Vincenzo Cosenza has mapped the most popular social networks by country, according to traffic data gathered on Alexa & Google Trends (June 2009). While Facebook’s growing dominance over MySpace in the US and other countries comes as no surprise, it is interesting to see the few smaller networks that most of us have probably never heard of that are country specific. It’s also important to note that that while Facebook is all the rage in the west, QQ (China) is still by far the largest social network in the world (300 million active accounts). As people continue to focus their time and energy on dominant networks, and the successful networks grow and take over, you’ll likely see many of these smaller social networks die out. It’ll be most interesting to see what happens if and when China becomes more open over time. We tend to forget about large networks like QQ and companies like BIDU that dominate the waking giant.
The Current Snapshot:
- Facebook is continues to dominate globe, especially in the west and other english-speaking regions, with more than 200 millions users.
- QQ, leader in China, is the largest social network of the world (300 millions active accounts)
- MySpace Still leads in Guam
- V Kontakte Still dominates Russian-speaking territories
- Orkut is strong in India and Brazil
- Hi5 is still leading in Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and other scattered countries such as Portugal, Mongolia, Romania
- Odnoklassniki is strong in some former territories of the Soviet Union
- Maktoob is the most important Arab community/portal
- Friendster is still rocking in the Philippines (remember Friendster?)
In this interview with Robert Scoble, Ripple6 founder Sang Kim talks about what his company has learned from trial and error since the community management system launched under the name Mom Junction in 2007. He discusses how to create what he calls “cloud communities,” how to scale them and how to reward and engage community members.
#1 Tim Berners-Lee On The Next Web of Open, Linked Data
20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he’s building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: Unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together. (Recorded at TED2009, February 2009)
#2 Jeff Bezos On The Next Web Innovation
As founder and CEO of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos defined online shopping and rewrote the rules of commerce, ushering in a new era in business. Time magazine named him Man of the Year in 1999. The dot-com boom and bust Bezos led is often compared to the Gold Rush. But Jeff says it’s more like the early days of the electric industry.
#3 Kevin Kelly on the next 5,000 days of the web
Kevin Kelly, exec editor at WIRED and founder of visionary nonprofits, shares a fun stat: The World Wide Web, as we know it, is only 5,000 days old. Now, Kelly asks, how can we predict what’s coming in the next 5,000 days?
#4 Yochai Benkler On Open-source economics
Law professor Yochai Benkler explains how collaborative projects like Wikipedia and Linux represent the next stage of human organization. By disrupting traditional economic production, copyright law and established competition, they’re paving the way for a new set of economic laws, where empowered individuals are put on a level playing field with industry giants.
#5 Ray Kurzweil On How Technology Will Transform Us
Inventor, entrepreneur and visionary Ray Kurzweil explains in abundant, grounded detail why, by the 2020s, we will have reverse-engineered the human brain and nanobots will be operating your consciousness.
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There is an interesting conversation going on this week between some of the web’s heavy hitters on the subject of the actual value of LinkedIn recommendations in the reputation economy.
Here’s the time line of the conversation so far…
- July 17th – Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Research) posts a thought provoking and well-written piece on his blog that sparks the debate titled Requested Recommendations on Social Networks: Why I Won’t Do It
- July 17th, later that day – Russ Somers (Egghead Marketing) posts an extended the conversation on his blog about the Evaluating LinkedIn Reccomendations that references Jeremiah’s article and the resulting Twitter chatter.
- July 18th – Kay Luo, Sr. Director of Corporate Communications at LinkedIn, contacts Jeremiah and writes him a LinkedIn recommendation that he accepts on his profile.
- July 24th, LinkedIn responds to Jeremiah’s post on their blog, discussing the benefits of recommendations and the social economy.
Along with a tune up and a face lift, the latest release of Glue boasts some new features that heavy social media users are really going to find useful.
If you haven’t heard of Glue, it’s a browser add-on that allows you to carry your social network with you as you browse around the web and do a whole host of really cool things with social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Digg etc. Like Firebug or del.icio.us, it’s become an indispensable part of my browsing toolkit. I use it multiple times a day to quickly share articles and books I read, music I’m listening to, restaurant reviews I write etc. to Twitter and Facebook as I’m browsing. There’s a lot of power packed into this little add-on and, because it allows you to do so many things on so many platforms, it’s replaced quite a few of my single purpose add-ons. For it’s integration with Twitter and Facebook alone it’s worth installing, but the new social features they’ve added today are worthy of applause. Read More
Whether or not you chose to acknowledge it, your ability to sink or swim on the social web depends on how you participate, engage others and embrace the customs of the virtual gift economy – this is as true for individuals as it is for big brands who have a web presence.
The concepts of “FREE as a business model” and sustainable gift culture generally makes sense to people in the context of products, services, brands and community building, but the understanding sometimes breaks down when it’s mentioned in the context of individual relationships and social media. Seasoned vets know that there are a host of unwritten rules and customs for reciprocating that we should follow when we benefit from free content and receive help and advice from others on the web. I’ll discuss some of those rules, explain why they’re important and offer some ways to act on them below. Read More
Jesse Stay, Marshall Kirkpatrick and Dave Winer recently posted some interesting and insightful pieces on how Twitter is going after people who game Twitter to get more followers. There are some solid arguments made in each post in support of Twitter’s move, as well as on the dubious and controversial nature of Twitter’s suggested users list (SUL). When it comes to the issue of eliminating spam and improving usability, I fundamentally support what Twitter is doing. That said, Dave Winer makes some excellent points on Twitter’s SUL. The three posts in tandem are great reads if you want to understand the core issues and what’s going on. There are also many gems in the comments.
