The acronym "YASNS" is well-known in Web geek circles. It stands for Yet Another Social Networking Service. In 2011, perhaps the acronym should be "YAUSNS": Yet Another Useless Social Networking Service. Even large, otherwise successful tech companies aren't immune to YAUSNS. In September last year, Apple launched a music social network called Ping. It's basically 'Twitter for music,' however it's been a fizzer - despite being embedded right into iTunes. Another company at risk of what I'll now call The Ping Effect is Amazon, which released Kindle Profiles in March of this year. It's a social network for reading, but so far it hasn't set the world on fire. A commenter on my Google Plus profile called it "The Ping of Books."
Also in March, business social network LinkedIn launched a social news service called LinkedIn Today. Is this service needed, or is it simply duplicating Techmeme, Google News and similar social news sites? Let's find out...
While the real-world markets take a nosedive, a virtual world's economy is on the up and up, and its parent company is reaping the rewards. Second Life, the user-generated virtual world, generates almost $100 million in revenue a year, according to a new report on LAUNCH. A "company insider" says that Linden Lab has grossed over $75 million per year for the past three years and the company is profitable.
But this isn't just another nine-digit number in the sea of Web business news. Linden Lab, the parent company of Second Life, simply charges fees on financial transactions. Its revenue comes from an entirely user-generated economy built on real estate, virtual goods and services. Yes, there's also a sex industry.
LinkedIn shared its Q2 earnings today in its first earnings announcement as a public company. Usage numbers are up significantly, with 115.8 million members, up 61% from Q2 2010, and 81.8 million monthly unique visitors, 83% more than last year.
Net revenue growth was not as strong, but CEO Jeff Weiner says this is due to heavy reinvestment in the growth and development of the site. LinkedIn earned $4.5 million in net income this quarter, compared to $4.3 million last year, just a 5% increase. But their top-line revenue was up considerably, more than doubling since Q2 2010. Before costs, they pulled in $121 million last quarter.
Today, Foursquare launched a new version of Pages. The update allows anyone to sign up for a brand page that can push tips and check-ins to followers on Foursquare, as well as to Facebook and Twitter. Foursquare lets users add new locations to the service, but, until today, there was no good way for most places to actively reach out to users, unless their owners waded through a daunting application process for a brand page.
Many words have been expended covering user demographics on Google Plus, mostly regarding whether or not the newborn social network is dominated by men. The data visualization wizards at Bime have just posted an interactive dashboard of Google Plus data that gives us a much more granular picture.
We've written on auto-posting before and there still seems to be a debate as to whether or not it actually affects performance to post via bot. Anecdotally, I've found that manual posting shows significant increases in performance.
When I first started at ReadWriteWeb, the updates to Facebook were automatically posted via a Facebook application. It was an easy way to make sure our fans got to see our posts, but it didn't foster community discussions so after I got my bearings around here, I stopped the app (or at least I thought I did).
The social Web has a tendency to fold in on itself. Shortly after the launch of Google Plus, for example, users began to complain that it was only being used to talk about Google Plus. Drew Olanoff, currently the community manager for Get Satisfaction, would prefer that social networks revolved around their people instead of themselves. After being diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2009, Olanoff built his experience into a Web phenomenon that offered connections, support, and some hopeful levity to people affected by cancer. His work is now bolstered by the launch of a new social network called I Had Cancer, which has created an engaging, Web-centric support system for cancer fighters, survivors, and their friends and family.
Google Plus has been live for a month, and some have already begun to fret about its health. According to Experian Hitwise, Google Plus traffic for last week declined 3% from the week before. This might suggest that some of the initial shine has worn off, but it's certainly too early to call it a trend.
Google Plus has surpassed 10 million users, which is impressive considering the service is still limiting sign-ups. Referral traffic from the service might be down in some parts of the Web, but it's quickly become one of our top traffic sources at ReadWriteWeb.
Here's an interesting and under-reported story: a developer by the name of Robert Norris Hills recently created a bot that automatically adds users to Circles on Google Plus. The bot runs until it reaches the friend limit of 5,000, then removes the Circle it created and starts again, keeping those who added it back.
Why would such a bot be a problem on Google's new social network? Because, like similar "auto-follow" behavior employed by Twitter spammers in the past, many users will return follow (or in this case, return "encircle") those who follow them. And that can be used to a spammer's advantage.
There is some good news to report, however: Google throttled the bot within days of it going live. But according to Hills, that may not be enough.
Twitter Lists are a beautiful thing, but the company limits what users can do with them. Presumably because of scaling challenges and a perceived lack of user interest, users who want to group together Twitter accounts into topical lists are only allowed to create 20 lists per account and each list can contain no more than 500 members.
Unless you are Twitter itself, that is. We wrote one month ago that Twitter's own staff list had hit the maximum number of members, 500. (It's not an unpopular list, either, almost 77K people are subscribed to it.) What would happen if Twitter hired more people, we asked? Would these limits be lifted for other users as well? Well, it turns out that the Twitter staff list is now at 545, another incredible growth of 10% in 30 days, and the list feature's limit appears not to apply in this case. Think these limits aren't important? Try making a list of employees at any large company, or of Women in Tech, or of People in Portland, Oregon.
