This data comes from a new report put out by Arbor Networks, who has just completed a two-year study of 256 exabytes of Internet traffic data, the largest study of global traffic since the start of the commercial Internet in the mid-1990's.

The biggest trend to come out of Arbor Networks' report is clearly that of the Internet's consolidation. Today's Internet is "flatter" and "more densely connected" than ever before, reveals Arbor Networks' Chief Research Officer Danny McPherson. Not only is Google the largest traffic source, there are only 30 large companies in addition to Google and including sites like Facebook, Microsoft and YouTube which now account for a disproportionate 30% of all Internet traffic.

According to Craig Labovitz, chief scientist at Arbor Networks, this shift represents the Internet's move into a second phase where it's no longer "all about contacting websites." Rather, "over the past two years larger organizations have been buying up the smaller websites and by July 2009, 30 per cent of the internet was owned by a few large sites." The acquisitions, the result of billions of dollars spent by large companies snapping up smaller ones, has created a new Internet core of "hyper giants," a coin termed by the report.

The other companies making the list of Internet giants include names like Akamai, Limelight, BitGravity, Highwinds, and Gravity - hardly household names, and certainly not big telco providers. Instead, these content delivery networks (CDNs), are the new Internet backbone that help move large amounts of data across the web.

So Long P2P, Hello Streaming Media

Consolidation is not the only trend revealed by the new findings, however. The report also discovered a sharp decline in peer-to-peer traffic, which only two years prior peaked at 40% of all traffic worldwide. Today, while still a hefty number, P2P traffic has dropped down to 18%. Why the change? For the most part, the file-sharing that took place on networks like Limewire and Napster back in the late 90's and early 2000's, has now been largely replaced by streaming video thanks to to sites like YouTube, Hulu, and Netflix. Given easier and less technical ways of accessing media, consumers have begun to shift away from the headache of P2P to these new and often free or ad-supported sites. Today, as much as 20% of web traffic is video, Labovitz estimates.

As far as Internet traffic in general, more than half (52%) is web-based, up from 42% in 2007. The remaining traffic comes from email and private networks.

A "Dramatic" Shift?

"Saying the Internet has changed dramatically over the last five years is cliché - the Internet is always changing dramatically," notes Labovitz. "However, over the course of the last five years, we've witnessed the start of an equally dramatic shift in the fundamental business of the Internet." He adds, "as content is getting faster and better quality it will change the face of the internet."]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_accounts_for_6_of_all_internet_traffic.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_accounts_for_6_of_all_internet_traffic.php Google Tue, 13 Oct 2009 06:38:11 -0800 Sarah Perez Waze is a free mobile navigation application which uses crowdsourcing to build its maps. Simply by having the application open and running, drivers using GPS-enabled smartphones can contribute map data to Waze where it then becomes part of the base map. Through passive tracking features which monitor speed, direction, and starts and stops, Waze can also identify traffic patterns to warn you of jams ahead. Drivers who want to take a more active roll in contributing content on hazards and accidents can do so from the app...although hopefully, not while driving.

What's most interesting about Waze is how it uses the power of the crowd to build its map database. Just by driving along with the application open, users are contributing data to Waze. Although this does make the service somewhat dependent on building critical mass in order to be successful, the company is confident they can do so. That's because Waze originally launched in Israel and in less than a year's time, they already have 91% of the country mapped. Here in the U.S., that process will obviously take longer, but Waze believes they'll have at least one metropolitan area completed in the next three months - the San Francisco Bay area, of course.

Since the application is designed to provide traffic alerts, one of its features allows users to contribute additional information like whether that's a speed trap ahead or just a fender bender slowing things down. Users can upload photos, too, so other Waze drivers can actually see what's causing the problem. This feature is a little disconcerting, though, since it does require the driver to interact with the phone while behind the wheel. However, Waze encourages the use of these features only when stopped, or even better, by having a passenger enter this info instead. (At least they disabled typing while the car is in motion. Whew!)

