Few Facts about Social Networking Websites.

As our digital and physical lives blur further, the internet has become the information hub where people spend a majority of their time learning, playing and communicating with others globally. Emergence of WEB 2.0 came with the concept of Social Network. The purpose of social networking is to CONNECT WITH PEOPLE on a very personal level.

Facebook Statistics:

• More than 300 million active users
• More than 100 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day
• More than two-thirds of Facebook users are outside of college
• The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older
• Average user has 120 friends on the site
• More than 5 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
• More than 30 million users update their statuses at least once each day
• More than 8 million users become fans of Pages each day
• More than 900 million photos uploaded to the site each month
• More than 10 million videos uploaded each month
• More than 1 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each week
• More than 2.5 million events created each month
• More than 35 million active user groups exist on the site
• Big brand names, like Ford, WholeFoods, Comcast, IBM, Dell, Southwest Airlines, and many, many more are establishing a strong presence on social networking hubs like Twitter and Facebook.
• Facebook membership has just passed the 300 million mark (that’s nearly the population of USA!) and Twitter is marching towards 18 million users by year’s end! That’s a lot of potential customers!
• Although, started with college kids in mind, over 50% of Facebook’s members now are over 25 years old, over 55% are women (the new buying power), 51% have an annual income of $75K, with 33% claiming to bring home $100K or more.
• Finally, Facebook has become one of the most trusted companies in America, and people spend three times more time there than on Google!

Social Networking Websites Statistics:

• By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
• Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
• 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
• Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
• If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia (note that Facebook is now creeping up – recently announced 300 million users)
• Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
• comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
• 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
• 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
• % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
• The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
• Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the  population of Ireland, Norway, or Panama.  Note I have adjusted the language here after someone pointed out the way it is phrased in the video was difficult to determine if it was combined.
• 80% of Twitter usage is outside of Twitter…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
• Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
• What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
• The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
• Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
• There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
• 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
• Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
• If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
• Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
• 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
• 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
• People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them
• 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
• Only 14% trust advertisements
• Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
• 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
• Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
• 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
• According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available
• 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
• In the near future we will no longer search for  products and services they will find us via social media
• More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
• Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second
• Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser

Google Services: Many of Them Depends Upon Your Country

By here, there are so many features which Google is currently offering is totally depends upon the region or the part of the world in which you are leaving. Described below are the Google’s services that will only work in one country, or a limited set of countries….

* At YouTube, sometimes videos will read “This video is not available in your country due to copyright restrictions.” Maybe you can click on the frontpage thumbnail, but then the video won’t show.
* At Google Books, even for stuff which is in the public domain in a country where you access the book, sometimes you’ll hit a block. For instance, when I want to read “The Comedies of William Shakespeare”, I’m seeing the text “No preview available” here from Germany. (Checking through a US proxy, I can see there’s a preview coming up.)
* Google China has a music service where you can listen to songs. It’s linked straight from the google.cn homepage. But what if you click on it from outside China? You’ll get the message “Music streaming/download services are not available in your region”.
* Google logo doodles are often country-specific. (This week’s comic doodle reportedly only shows in the US, for instance, unless you call up a special URL.)
* Google Video sometimes brings up country-blocks for specific videos. At one time, I saw the message “We’re sorry, but this video is not available in your country.” (While Google Video still had upload functionality linked from its homepage, you could also select target countries from a dropdown box for your content.)
* Users of Google China are in the position of having quite a bit of features and content blocked for them. For instance, Google recently removed the “sign in” link from their homepage, they stopped offering auto-completion on the search box, you can’t disable safe-search, and they censor certain web results, images, or news sources. (Search for e.g. human rights, and you’ll find a censorship notice by Google at the bottom of the page. On a side-note, an ad says you can “Find human rights on eBay”, though.)
* When you enter www.gmail.com in your browser and you happen to be in Germany, you’ll see the note “We can’t provide service under the Gmail name in Germany; we’re called Google Mail here instead.” You can access Gmail here by typing mail.google.com instead. You can’t get a @gmail.com account in all countries, but need to settle with @googlemail.com in some places.
* New Google features and functionality are often initially offered in US English language versions of the interface only (like most Gmail updates) or on the .com domain (such as the new iGoogle layout). Although that’s not country-specific, it hides new things from non-English speakers.
* The Google SMS service isn’t available in all countries. The UK homepage reads, “Google SMS is currently not available in the UK. The service is still in beta, and we’re working hard to make it better.”
* Google Apps only supports the purchasing of the following top level domains: .com, .net, .org, .biz, and .info – all others need to be purchased elsewhere.
* Free giveaways often officially only apply to the US… although others say they received them anyway.
* Google says, “The Google Latitude web app currently supports iPhone/iPod Touch OS 3.0 or above. For now, it’s available in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and we hope to bring it to more countries soon.”
* Phone service Google Voice is only available for the US.

