Facebook long ago passed MySpace in global visitors and time spent on the site, but now it appears to be gaining ground on Google.

A couple days ago, Facebook released some new statistics on user growth and engagement on the site. It now has more than 140 million active users, 70 percent of whom are outside the U.S. The number of active users added each month seems to be accelerating, only half are in college, and the fastest-growing demographic is 25 years and older.

There are now 52,000 apps on Facebook, created by 660,000 developers. That’s a serious platform. Some of the user engagement stats were also particularly interesting:

User Engagement

* Average user has 100 friends on the site
* 2.6 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
* More than 13 million users update their statuses at least once each day

Applications

* More than 700 million photos uploaded to the site each month
* More than 4 million videos uploaded each month
* More than 15 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each month

How does this level of engagement compare to other large sites? These are global numbers so let’s start there, with minutes spent on the site, which is the way comScore measures engagement. According to the most recent global data from comScore, which is for October, people spent 33.9 billion minutes on Facebook (up 19 percent from September), compared to 41.6 billion minutes on Google (up 3.6 percent) and 18.5 billion on MySpace (down 2.5 percent). Yahoo is still heads and shoulders above everybody else with 120 billion minutes. And in terms of actual visitors, Google still has nearly four times as many monthly visitors worldwide as Facebook.

In the U.S., the gap between Facebook and Google in terms of time spent is much closer. ComScore has November data for the U.S., and it estimates people spent 8 billion minutes on Facebook during that month, versus 8.5 billion minutes for Google. MySpace was about double with 16.4 billion (it also had more visitors than Facebook in the U.S., with 75.5 million vs. 50.5 million).

Some might argue that it makes no sense to measure engagement for Google, since it’s stated goal has always been to send people away from its site as fast as possible. But that’s only for search, and even there Google wants to send you away only to draw you back. With its apps and other sites (Gmail, Google Docs, Youtube, Orkut, Google Docs), engagement is most definitely the name of the game, so it is a fair comparison.

By Ed Lee

On Monday, technology analyst house Forrester released a report that demonstrated consumer adoption of RSS had reached 11 per cent (versus almost 50 per cent of interactive marketers) and wonders:

“What’s holding RSS back?” (available to you for just $279.00)

The report, as blogged by Steve Rubel at Micropersuasion, included the following chart:

So, with just 3 per cent of the 1,900 U.S. adults who frequently go online and who don’t currently use RSS, “very interested” in using RSS in the future, is RSS as a technology reaching it’s zenith? Is it destined for use by a committed, yet niche audience?

No.

RSS use is only just getting started

RSS may not be used actively by consumers but the people who are design Web sites and online applications sure are using RSS. Look at the 110 million people on Facebook who use RSS via the “news feed” option.

read more…

If you thought Randall Stross’ attack on Tesla yesterday was in poor taste, wait until you read what Michael Wolff has to say about MySpace. In a dinner interview with BusinessWeek columnist Jon Fine, Wolff says:

…if you’re on MySpace now, you’re a [expletive] cretin. And you’re not only a [expletive] cretin, but you’re poor. Nobody who has beyond an 8th grade level of education is on MySpace. It is for backwards people.

That’s just part of a much longer interview in which Wolff goes into detail on exactly why he thinks MySpace will go the way of AOL. He also makes some blatantly incorrect statements, such as “All of the growth now in MySpace is international,” which is incorrect. In the last year MySpace has grown about 10% in the U.S., adding 7.5 million monthly unique users to a total of 76.4 million. Non-U.S. users have grown from 45 million to 54 million, a 17% increase. (source: Comscore)

And those comments about MySpace users being poor and uneducated aren’t entirely correct either. Of MySpace’s U.S. users, 52% make more than $60,000 per year, which is far from poor. 23% make more than $100,000 per year. Just 11.6% make less than $25k/year.

Facebook’s numbers are 65% and 33%, respectively, which is more impressive. But MySpace has 30 million more U.S. users than Facebook (76 million v. 46 million), so MySpace’s aggregate numbers are higher. 17.6 million U.S. MySpace users make more than $100,000 per year.

Also true of MySpace users, according to Nielsen: 63% own homes, 86% are registered voters and 28% are college graduates. Facebook has similar numbers.

And a whole lot of people smart enough to work a Blackberry device seem to like MySpace, too.

See the graph below for more details.

By ALEX MINDLIN
Published: November 30, 2008

Canadian Internet users are far more likely than Americans to use a social networking Web site, according to September figures released by the research firm comScore. That number is consistent with Canadians’ generally heavy use of sophisticated Internet features like online video. “We joke that it’s because of those long winter nights up there,” said Andrew Lipsman, a senior analyst at comScore.