Also new to Waze is turn-by-turn directions, now available for free within the application. That feature alone should encourage more users to give it a shot, especially those who haven't purchased their own standalone GPS-based navigation device yet.

Early adopters can download the free mobile application from the company's homepage here. Just remember: this service only arrived in the U.S. this May so at this point, it may be more about helping build the map data than it is about using what's already there.

In the company's latest report (sample) "Mobile Broadband Traffic Across Regions 2009-2017," they've determined that this increase will account for nearly three quarters of all global traffic via mobile broadband portables. The top region for video consumption will be Asia Pacific which will account for over half (53%) of the traffic. That will be followed by Europe (26%) and then North America (14%).

The reason why Asia Pacific comes in so high is because, in many countries, mobile broadband is often the sole option for internet connectivity. Another forecast states that two-thirds of the global traffic will be via LTE (Long Term Evolution), a 4G wireless technology, where Asia Pacific will consume just under half (45%) of LTE traffic. In Europe, 80% of traffic will be LTE-based and in North America, 75%.

It Will Get Worse Before it Gets Better

According to Steve Smith, founder of Coda Research Consultancy, "the sheer amount of traffic people will consume worldwide will put pressure on operator revenues and network capacity, necessitating radical efficiency drives." He also notes that, in the short term, end user frustration with bandwidth and speed will increase. To illustrate this point, he mentions that today as many as three-quarters of Europeans are dissatisfied with the speeds they currently receive. That's an interesting comment, especially considering all the grumbling we hear about AT&T in the U.S. and their general failure to deliver on the promise of high-speed internet for iPhone users. (In many urban areas, they can't even consistently deliver a signal!) Although this report didn't focus specifically on smartphones, it's somewhat comforting to know that overseas users are experiencing the same struggles as we do here in the U.S.

However, once mobile broadband operators complete their build-outs and upgrades to this high-speed data network of the future, the resulting impact it will have on the internet as a whole will be mind-blowing. One could even argue that bandwidth speeds have accounted for many of the major revolutions the internet has seen over time - since the invention of the hypertext protocol and the web browser, that is.

The Next Revolution for the Net: Extremely Fast, Lots of Bandwidth

In the early days, slow dial-up speeds left us with simplistic, HTML-coded web pages where the most action to be had was an animated GIF. As bandwidth and speeds increased, pages became more robust, too. This change led to sites like Amazon and eBay, both of which launched in 1995, allowing people to shop from home using their PCs. By 2001, the usefulness of the net encouraged enough people to come online to make sites like the crowd-sourced Wikipedia possible. By 2003, the still-increasing speeds meant users could now download music from the newly launched iTunes store, customize (and overload!) their online profiles on MySpace, and play in online virtual worlds like Second Life. The following year, online photo-sharing prepared to go mainstream thanks to the launch of Flickr. Facebook, too, launched this year and eventually became the largest photo-sharing site in the world only three years later when they announced how they hosted over 10 billion photos on their site.

Also in 2005, the abundance of high-speed data connections made video-sharing site YouTube a hit among a new generation of user-generated content producers. By 2007, broadcasters banded together to launch Hulu, a video-streaming site for commercial content in an effort to compete with pirated peer-to-peer downloads as well as iTunes, which by now was serving up TV shows and full-length movies. In Europe, the BBC iPlayer was doing much of the same. In 2008, the launch of the 3G iPhone brought the high-speed internet to the handheld and revolutionized the mobile phone industry. This year, the handset's hardware was upgraded to record video, too.

As you can see, many of these changes were either directly or indirectly impacted by the increasing speeds and bandwidth provided by both mobile operators and ISPs. But currently, it's the mobile broadband networks which are having more of an impact on the latest trends. Even with all their struggles (cough AT&T cough), without the bandwidth provided, phones like the iPhone wouldn't even be possible and the smartphone revolution wouldn't be underway as it is now.

