However, the very reasons that such networks exist are also proving to be their weakest points. In this post we look at the current market for mobile social networks and try to understand some of the issues they face.

While mobile social networks promote and encourage users to meet offline, this is also the biggest obstacle for networks to overcome. GPS may not be a requirement, but honestly, who's in your neighborhood and using these services?

The majority of the users of mobile social networks congregate in one specific city and rarely move outside of it. These areas are normally cities that the product premiered in, or a city in California (Silicon Valley anyone?). However, step outside such hot spots and users will hit a desert that stretches across many states.

Marketing To Mainstream

It's no secret that most mobile social networks are not catering to mainstream users. Take a look at the who's using Brightkite and we'll guarantee that the majority of users are part of the early adopter crowd. While this is fine, mobile social network developers need to realize that such products don't have to run into the same issues that hinder services like Twitter or Friendfeed from going mainstream. The mobile market is already mainstream, with over 1.8 billion cell phone users worldwide!

Compatibility issues

Anyone can sign up for mobile social networks such a Brightkite, Zyb, or Groovr, regardless of whether or not an invitation is needed. However, the majority of users are greatly disappointed afterwards because phone compatibility is another issue that plagues mobile social networks. They aren't the only ones with this problem either. Even services such as Qik have limited compatibility with mobile phones. It seems that if you aren't using the latest high-end phone made by Nokia, which runs well over $400, you're given the cold shoulder by these services.

Bleak or Bright Future?

Unfortunately, mobile social networks still have a long way to go. Other outside issues such as network compatibility can also affect the number of active users of mobile social networks. Despite these issues, we continue to look forward to the development of mobile social networks and services. However, developers need to take a moment and look closer at the problems that they may be creating just by developing networks that are as immobile as their users.

In the next post we'll review some of the aforementioned mobile social media contenders.

Ning is also an active proponent of OpenSocial and hosts a vast directory of OpenSocial apps that its users can use on their profile pages and networks.

Ning raised $60 million last April, and if Dan Frommer's calculations are right, it currently has an annual revenue of about $10 million from paid accounts, premium features, and advertising.

Compared to Facebook and MySpace, Ning, of course, is only a niche product, but it has clearly found its place in the social networking space.

Title: Please ignore any Quechup.com Invites - It's a spam engine

Message: I am writing this with profound embarrassment.

I was recently tricked by a spam engine posing as a new social network. I got an invite from someone I knew and trusted, signed up to see what was about. Two days later, Quechup sent out SPAM to my entire address book.

Please ignore or delete all emails claiming to be from me that mention a site called Quechup.com.

Please also accept my apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

I won't mention the name of the person who sent this message, because it isn't their fault. Clearly Quechup has broken the golden rule of social networks and abused the trust of their users. Quechup's tagline is "the social networking platform sweeping the globe" - however it seems to be doing that via an email spam campaign.

Our recommendation: stay away from Quechup. You may also adopt my own current rule and not sign up to new social networks unless there's a clear - and new, unique - benefit to you. After all, how many social networks do you need?

This is further supported by data about what consumers do when mobile social networking. Checking for both comments and messages from their friends register above 50% for mobile social network users and 45% of users post status updates. In other words, they're doing the same sort of things on their phone as they would do if at their computer. The phone is just an extension of their online social networking life, not a separate and different platform for new types of interactions.

The survey, which was conducted 2Q, 2008, interviewed 500 users of online social networks. Out of those users, only 1% had visited a social network on their phone only. A mobile social network, for example, would be phone-only. Yikes. That number is low.

So Where Does This Leave Mobile Social Networks?

At first glance, we have to admit, these numbers don't look promising for mobile social networks. Although it's possible that some of these social networks will stick around thanks to strong and supportive niche audiences, it doesn't look like any today are poised for mainstream success.

Then again, it could just be too soon to tell. Given how long it takes for mainstream users to discover any new technology, it may be just a matter of time before mobile social networking really takes off. With the recent explosion of new touchscreen smart phones (iPhone, Android, , HTC Dream, Instinct, LG Dare, etc.) designed with web surfing in mind, mobile social networking could still be right around the corner.

Some of Ning's most popular networks include Chris Pirillo's Geeks! Network, a network for the Ellen DeGeneres show, and rapper 50 Cent's social network. While Ning has a number of competitors, including KickApps and Crowdvine, Ning clearly leads the pack in terms of its user-base.