But it also reflects the broader truth that the popularity of such Web sites, and which services are at the top, can vary sharply in neighboring countries.

“One site may catch on in a certain country, and another may catch on elsewhere,” said Mr. Lipsman. “Often it’s whichever one gained prominence in the early phase of the game.”

For example, Google’s Orkut service, which has a third of Facebook’s traffic in the United States, is the dominant social networking site in both India and Brazil. ALEX MINDLIN

*Includes countries with a total Internet population of at least 10 million unique visitors in September 2008.

**Excludes traffic from public computers, such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones/PDAs.

“For Internet users in Brazil, social networking continues to flourish as a hugely popular activity,” said Alex Banks, managing director of Latin America for comScore. “One likely reason for social networking’s success in Brazil is that its concept of online community closely aligns with the culture in Brazil, which is also centered on a strong sense of community and social activity.”

Numbers Via Comscore

Today’s the day that Facebook makes their big press push for their Facebook Connect service, which was first announced last May. The NY Times has a story giving a broad overview of Connect as well as competing services from MySpace (Data Availability) and Google (Friend Connect).

All three services are platforms for third party sites (Digg, Twitter, Citisearch, CBS, whatever) to let users sign in via their favorite social network instead of the normal approach. Some profile information flows with the sign in, which the sites can keep for a period of time. And activity that occurs on the site – Twitters written, Digg stories voted on, restaurant reviews on Citysearch, etc.) can optionally flow back to the user’s activity stream.

What the third party sites get out of these services: easy sign in for users, particularly new users. They can also use the profile data to help users create accounts at their site with little data input. The activity stream information published on the social networks includes links back to their sites. And one of the most interesting features, for Facebook Connect partners: sites can request friend lists from Facebook to help them make more connections on their own services. Digg CEO Jay Adelson recently gushed over the potential of Facebook Connect for his service.

Facebook also gives Connect partners most of the same tools as their application developers to promote their services via the news feed, invites, etc.

But the real value goes to the social networks. These services make users begin to think about their identity in terms of their MySpace profile, or Facebook login as they use it to sign into their favorite services. That makes it even more likely the users will maintain their profiles on those services, add friends, etc.

MySpace in particular wants to own user identities. Their MySpace profile is their name online, which is why they’ve embraced OpenID so completely in recent months. Data Availability and OpenID are two parts to a single strategy.

Facebook is probably less concerned with identity – there is no branded URL for users, for example. But they do want to own the definitive profile for an individual and, more importantly, their social graph. Knowing who you are and who your friends are is the key to their yet-unrealized business model.

And the biggest win of all is this free flow of data back to the social networks, which quite nicely fills out a user’s profile for advertising purposes.

Facebook is moving ahead alone with Connect, using proprietary standards for login and data sharing. They’ve also prohibited Google from trying to get in the middle of things with their Friend Connect service. MySpace, by contrast, is using mostly open standards in their approach, and is working closely with Google to make sure the services work properly together.

The battle for partners is intense. MySpace announced Twitter as a launch partner, but rumor is that Twitter is actually integrating with Facebook first (there’s no reason they can’t offer both, and they probably will). MySpace also announced Yahoo and eBay as launch partners. To date, though, they’ve only launched with Flixster and Eventful.

by Josh Bernoff

Forrester’s Social Technographics surveys show that when
it comes to social content 21% of online US consumers are Creators, 37% are
Critics (those who react to content created by others), and 69% are Spectators.

The 90-9-1 principle, recently publicized by Community
Guy Jake McKee at 90-9-1.com, says that in a community, the rule of thumb is
that 90% of visitors only view the content, 9% only comment or react to it, and
1% create it.

 This confuses people, and I often get questions about
who’s right. In fact, there is no contradiction between these two statements.
Let’s examine why.

First of all, the 90-9-1 principle applies to a single
site or community. Let’s suppose we are talking about tivocommunity.com,
for
example. 90-9-1 says that 1% of its members create content. But our
surveys
might detect a TiVo community member who just reads the Tivo posts, but
who is an enthusiastic Barack Obama supporter at myBO.com. Forrester’s
surveys would call her a Creator. But with regard to tivocommunity.com,
Jake’s rule says she’s in the 90% or lurkers. No contradiction, it just
depends on whether you’re looking at a single site or across all sites.
Since Creators (in the Forrester sense) include people who create
content at any site, they add up to a lot more than 1%

Second, our groups are designed to overlap.
Since we
also identify Collectors (who organize content) and Joiners (who join
social
networks), there’s no strict hierarchy. Some Joiners are Creators, some
Creators are Joiners, but neither group is a subset of the other. (When
creating Social Technographics I attempted to create a hierarchy of
behaviors, but carefully examining the data convinced me that was a
mistake.) So we allow our
categories to overlap. 90-9-1, which examines fewer activities, can
accommodate mutually exclusive categories.

