Internet love FREE STUFF. They feel warmly to people who give it to them. I like O’Reilly as a business to a greater extent because they’ve done this. I am slightly more likely to buy stuff from it.
2. It generates a lot of buzz and positive PR. I’ve blogged about the book, for example. More usefully for O’Reilly, Mashable readers voted it the 2nd most important book on social media. This will lead to increased sales of the dead-tree version, or I’ll eat my cat.
3. The book is nearly 400-pages long. Nobody in their right mind is going to read something that long on screen. It hurts your eyes. You’re going to have a dip into it, decide if it’s useful to you and then buy it.
4. Not knowing whether a book is good or not is a big barrier to buying them online. In a bookshop, you can have a flick through to see if it’s any good. On Amazon, you’re mainly buying blind, which people don’t like to do. (That’s why Amazon give such prominence to reader reviews and recommendations, of course – because they’re very well-aware of this.) The free version recreates the in-shop browsing experience, restoring consumer confidence.
5. This is not a reference book. Were this a manual on writing CSS, for example, the PDF version actually has some considerable advantages over print versions: because you can search and find the nugget you need using your computer. The Art of Community consists of long chapters with lots of discussion – you need to read it properly to benefit from it.
6. Someone, somewhere probably will make that 20-page remix edition and give it away. That, my friends, is called a promo.

And the downsides?

1. If the book was rubbish, then people would find out and not buy it. Of course, this is actually an up-side in disguise. The free version shows O’Reilly’s confidence in its quality. They are saying that they have nothing to hide.
2. Potential buyers might discover it’s not for them. This probably sometimes happens. Again, it shows the publisher’s confidence in the title  – if you pick it up, then it probably is for you. It also gives O’Reilly some moral kudos – it doesn’t want to dupe people into buying something that isn’t going to be useful to them.
3. People might pirate the book. This is something that’s happened since the middle ages, of course. You may recall, for example, the difficulty of deciding what Shakespeare actually wrote because of the multiple variants of the texts from school. I could take the PDF, republish it on Blurb and sell it myself. But that’s not really going to happen: O’Reilly would sue me and I’d go to jail. Some people might take the risk, but they are idiots.
4. People might print out the book on their office printer, bind it and thus avoid paying for the real deal. Again, this isn’t really going to happen – think about the time, the cost of consumables and considerable chance of getting fired when your boss finds out versus the £18 cover price for the real thing.

So there aren’t really any plausible disadvantages. Unless you’re in the business of selling bad books, in which case you should probably give the whole social-networky-sharing thing a miss, if you can.

Note that I am not remotely suggesting that the free PDF version is a cynical ploy – far from it – but it is certainly shrewd. O’Reilly is not waving goodbye to its profitability. What it is giving away is both valuable, but not remotely as valuable as the physical book – it’s a considerable driver for sales of the dead tree edition.

Seth Godin’s been talking about this stuff for years, I know, but there are still few publishers willing to experiment. Paul Carr’s recent decision to pirate his own book despite the wishes of his publishers is a great illustration of the on-going battle between the vanguard and the old guard.

picture credit: Pink Sherbet Photography

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 views forty times to beat the top contender. It will need an increase of 50% to beat Tagged. And when’s the last time you saw that network mentioned on the BBC (five mentions of Twitter in the last week) or featured in the broadsheet press?

I must admit to being surprised to the extent that the big three networks dominate the area. Like many, my impression was that there was much more of a struggle going on.

Bear in mind, though, that this is US-only data. Bebo is more popular than MySpace in the UK and Ireland, while the Google-owned network Orkut rules the roost in Brazil and much of South Asia. In China, meanwhile, 51.com, Xiaonei and QQ have resisted western decadence with home grown decadence of their own.

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.