Ning is also very popular among academics and teachers, who often use it to set up networks and blogs for their classes instead of relying on more commercial platforms like Facebook or MySpace or having to use cumbersome class management software.

Still Limited

While we have little doubt that mobile social networking will become a big market in the future, today's reality is still rather bleak. Because of the limitations in the current hardware and software implementations, a lot of the location-based social networks like Loopt, WhosHere, Pelago's Whrrl, and others feel limited and at times rather gimmicky.

Also, most of these networks simply suffer from the fact that they don't have many users and that the chances of finding any of your friends on them are relatively low for now.

What About the Established Networks?

In the near future, mobile social networking is only really going to grow once the big social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, LinkedIn, or MyYearBook start releasing location-aware applications for mobile devices.

Overall, we don't put too much stock into the ABI report. Thanks to highly targeted location-based advertising, there is a good chance that a mobile social network that manages to attract enough users (or any of the already establish social networks that releases a location aware application) will be able to be financially successful. For right now, however, with a market that is barely establish, trying to put a number on the potential success of these networks is almost silly.

As the Wall Street Journal points out, though, it is also important to note that eMarketer predicted a 10.2% growth in ad spending for 2009 in December 2008. For the upcoming years, eMarketer predicts that the market will rebound and it predicts a 13.2% increase in ad spending in 2010. However, given how far off eMarketer's prediction for 2009 was, we will just take this projection with a grain of salt.

More Bad News for MySpace

Overall, this is obviously even more bad news for MySpace, which is already struggling to just keep its current user base from moving to other services. Even as the MySpace team tries to improve the service and streamline its business, it faces an extremely tough challenger in Facebook, which also has a lot of momentum behind it right now.

Atomkeep is a service that aims to help users keep their profiles in sync across multiple networks. Registration is as simple as typing in your email address and a password. A confirmation email will be sent to your email address for verification. Unlike most sites, Atomkeep does not immediately prompt you to enter in the typical user information such as your name, birthday, etc. Instead, you're immediately taken to the 'Manage Accounts' page to choose from a list of social networks to import or merge existing data from. You can use your profiles from other networks to fill in your Atomkeep profile or manually add in this information yourself.

Supported networks for Atomkeep include:

• Twitter
• Plurk
• Disqus
• Facebook
• Technorati
• Blogger
• WordPress
• LinkedIn
• Flickr
• Last.FM
• Ning
• Pownce
• Yelp
• Youtube

Tons more are also supported with support for numerous more social networks on the way.

Synchronizing Your Profiles

You can synchronize all of your profiles or just one by providing your password for each account on the synchronization page. Atomkeep also shows you the synchronization process for each account that you choose to sync. Here's a demo video of how the synchronization process works.

Atomkeep.com: Step Four. Sync. from Olexandr Prokhorenko on Vimeo.

Too Many Social Networks

Are we spreading ourselves so thin across the web that we have to create more utilities in order to keep up? When services such as Atomkeep pop-up, one wonders if maybe we're joining too many social networks. On the other hand, there's no denying that Atomkeep is a handy tool if you're forever changing your information and can't stand the process of updating each of your accounts one by one.

Further, even though Microsoft keeps talking about data portability, this announcement is not about their participation in DataPortability.org. Today's announcement is strictly about contact data, and it is strictly about Microsoft and these five sites. So while it is technically about making some data more open and portable, the old silos still exist -- there are just a few new paths cut between a handful of them. (To be fair, Microsoft's end of the contact data is open to everyone via their Contacts API, which has been around since last April. DataPortability.org, though, is about using existing, open standards to share all user data.)

Microsoft did mention their involvement in DataPortability.org in their announcement of today's news, however, saying that this and it are natural steps in their "pursuit of data portability to put users at the center of their online experience, while at the same time being thoughtful about balancing user security and privacy with the experience." Here's hoping everyone continues to open up.

A majority of teens, percentage wise, join social networks, but it's the adults that still make up the bulk of these web sites. That's because adults make up a larger proportion of the U.S. population than teens, reports Pew Internet & American Life Project. So the 65% of online teens actually represents fewer users than the 35% of adults who participate online. Of course, out of that 35%, the adults that tend to join social networks still skews younger: 75% of those 18-24 use these networks, but only 7% of the adults 65+ do.

It's Not About Professional Networking After All

You may think that many adults have joined the online trend mainly to network professionally with others in their field. However, that turns out not to be true. Instead adults, like teens, are there to socialize with their friends and people they already know. Nearly nine in ten social network users (89%) say they use the networks to stay in touch with friends, and 57% say they use it to make plans with friends. Under half (49%) use the sites to make new friends.