So what will the world look like by 2017? It's almost hard to imagine. But the promise of 4G could deliver things like live streaming HDTV, real-time updates from a variety of services, video chat, abundant use of MiFi, mobile cloud computing, streaming via iTunes instead of downloading (we like that!), and much more. In other words, the high-speed net that you use at home could go with you everywhere via your netbook, tablet, smartphone, or some other device in between. What will that mean for the world of online applications and cloud computing? Only that the next big shift for the internet as a whole is underway and we're privileged to be watching it happen now.

Update: We just heard back from Google - here is the official statement about which phones will be able to contribute traffic data to Google Maps:

Google Maps products that include location services will make use of this information for traffic. This includes the downloadable Google Maps for Mobile product for mobile phones as well as the Google Maps application for Android phones. One exception is the maps functionality that Google provides for the iPhone - the iPhone does not provide any location data that is used for traffic crowdsourcing at this time.

Google is obviously aware of the potential privacy issues involved here, but according to Dave Barth, the product manager for Google Maps, Google will "find the start and end points of every trip and permanently delete that data so that even Google ceases to have access to it." This way, nobody can find out where a car actually came from.

According to Google, enough users use these phones to make this project feasible. In my experience however, the data for these arterial roads isn't quite as trustworthy as the data for highways.

Overall, though, this is a great project and the more users are aware of it, the better the data will become. However, it is also worth noting that some GPS manufacturers have been using data from their users' GPS systems to crowdsource traffic data for years, though chances are that Google will be able to recruit more users and hence create a better experience for its users.

A greater number of related queries will now be listed for many searches and longer page excerpts ("snippets") will be shown in response to longer search queries. Those look to us like ways to keep people on Google longer.

Google has always had a delicate relationship with the sites that it indexes; caching and excerpts have been deemed acceptable because they serve the larger purpose of driving traffic to indexed sites. But ultimately it's more in Google's interest to offer "one-stop shopping" than it is to drive traffic.

Google's search engine is smart enough that users could be given much of what they need right on the Google pages, without ever having to visit the sites the information came from.

One academic study has found that 80-percent of searches people perform online are informational in nature, whereas 10-percent are navigational and another 10-percent are transactional. Today's new search improvements will likely help Google retain a larger portion of the most popular kind of search traffic.

We found those numbers by doing an informational search. The top search result was from Search Engine Land, and lucky for that site the Google "snippet" was incoherent enough that we had to click through and read the full article. It's not hard to imagine snippets getting smarter, though, and sites that provide the information suffering a substantial drop in the largest type of search traffic. Google results are pretty close to that point already and today's announcement seems like a move in that direction. It's a move that will benefit users, but could hurt the sites that Google relies on for the information it's serving up. Who has your sympathy in this case?

"Clearly, the world eagerly embraced MySpace, but as the average person has adopted social networks, where they come to first is making connections with the people they already know.

"Facebook has done an excellent job of capitalising on that."

That shift is translating into user adoption - and traffic - that has Facebook quickly winnowing the once seemingly insurmountable MySpace lead. And that's not just Brewer's opinion. It's a position that is supported by metrics from Compete, Alexa, and assumptions from Quantcast.

It's interesting how quickly things change. It wasn't so long ago that we pointed to data that showed MySpace was "still kicking Facebook's ass in traffic." And now, those tables seem to have turned - and drastically so.

Facebook may have won this battle. But in Brewer's opinion, there is another competitor that will be looking to topple the leader in the not too distant future. Who does he think has the power and momentum to take the wind out of Facebook's sails within the next two years? He hypothesizes that a service that makes better use of the mobile platform - a technology that continues to edge ever closer to ubiquity - will usurp Facebook.

But for now, Facebook is heir apparent. And It will be interesting to see where they go from here - especially given the current economic environment. They're adding "new" functionality and becoming more open, but will it be enough to stay at the top of the heap? That remains to be seen.

We've posted the numbers and charts below, along with some thoughts on how this may or may not be possible. You be the judge. We don't believe it though. Why is this important? Because if the leading microblogging service really topped the leading user-voted news site for eyeballs, that would say a lot about emerging new media paradigms.