Third, 90-9-1 is a rule of thumb. For example, according to 90-9-1.com,
only 0.16% of YouTube visitors upload content, far less than 1%. A community of Webmasters
will have a lot more contributors than a community of senior citizens. Our
surveys are actual data independent of site-to-site variation. (So I don’t get
to create a nice neat rule, while Jake can.)

What’s it mean? It means that 90-9-1 is a good rule of
thumb for sites, while Social Technographics is a good way to look at
populations. And it also means that you should check the Social Technographics
Profile of your customers first, to see how many of them are likely to
contribute if you put them in a community.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers just released their quarterly report on U.S. online advertising revenues. For the quarter, they estimate online advertising revenues were almost $5.9 billion ($5.865 billion, to be exact), which is an 11 percent increase from the same quarter a year ago and a 2 percent increase from the second quarter of 2008.

By John Timmer | Published: November 20, 2008 – 08:55PM CT

Angela Pacienza
November 05, 2008

Today’s youth are plugged into the world in more ways than one, according to the author of a new book that explores the so-called Internet generation.

Don Tapscott says those weaned on the Internet – people born roughly between 1977 and 1997 – are more politically savvy, socially engaged and family-centred than society gives them credit for.

“They are a generation with really strong values of integrity,” he said of the group, the members of which are between about 11 and 30 years of age.

With the eldest of this group making their way in the workforce and marketplace, Tapscott says it’s essential that politicians, CEOs, educators and marketers understand how “Net gen-ers,” as he calls them, think, act and feel because “they’re an unprecedented force of change.”

To that end, the Toronto-based consultant has written “Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World” (McGraw-Hill).

Based on interviews with more than 10,000 young people in 12 countries including Canada and the U.S. done by his nGenera Innovation think tank, the book shows how technology has infiltrated their lives, and how it shapes their decision-making.

He estimates the Internet generation is 81 million people strong in the U.S., or 27 per cent of the country’s population. That’s nearly double the size of generation X.

“This is the first time in human history when children are an authority about something really important,” said Tapscott, author of a dozen books on the use of technology in society including “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything” and “Paradigm Shift: The New Promise of Information Technology.”

“Today, the 11-year-old at the breakfast table is an authority on a digital revolution that’s changing every institution in society.”

He outlines eight “norms” of this generation, such as prizing freedom of choice and customization – adapting work stations, cellphones and so on – at work and play. Kids of this era are skeptics when presented with information online and elsewhere, and expect speedy responses when buying items on the web.

The book is chock full of anecdotes and case studies, including why Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes decided to join U.S. president-elect Barack Obama’s web team.

“The world has changed. The web has changed,” Tapscott said, explaining the stimulus for the book, a followup to his 1996 bestseller “Growing Up Digital.”

“Back then there was no broadband, no blogging, no social networks, or Twitter, MySpace or Facebook. The web was a very different beast.”

Tapscott said his latest research filled him with hope because “Net gen-ers are smarter, quicker and more tolerant of diversity than their predecessors.”

Still, he acknowledges there are widespread stereotypes and fears about this group. They’ve repeatedly been called lazy, unmotivated, dumb and narcissistic, said Tapscott.

“None of this is supported by the data,” he said, pointing to IQ scores and college graduation levels to support his thesis.

“We’ve always been uneasy about young people,” but the fact that today they are authorities on all things Internet is “a real formula for disruption, and for challenging many institutions. We fear what we don’t understand.”

Tapscott hopes the book will inspire people in positions of power to change business and teaching practices to take advantage of this group’s strengths.

He fears the opposite is happening. Instead of learning from youth, workplaces fight them and “do things like banning Facebook.”

“What happens is (Net gen-ers) bump up against Dilbert Inc. and they don’t like what they see,” he said, referring to the comic strip about cubicle culture.

“There’s a generational firewall that’s being created within our companies, and as a result there’s real friction and tension and conflict starting to emerge in workplaces all across North America.”

And it’s not the Internet’s fault. Blaming the web is “like blaming the library for ignorance,” he said.