Surprisingly, those on social networks for professional purposes are not as common as you may have thought. Only 6% of adults use LinkedIn, the online social network dedicated to professional networking, but 72% use other social networks (50% use MySpace, 22% use Facebook) for both professional and personal networking purposes. The most interesting finding is that less than a third of social network users are using them for professional purposes, regardless of which site they use.

More Tidbits: Demographics

Some other findings confirm what we've heard before about social networks: MySpace users are more likely to be women, Hispanic, black, and have a high school education or some college experience. The median age is 27. Facebook users are more likely to be male and have a college degree. The median age there is 26. LinkedIn, however, tends to be comprised of more older, white men with a college degree and median age of 40. The prevalence of men on these networks could be explained by the fact that men are more likely than women to have two or more online profiles (54% vs. 47%).

What It All Means

It appears that the trend of using social networking sites for professional purposes is not quite as common as we may have thought. Although there are portions of the population both young and old that do so, it isn't the main reason people join social networks. It's more common for people to go online to use the networks as they were originally intended - to socialize. That's not a bad thing, we suppose, but it will be interesting to see what this means for sites like LinkedIn, whose main purpose is to cater to the professional crowd.

We've already seen LinkedIn attempt to expand their network in new ways not too long ago. Just this past year, we've watched as LinkedIn added LinkedIn applications, an effort to make their network more interesting and dynamic. They also added helpful features for business-minded folks like the events section, which debuted last November. But it was only a month ago that the company brought in a new CEO, or rather, an old one - the company founder Reid Hoffman. Perhaps that means LinkedIn is planning to shake up their site and make it more relevant and popular among online users than it is today. ]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/more_adults_than_ever_on_socia.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/more_adults_than_ever_on_socia.php Trends Fri, 16 Jan 2009 06:15:13 -0800 Sarah Perez Universal McCann has released a new report on the impact of social media (such as blogs, social networks, online video) on the media landscape. It surveyed 17,000 Internet users worldwide in March 2008. The report found that social media, in particular blogs, are "becoming a more important part of global media consumption for internet users than some traditional media channels." The report also found that social media is a global phenomenon (29 countries were surveyed), although there are cultural differences in how people use it.

- 83% watch video clips, up from 62% in the last study in June 2007
- 78% read blogs, up from 66%
- 57% of internet users are now members of a social network
- RSS consumption is growing rapidly up from 15% to 39%
- Podcasts are now mainstream digital content, listened to by 48%

Social networks have been "a key driver for the growth of social media":

- 22% of social network users have installed a widget or applications
- 55% have shared photos
- 22% have shared their videos
- 31% have started a blog
- The world’s biggest social network is MySpace with 32% weekly reach followed by Facebook on 23%

The report also states that social media is a global phenomenon:

- Top markets for blogging – China 70% of internet users write a blog, Philippines 66% and Mexico 60%
- Top markets for social networking – Philippines 83%, Hungary 76% and Poland 76%
- China is the world's largest blogging market with 42m bloggers versus 26m in the US

Those last stats will be an eye opener for many, because the US web tech market gets most of the attention of the blogosphere and mainstream media. But with China having 42m bloggers compared to the US's 26m, there is large scope for social media to flourish there - even despite China's political issues with social media.

Internet Use and Social Media

That's not to say that there aren't some technology addicts that aren't social isolated - around 6% of the adult online population would fit in this category, having no one with whom they can talk about those important matters and who say they don't have anyone "especially significant" in their life. However, this figure (the 6%) has not grown as access to technology has grown over the years - it has remained virtually unchanged since 1985. This points to the fact that perhaps those who are socially isolated individuals would be so anyway, regardless of what sorts of tools are provided to them, be those mobile phones, PCs with internet access, etc.

For the majority of the online population, technology - and especially social media - has led to more diverse networks than we've ever had before. The report notes that those who participate in social networking services such as Facebook for example, are more likely to interact with people from different backgrounds, different races, different political parties, etc. Specifically, blogging and general internet use was tied to having more racially diverse networks while online photo sharing was tied to having more diverse political discussion partners.

Those who use the internet tend to have 15% more network ties who aren't family members and those who use instant messaging services have 19% more non-kin members in their core networks.

