Can you believe YouTube has only been around 5 years?
It was registered on February 14th, 2005 and has grown so fast in the past 5 years. It serves more than 2 billion videos per day. That is the equivalent of every person in the world watching 10 videos per month, or according to YouTube is nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major US television networks combined.
YouTube turns 5
There were other competitors to YouTube, there were services such as Veoh, Vimeo and Viddler and many more. But it was YouTube that came through and 19 months after setting up the company, it was bought by Google in October 2006 for $1.65 billion. Not bad for a couple of Paypal employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim.
Check out YouTube’s blog for the “My YouTube Story” which has tales by people around the world describing how YouTube has changed their lives.
Anyone can broadcast yourself on YouTube, politicians, students, even brides and grooms from their wedding videos. My favourite has to be the Wedding First Dance – Baby Got Back . That has been viewed over 12 million times. They are stars in their own right. and many unknown joblogs have used YouTube to show off their talent (Justin Bieber) or show their odd family videos. YouTube was started to give bloggers an easy way to put their videos in their blogs and has expanded ever since. Apparently 24 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube each minute. YouTube also has content deals with more than 10,000 partners including entertainment titan Disney, and has a fledgling online movie rental service.
It will be interesting to see how much YouTube develops in the next five years especially now that is is part of Google’s “media cloud” for people to access films, books, magazines, tv shows old and new. YouTube will go from strength to strength and who knows how much the video search landscape will have changed when we celebrate its tenth birthday?
If your children are too young for facebook, they may be using a kids site called moshi monsters.
Michael Acton Smith set up the social networking site for kids in 2004. Last week it reached 15 million members, and according to Hitwise is the quickest growing site online. It is now one of the biggest sites for children.
Welcome to Moshi Monsters
Children login to the site and adopt a monster which they create from 1 of 6 basic designs. Each monster has name and the children can choose the colour of their own little monster. The graphics are amazing as well, you can tell the founder was inspired by Pixar.
Parents do not have to worry about their children on this site as privacy is very important and users are unable to post photos and send messages. Conversations are also monitored and filtered. I was really impressed with the terms and conditions for the site. Everyone has to accept these before they are allowed to enter the site and play games.
Rules for Moshi
The monster has to be regularly fed and interacts with others in the virtual town. Users can also get virtual pets called “moshlings”. You can get your own moshling by planting the right combination of seeds. You can learn online, maths puzzels, spelling and play games, all for free. The site is educational, perhaps the 21st century edition of Sesame Street. The kids come from all over the world with a third coming from the UK and the US. It was originally aimed for 7 – 11 year olds but now there are players as young as 3 years old. The site is all about learning and where kids can be kids.
Last year the number of visits to the site grew by 424% and this year it is set to grow even more. Michael Acton Smith has signed a book deal for Christmas and has licensed the track “Hey Mickey” for “Hey Moshi”. 2010 is set to be the year for Moshi Monsters.
For more information, please read the feature from the Evening Standard.
On Wednesday, Google announced their new social media product “Google Buzz”
Google Buzz
According to the guardian, Buzz has been rolled out to all of Gmail’s 150 million users worldwide, though not yet to those using Gmail inside organisations, where it is expected to arrive next month.
When it was being tested internally, it was called Taco Town, and proved popular for sharing high-definition videos, said Hugo Barra, a product manager. “Google is really good at sorting information,” he said. “That’s what we intend to do with social information as well.” Some critics say this is Google’s attempt at twitter and it is not really offering anything new and exciting. However, if Buzz were to be used by all Gmail users, then it would have more users than MySpace. Facebook is currently the number 1 social networking site with 400 million users.
But what about mobiles? Well it does not work on all mobile phones yet, just the iPhone and the Google Nexus. I am sure Google is working on making sure Buzz is available on more handsets.
So how will Google compete in an already saturated market place? Apparently, Google already tried to build social networking systems before. In 2004, it launched a Facebook like site called Orkut and successful in Brazil. Google bought Jaiku in 2007, a Twitter-like system but was abandoned by the company in January 2009.
According to techradar , Yahoo and Microsoft already offered similar services. Yahoo launched http://buzz.yahoo.com/ two years ago. And Microsoft say their Hotmail customers have benefited from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008.