The needle moving event? According to Hitwise the much publicized Twitter coverage of the US Airways plane crash in to the Hudson River last Thursday drove a whole lot of traffic. That can't explain it all though.

There's a bunch of caveats we have to mention here. Specifically, Hitwise notes that much of Twitter's traffic comes from mobile devices that aren't counted. We'd add that much of Digg's traffic probably comes from paranoid and tech-savvy users who evade traffic monitoring software, though much of Hitwise's data comes directly from ISPs and is harder to evade than other monitoring methods might be.

Compete.com puts Digg still far, far ahead of Twitter.

Other reports put Twitter's registered users around 5 million. Digg sees monthly unique visitors probably 5 or 6 times that number, at least. Are a whole lot of people visiting Twitter but not registering for accounts? Given all the mainstream media attention Twitter has been getting this year - maybe it is possible. For what it's worth, here at ReadWriteWeb we get a lot of love on Twitter but see far more traffic from Digg, StumbleUpon and other social networks.

Twitter couldn't see more traffic than Digg already, could it? This looks more like a Hitwise problem than a changing of the online landscape. If Twitter did pass Digg that would be a big deal - but we don't see that happening any time soon. Sorry Hitwise.

Twitter may be tiny but we love it any way. Come join the RWW crew there via this slideshow of our accounts.

Compete estimates that there were about 99 million people who visited Google.com during that period, so that's a little less than 1% click through. To be honest, we're a little surprised the number isn't higher than that. That's just the beginning of the surprises, though.

We're a little surprised that less than 1% of visitors were curious enough to click on the first new link on Google.com in a long time and we're quite surprised that other parts of the marketing campaign were able to deliver even more traffic!

How did all this traffic convert into sales? Some people have said that there's an estimated 1.5 million G1 phones in circulation, but others, like Information Week, say those numbers aren't believable.

Compete's traffic numbers are probably a little soft as well, but they sure are fun to think about. For the full write up, see the Compete blog.

Approximately 200 respondents told GooseGrade that while blogs aren't a major source of news for most of them, they often find errors on blogs and that makes them less likely to share the content they find there with other readers. While unsurprising, these numbers are a good illustration of just how much things have changed in media - or not.

The company asked a demographically diverse group of respondents on Amazon's Mechanical Turk website to fill out the survey and published the results today on the GooseGrade company blog. The bulk of respondents spent some time reading blogs but were people who remained dependent on "mainstream sources" for most of their news.

We thought that the most interesting findings were these:

• Spelling and grammatical errors harmed a reader's opinion of a blog, their willingness to spend time on the site and to share its content nearly as much as perceived factual errors did.


• Respondents believe that spelling, grammar and factual errors on blogs are common. Only 20% of respondents said that it was "not often" or "never" that they found such errors.

Good writing is a rare skill, though it often goes unnoticed when it produces easily read text. Bad writing is very, very common and if you're someone who finds it distracting - you're not alone. Many of us fluctuate somewhere in between, but this study is another reminder that it's not a casual matter if we wish to communicate effectively. If you're response is that this study is over exagerating it's conclusions - then your probly not paying attention. (Ha!)

Below are a few of the charts, you can see the rest on the GooseGrade blog. The lesson here? It seems pretty clear. We bloggers are harming our own credibility and traffic with our inattention to details, not just in the facts, but in the basics of our writing. Let's do better!

Well Spelled Charts

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?

Hitwise also noted that MySpace has seen an increase of 73% year-over-year in average time spent. So while they may be losing a small amount of total social networking traffic to Facebook, MySpace is better engaging the visitors it has retained. Interestingly, competing web metrics firm Compete paints a different picture, suggesting that year-over-year average stay has fallen 9.9%. Differences in how each stat is measured could explain the dissimilar results, however, though they are strikingly different.

After subscribing, your videos, photos, songs, etc. will automatically be added to your library via Traackr's auto-discovery service. This process may take up to 24 hours.