Mobile Phone Use

Along these same lines, the ubiquity of mobile phones hasn't led to decreased face time with family and friends, but just the opposite. On average, a person spends 195 days of the year having mobile phone contact with others, but face-to-face interactions occur on about 210 days per year. In addition, mobile users have around 15% more family members with whom they can discuss important matters and tend to have 25% more core network members who are not family members. Overall, those who use mobile phones have core networks that are 12% larger than those who don't.

Despite all this good news about how technology leads to having larger, more diverse networks, the researchers also found that our networks' size has actually shrunk over the years. Since 1985, there has been a decrease of about 1/3 in their size. The researchers don't suggest any specific reasons for this shrinkage, but they do point out that they can now rule out one possibility for sure: technology.

The foundation of Socialmedian is its user created 'news networks.' Right now, there are over 1000 different networks on the site. Given the nature of the service, it is no surprise that most of them deal with technology in some form or another. Users can add links to these networks, but Socialmedian also automatically suggests stories based on keywords users can add when creating a new network. This is a very smart idea, as it allows even small networks to have a constant stream of updated news.

Vote Till You Drop

To share items on the site, users can either use a bookmarklet or 'clip' any story already on Socialmedian and share it on another network. One of Socialmedian's most interesting aspects is that it allows its users to vote on almost everything on the site. Users can, for example, vote on the ranking of the keywords and sources that are used to seed the networks.

With all this voting, it would be easy to consider Socialmedia as just another Digg, reddit, or Newsvine clone, but its personalized networks and extensive social networking features set it apart from most of its competitors. While both Digg and reddit are moving towards more personalized experiences, Socialmedian has made those the foundation of its product right from the beginning.

Keep Following

Out of all its core features, Socialmedian's social networking features have probably seen the most extensive remodel. Most importantly, users can now 'follow' each other. This is, of course, a similar model to what other social networks have done in the past as well, but this feature also allows you to see what topics and posts are most popular just among the people you follow, which puts a nice twist on the following/follower scheme.

Among some of the other new features are the ability to directly post to Twitter, as well as Socialmedian's use of Google's Social Graph API to help seeding new networks and recommending stories to its users.

Socialmedian is a very nicely designed social news network with a feature set far too extensive to cover in this short post. Thanks to its extensive alpha test and close interaction with its early users, almost everything on the site feels very well thought out and we did not come across any major bugs. Overall, we would be surprised if Socialmedian couldn't carve out a very nice niche for itself in the social news market.

Here is the full paper, in slideshow format:

The study also has some interesting analysis of business social networking, a subject we've been looking into recently.

Today on GigaOm, Om Malik reports on some of the new numbers coming in for social networks here in the U.S., specifically new comScore data which shows that the two biggest networks - MySpace and Facebook - are beginning to plateau in their growth.

Additionally, he points to an eMarketer article where they've lowered their 2008 advertising estimates from $1.6 billion to $1.43 billion. By looking at these numbers, Malik concludes that social networking is in for "tough times going forward." But is that really the case?

Social Networking Taking Off?

On the flip side, a completely different, and more positive, report on social networking was also released today. The report is called "The Consumer Internet Barometer" and is produced by The Conference Board, a global business research and membership organization, and TNS, a world leader in market insight and information who surveys 10,000 households across the country and tracks who's doing what on the Internet.

Interestingly, their report doesn't mention a decline or plateau at all. Instead, it concludes that what was once only a niche activity is now a growing trend that has more people joining every day. According to the report, one out of every four people visit social networking sites, and half of those that do, do so on a daily basis. The trend is so prevalent, says Lynn Franco, Director of The Conference Board Consumer Research Center, that it's going to extend beyond just personal use. "The next growth wave will be expanding and incorporating these networks into our business lives," she claims.

While this report doesn't look at traffic stats and advertising projections, it is looking at market penetration, and in doing so, paints a much rosier picture than the worrisome plateau in the chart above.

What It All Means

Perhaps social networking is reaching a saturation point as it matures, but that's not to say that it's all doom-and-gloom. Many people are still joining social networks, and, with each new generation, social networking will become even more of a part of life than it was for the generation prior. Whether MySpace and Facebook will always be the hot properties that they are today is yet to be seen, but the rise of new sites like Twitter, for example, shows that there's still potential for new social networks to rise up and gain mainstream appeal.

If anything, the sheer number of users on these networks today prove that social networking has earned its place in today's mix of new media. Don Ryan, Vice President, Technology and Media, TNS, agrees, saying, "as social networking becomes a staple in people's media experience, brands will place it alongside print, TV and search as a main advertising vehicle." Hmmm..maybe a saturation point isn't really such a bad thing after all?