It seems like Google have copied the name from Yahoo and the idea from facebook and twitter without offering anything new. It will be interesting to see if Google can make Buzz work.
A Vodafone employee posted an offensive message this afternoon which read “Is fed up of dirty homo’s and is going after beaver”
This was sent out to Vodafone’s 8,663 followers. Vodafone has since apologised to its followers and says the employee in question has been suspended.
Vodafone are not the first company to be embarrased by their twitter account
Habitat returned to Twitter in September last year with a message, “We’re back. Sorry it took so long. This time we want to get it rightt. Tell us what you want to hear from us and we’ll mark suggestions in our favourites.”
Habitat was criticised for using Twitter site to spam the community back in June. It used hash tags, which help users track conversations on the microblogging site, to promote marketing messages that had no relevance to the topics used. Habitat’s defence was that the campaign was a mistake and the posts were made by an intern.
However, HabitatUK, was putting out marketing messages such as ‘Our totally desirable Spring collection now has 20% off!’ on Friday, using tags such as #mms, #Apple, #iPhone and even used an Iranian election hashtag #Mousavi.
Although all the messages were replaced with sales and marketing tweets, the damage had already been done. Many Twitters already saw the messages and tweeted their annoyance.
This is a classic example of how a big brand such as Habitat was unable to execute a social media idea successfully. They jumped on the twitter band wagon too soon without truly understanding the full damage it could do if implemented incorrectly.
I have to say I am very impressed the way Google keeps modifying its branding.
This past week it was Wallace and Gromit’s 20th birthday and google had a team party image of them. It has also been Sesame Street’s 40th birthday and the rest of the week has seen images of different sesame characters on google’s home page. My favourite is the one with Elmo as below.
Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?
Sesame Street was set up in 1969 by the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) aimed to help all kids especially those that were from poor neighbourhoods to learn and prepare for school. The use of television for educational purposes had not been a proven tool before this time and Sesame street was ahead of its time promoting values we take for granted now. Some of these values were that everyone is created equal, accepting people from different racial backgrounds and not making assumptions based on gender. The show integrated muppets and people from different racial groups.
According to reuters to celebrate its 40th anniversary, Michelle Obama will appear on Sesame Street on November 10th. This will probably be the episode shown in the US and will be aired in the UK after.
Sesame's Count loves counting
Cookie monster says share
I know I have written a lot on social networking, but there is so much new information that comes up I feel I have to share it with you.
I found this interactive social networking map, so you can see which countries use which social networking sites.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/07/a-map-of-social-network-dominance/
All the light green countries belong to Facebook. But there are still resisitance from some countries such as Russia (where V Kontakte dominates), China (QQ), Brazil and India (Orkut), Central America, Peru, Mongolia, and Thailand (hi5), South Korea (Cyworld), Japan (Mixi), the Middle East (Maktoob), and the Philippines (Friendster).
Another report I found shows how popular social media has become. They even boost it has overtaken porn as the number one activity on the Web. Facebook has been compared to a country, saying it would be the world’s fourth largest, behind the USA and Indonesia, simply because of the number of registered users. Facebook which once started just for college graudates now has growing segment, the 55 – 65 year old females. This is mainly due to these women wanting to keep in touch with their children and now grandchildren. Another interesting fact about facebook is that more than 1.5 million pieces of content (Web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on facebook daily. So who needs encylopedias now?
I am not going to take the credit for this, so if you want to find out more, please visit http://searchenginewatch.com/3634651
According to research by Nielsen, the two most heavily used web brands are Facebook and MSN/Windows Live. They account for almost 11 billion of the 48 million minutes Britons spend online. Coming in third is Google and fourth place is eBay with total UK users spending a whopping 2,560 minutes and 1,978 minutes respectively on these sites in April 2009.
Facebook is one of the major reasons people are spending more time online. People in the UK spend a total of 22 hours and 20 minutes online which is up on 34% a year ago. (April 2008 – April 2009) However, facebook recorded people spending 3.8billion more minutes in April this year than April 2008
The most heavily used web brands are those in the communication and entertainment industry. Hotmail’s instant messenger has people hooked for hours online, chatting away to friends or sending work files to colleagues. YouTube is the entertainment channel for most users online, allowing those to search for quirky videos or funny clips.