Once your content has populated into the Traackr service, you'll be provided with stats like number of views, comments, and ratings, as well as trend graphs which show stats over time. Traackr will also show which of your tags get the most views. Your daily numbers are compared with others on the service and you are given a buzz and popularity rating out of 100, which is added to your profile.

You can also use Traackr's "Campaigns" feature to mix and mash up your content by creating groupings of your media objects. By starting a "campaign," you can compare these groupings to each other to see which ones are the best performers. Using the data the campaigns provide, you can make decisions on what is the best way to market your content in the future.

If you use the Campaigns feature, you will also be put on Traackr's "digerati" map, which is their fancy way of saying that your profile and assets are public and ranked in comparison with others. Using the "Explore" option, you can browse other profiles, or click "find people like me" to connect with others of similar interests.

Traackr's web site still seems a tad rough around the edges. Signing up for services, for example, meant typing in your username, and pressing "enter", but it took trial-and-error to figure that out, as there was no "OK" button present to confirm your entry. The sign-up process also allowed you to enter in all your usernames one after the other, without confirming each selection, only to discover there was no "Save" button at the bottom to save all your entries.

That being said, the service that Traackr provides could be a very useful tool for web artists like song writers, videographers, video bloggers, photographers, poets, and more. With Traackr's statistics, you'll know right away, your social "net worth" on the web.

It is the distributed nature of Twitter that makes it such a powerful tool for citizen journalism. Not only can Twitter be used by individuals to push news out to people quickly and as it happens, but it can also be used to crowdsource the process of gathering information. One of the best examples of this in action is Commuter Feed.

Commuter Feed, which launched last week, is a Twitter mashup that plays off the distributed nature of the app to aggregate traffic reports. It works by asking users to tweet traffic updates at a Twitter robot along with an IATA airport code (used to designate the city where the post is originating) and then parses those traffic updates to the correct city. For example, "@commuter PDX Trailer overturned at exit 10 on I-84" would parse to Portland, Oregon. Each metro then gets its own page and its own RSS feed.

Commuter Feed works by tapping into the wisdom of the crowd and the more people that use it, the more accurate and up-to-date the information can be. "Commuter Feed's dependence on the community changes the commuting landscape for an instant, personal account of what to expect on the way to and from home," said the company in a press release.

As Webware's Josh Lowensohn notes, Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo! all have real-time traffic overlays on their mapping products. But my guess is that if you have enough penetration in your metro, Commuter Feed might end up being more timely and on top of current conditions. We saw with the California wildfires last fall that often times it was citizen journalists reporting on the scene that scooped the mainstream press. There can only be so many traffic helicopters and government officials reporting traffic conditions, but there is an almost unlimited number of commuters on the roads and armed with cell phones. Of course, I hope they're not tweeting while driving!

How else would you like to see Commuter Feed's localized information gathering and distribution model applied? What other types of information and news do you think could benefit from this sort of set up? Let us know in the comments.

According to the article, Facebook saw a 5% drop between December, 2007 and January, 2008, but still had 8.5 million users in January. This keeps Facebook in the number one position as the most popular social network in the U.K. However, after 17 straight months of growth, this drop of 400,000 users, is the first on record for Facebook in the U.K.

MySpace also lost 5% drop in traffic between December and January. They are still the number two social network in the U.K. with 5 million unique users.

Bebo only saw a 2% drop, and ranked third with a total of 4.1 million users.

Growth Rates at an End?

These drops in growth, if anything, point to the fact that the massive growth rates the networks were experiencing could not be maintained indefinitely. For example, Facebook's audience is 712% bigger than it was in January of 2007 and Bebo saw a 53% increase in the same period. I would argue that these numbers point to the networks being more popular, not less, than they were a year ago, so I'm not sure what Burmaster meant in that earlier statement unless he was solely referring to growth rates.

However, Facebook and Bebo's growth may have come from MySpace's loss. The News Corp. giant actually saw its number of unique users fall by 9% since January, 2007. Says Burmaster, "Growth among the big players looks to be more about getting people from their competitors, not attracting new people to social networking."