Source :Blogoscoped

Yahoo ! GeoCities: Now Closing after 15 Years of Web presence

Geocities was created in 1994 as an easy way for people to create a Web presence. Fifteen years later, Yahoo has decided to close the doors on the iconic webpage service. Ars reminisces upon the good times of Geocities.

U.S. Internet search giant Yahoo! Inc., said it would close out GeoCities, a personal Web page service it purchased for $2.9 billion in 1999. The GeoCities Web page now sports a prominent note that says, “Sorry, new GeoCities accounts are no longer available.”

Yahoo bought GeoCities for more than $2.9 billion in dot-com-priced stock in 1999, when GeoCities had more than 1.1 million users. However, while the idea of having a personal presence on the Internet has caught on, GeoCities turned out to be a backwater, not the mainstream.

Still unclear is what exactly will become of GeoCities pages. New sign-ups are already no longer permitted, but what about existing sites?

Here’s how Yahoo put it: “You can continue to enjoy your Web site and GeoCities services until later this year. You don’t need to change a thing right now–we just wanted you to let you know about the closure as soon as possible. We’ll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer, and we will update the help center with more details at that time.”

The purchase 10 years ago anticipated the popularity of personal Web pages, but GeoCities did not match up to the interactive capabilities of social networking services, like Facebook, Cnet said. Unsurprisingly, Geocities has declined in popularity in recent years thanks to the plethora of similar and easier-to-use services—not to mention the rise of social networks like MySpace that allow the same demographic to make equally horrific pages and try to pick each other up at the same time. Add to that the explosive popularity of various blog platforms and the suffering of the online advertising market, and it’s really not a shock to see Geocities going the way of the dodo.

Google shuts down many Products

Just recently, Google’s 3D world Lively was shut down. Now Google announced they’re canceling a couple of other products or product features. These are:

• Mobile service Dodgeball. “We have decided to discontinue Dodgeball.com in the next couple of months, after which this service will no longer be available,” Google says. The original founders of this Google-acquired company already left a while ago in frustration due to Google allegedly not evolving their product.

• The Mashup editor, which is still only available in a limited test version. This product, originally released in 2007, was letting you create programs accessing and mixing APIs like the Google Maps API. Google suggests the App Engine would now be the way to go, as far as Google products go. “Existing Mashup Editor applications will stop receiving traffic in six months,” Google notes.

• Video uploading at Google Video. For quite a while now Google had made acquired YouTube their official video upload site, at least judging by things like where Google uploaded their own content for official blog posts (and judging by how much easier it was to get videos onto YouTube in terms of speed and lack of bugs). Google Video is a meta video search engine these days. Now that change in direction has become more completed and official: “In a few months, we will discontinue support for uploads to Google Video,” Google writes, adding that existing uploaded content won’t be removed, though.

• Google Catalog. This was a bit of a precursor to Google Print, now known as Google Book Search. The scanned and OCR’d catalogs of this collection are painfully out of date by now, tough. “[W]e’re bidding it a fond farewell” Google says, stating they want to focus efforts “to bring more and more types of offline information such as magazines, newspapers and of course, books, online.”

• Last not least, Google Notebook – while not being directly canceled – won’t be worked on anymore. “Starting next week, we plan to stop active development on Google Notebook. This means we’ll no longer be adding features or offer Notebook for new users.” Google say they will continue offer the service for existing users. The Notebook extension won’t be supported anymore, though, Google adds. Google suggests users look into Google Docs, as well as the SearchWiki feature.
  

“I’m feeling lucky” button costs Google $110 million per year

Google cofounder Sergey Brin told public radio’s Marketplace that around one percent of all Google searches go through the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. Because the button takes users directly to the top search result, Google doesn’t get to show search ads on one percent of all its searches. That costs the company around $110 million in annual revenue, according to Rapt’s Tom Chavez. So why does Google keep such a costly button around?

“It’s possible to become too dry, too corporate, too much about making money. I think what’s delightful about ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ is that it reminds you there are real people here,” Google exec Marissa Mayer explained, or at least tried to.