The 10 most heavily used brands online are the following:
1 Facebook
2 MSN/Windows Live
3 Google
4 eBay
5 Yahoo!
6 AOL Media Network
7 BBC
8 YouTube
9 Microsoft
10 Apple
The future of the social networking sites is in niche online communities
These will be based on:
1. Interests or lifestyles eg diamondlounge.com
2. Solving problems or self help eg netmums.com
3. Business user needs to keep in touch with colleagues and contacts
People like the exclusiveness and the feeling they belong, they want to be part of these niche online communities. Normally it is the innovators and early adopters who are first to be part of these communities.
There are a lot of these small online networks. One of the most talked about is “SmallWorld” which was set up 2004. It is a private online community and is by invitation only. So if you know someone who has a smallworld membership, ask them to invite you, smallworld claim they are “the world’s leading private online community that captures an existing international network of people who are connected by three degrees of separation”. They argue that what makes the network unique and different to other social sites such as facebook is that the connections are authentic. People do not have loads and loads of friends who they never see or speak to in real life. Those trust and loyal ASW members who meet certain criteria can invite the limited number of their friends to their network. So if you want to be a invited, ask your friends or colleagues and if you are real nice, they might just send you an invite!!
If you are part of the elite networking scene, you may have heard of Diamond Lounge. Set up October 2007, it has a very selective membership process – more rigorous than that of any other online club. Prior to launch accepted only 100 members from 10,000 applications. It is an advertising free site and instead charge a monthly membership fee from £24.99 a month. The perk of Diamond Lounge is that it offers separate social and business rooms where members can build separate profiles. So you can meet your future business partner and life partner on the same site. Diamond Lounge also offers immediate communication options; live email, 4 party instant messaging and even video conferencing within the different online rooms.
So if you are looking for that special someone, check out Diamond Lounge.
There are lots of new things happening in social networking. Flickr, the photo sharing website is now introducing a new sharing option called Flickr Twitter Beta.
This will allow users to automatically notify their friends via Twitter every time they upload a photo. At the moment, it just works for email uploads, but before long it could grow to the whole site. Another future feature is adding the possibility to tweet a photo from inside Flickr.
“How does this work ?” you may ask.
Well let us just say it is very clever and social networking is faced pace, so things advance all the time. The secret is that the system works with what is called “the Oauth protocol” and it links a user’s Flickr and Twitter accounts together. How smart is that? Very smart, it means every single time a user uploads a new photo through email, a message that links to it is posted on the user’s Twitter stream.
Facebook’s first decline in users was between December 2007 and January 2008 where they lost 400,000 British visitors. However it still remains the UK’s most popular social-networking site despite the drop in users from 8.9 million users in December 2007 to 8.5 million unique users at the end of January2008. Facebook’s nearest rival, MySpace, saw UK traffic drop 5% between December 2007 and January 2008. It had 5 million unique users in January 2008. Bebo also had decline of 2% month on month with 4.1 million users.
People are calling the drop in members for these networking sites, particularly with facebook as “facebook fatigue”. There are a number of reasons:
1. Security concerns
2. Amount of personal data people put on the site
3. Employers have banned staff from accessing the site at work.
4. Too much information when they log onto facebook.
5. Trivial information from their contacts
6. No longer niche
Facebook was originally niche – it targeted people based on membership of organisations – the universities. It was for the early adopters. However, now it is mass market and has lost its excitement. There have even been campaigns to get rid of friends. At the end of 2008 Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice campaign asked users to sacrifice 10 friends on facebook in exchange for a free Whopper. Facebook soon caught onto this and cut short their campaign when By January this year 60,000 users deleted their friends for free burgers
So what is the future of these social networking sites?
The future is in niche online communities. These will be based on interests or lifestyles eg diamondlounge.com, solving problems or self help eg netmums.com. These network sites will be aimed towards business user needs to keep in touch with colleagues and contacts. The innovators and early adopters will be the first ones to take part in these niche online communities. They want to be part of something that no one else is. People like the exclusiveness and the feeling they belong. This will always far outweigh those networks where everyone and anybody can join.
(source:http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/22/facebook.facebook?gusrc=rss&feed=global).
Social networking sites | Jo Turnbull | 
May 23, 2010 12:27 pm | 
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