Does these findings foretell a saturation point for social networks? Or are the networks just not that cool anymore now that everyone uses them? In a BBC News article on the subject, Nic Howell, deputy editor of industry magazine New Media Age claimed, "Social networking is as much about who isn't on the site as who is - when Tory MPs and major corporations start profiles on Facebook, its brand is devalued, driving its core user base into the arms of newer and more credible alternatives."

Interestingly enough, the exodus from the larger networks may have had an impact on some of the smaller networking sites that grew during the month of January. Less trafficked social networking sites like Windows Live Spaces, which just launched a refreshed version with some Facebook-like features, saw a rise in number of users at this same time. Other U.K.-oriented sites like BBC Communities and Friends Reunited also saw growth in January.

Update: A Facebook spokesperson contacted me this afternoon with the following: "The number of users for Facebook continues to climb in the UK. Our internal monthly active user numbers rose between December and January in the UK and are now at more than 8.3 million. Facebook tracks active monthly users, rather than registered user or unique visitors. Active users reflect those who have used the site in the past 30 days."

In other words, "you're measuring the wrong thing."

How about year over year growth? Facebook had 10.59% marketshare in December 2006, Hitwise says. Myspace dropped from nearly 79%. It appears that social networking has grown in general; though Facebook posts impressive numbers of new users, in terms of sheer visits Myspace is nearly keeping up with its growth.

If we assume that Facebook is growing rapidly then the relatively similar marketshare numbers year over year indicate it's actually the entire sector that's growing. Though trailing in the distance of the big two, market share percentages have held steady or grown for the next services in line as well: Bebo, BlackPlanet, ClubPenguin, GaiaOnline, MyYearbook and Hi5 have unchanged or increased marketshare numbers according to the same metric.

Chart from Hitwise

The Hype

Tech bloggers write about Facebook all the time, I feel like every coffee shop I visit is filled with laptops open to Facebook and Richard MacManus (in transit to the US as we speak) says he just saw a whole magazine about Facebook in the airport. CEO Mark Zuckerberg was on 60 Minutes last weekend, interviewed by a reporter who marveled at the most basic social networking functionality.

The Facebook platform, valuation and scandals have all caught the imagination of much of the press. Many of our readers, however, are less thrilled with the direction Facebook is going. Two of our most popular posts of late were an interview with a disgruntled early Facebook user and our coverage of the just released Facebook feature that lets users hide the overhyped applications in their profile!

Tom's Still Got Friends

Meanwhile, millions and millions of people are still happily logging into MySpace to communicate with their friends. I spent some time on MySpace last night, exploring the profile pages of family and friends and was shocked to see that all the music players on the site are now sponsored by Zune. It was news to me but I'm told it's been that way for weeks. I haven't been able to find a single shred of coverage of that deal on any of the top tech blogs - but I would assume it's helping sell more Zunes than ever.

Numbers like those from Hitwise always need a grain of salt, but the next time someone tells you "by this time next year, everything you invest in will be built on top of Facebook," (as Tribe.net founder Mark Pincus reportedly told Fred Wilson last year) - you just send them over here to this post and then see what they say.

Facebook is interesting but Myspace is where the users are, still.

Is Classism Part of this Story?

It's entirely possible that people actually know about this already, but that the technocratic classes are excited as they (we) are about Facebook for another reason. Money. It's been documented and is generally understood that Facebook users tend to come from wealthier demographics that are more invested in the high-end economy than are Myspace users.

There has certainly been a lot of innovation at Facebook, and that innovation is more accessible to developers than the still-forthcoming Myspace Platform, but how much of this excitement about Facebook is really grounded in the perception that it's the Junior LinkedIn - the path to yuppie pockets. If people mock niche social networks aimed explicitly at wealthy or upwardly mobile people - why is it more polite to focus on a social network widely understood as yuppie-focused (Facebook) as the future of everything important on the internet? How often does the press pay attention to BlackPlanet.com? Not very often, as far as I can tell.