Social Networks Gaining on Internet Portals

Compete writes "We have some interesting analysis on how Social Networking sites compare to portals. From a sample size of around 2 million US people, Compete concludes that social networking sites are quickly approaching the traffic level of the big portals like Google and Yahoo. They liken the growth of SNS to email in the 90's. Their key findings: 1. In June, 2 out of every 3 people online visited a social networking site 2. Since January 2004, the number of people visiting or taking part in one of the top online social networks has grown by over 109% 3. Social networking sites are now close to eclipsing traffic to the giants — Google and Yahoo"

In the minority again

2 out of every 3 people online visited a social networking site

I don't get it. Maybe I'm just too old, but they hold practically zero interest for me. Too old or just too busy (but not to busy for /.)?

Re:In the minority again

In a way I agree. However, myspace, and by extension other sites like it, DO have some utility. After my wife signed up for a myspace account she ended up getting in touch with quite a few friends from school. I decided to get an account just to see how many of my friends I could get in touch with again, and I was surprised that within one day I had gotten back in touch with numerous good friends and family members that I had lost the contact information for. Now all I do is check it every once in a while (every other week or so) and browse new additions to my high school/college classes and see if it's anyone I would want to get back in touch with. Not to mention any new messages I receive in myspace (including friend requests) I have sent to my email.

Re:In the minority again

I thought /. was Social Networking For Geeks. I don't picture a lot of obscure Hitchhikers Guide jokes in astrophysics threads on MySpace.

Then again, maybe you're not.

Looking at what they consider a "social networking site," I'd say that Slashdot would qualify. You talk to other people about common interests, you can add "friends" and "foes," I notice that you've even made at least one entry in your /. journal.

Congratulations, you're using a social networking site! They're not all MySpace, you know.

Yeah, but...

... how many slashdot users have you fucked?

Re:In the minority again

I don't get it. Maybe I'm just too old, but they hold practically zero interest for me.

I think there a growing crowd of aging people on slashdot that is either not motivated with following the herd or just not for new technologies and very doubtful of the future (For example, every time a new technology is mentioned we get someone yelling about "Where are those flying cars you promised?! We'll never see this in 20 years!")

Then we get those who often complain about Flash video when every knows the net is being dragged screaming and kicking to use flash video technology. Its just the way things are moving.

The same with social sites. Personally, I'm an old live journal user (well if you think 2001 is old) and would never blog on myspace, but yet I keep a my space site just so I can keep a presence there.

I'm late twenties almost thirties so I'm kind of old for that age group, but I can't tell you how many people from my old high school have contacted me through my space. Its endearing if nothing else, but as far as spending more than 5 minutes on the site per week, I seriously doubt I would ever do that.

So the point being is that it appears that most technology nerds on slashdot (including me) aren't really up on technology trends as much as we should. Maybe we don't care... Or maybe we cling to are old ancient technologies and refuse to give up the ghost.

Still we shouldn't scoff at it and nay say because it obviously these things are bigger than all of us combined like it or not. It's like the old war generals saying cavalry still trumps everything on the battlefield only to get them run over by those new fangled tanks.

Re:In the minority again

I don't think it's that we are a bunch of old curmudgeons who hate Myspace because it's one of those newfangled thingies, or because we don't understand it. I don't think that it even has to do with average age of its denizens. For me, one thing it has to do with is the TYPE of people it attracts, rather than their age. And what geek on Slashdot would subject themselves to the browser-crashing HTML and attention whoring that is Myspace unless they want to see the boobs of a co-worker or high school classmate?

But seriously - The other dimension of it is that to be an effective Myspace participant you have to put a ton of information about yourself - Pics, where you went to school, your job, your thoughts, and -best of all-, everyone you have contact with. I don't think it's a secret to anyone here that Slashdotters are acutely averse to letting a lot of detailed info about themselves out, let alone posting it voluntarily. This is especially true since we know that the NSA is trolling MySpace [securitypronews.com] to build a map of the social networks of anyone they spider. Which is probably everyone^N^N^N^N^N^N^N^N^N only terrorists.

Re:In the minority again

Well, it's a way to connect with people. If you're satisfied with the people you have, then a social networking site probably looks pretty stupid. You wouldn't surf match.com if you weren't looking for a date, and you wouldn't be on myspace if you weren't looking for people to connect with.

If you are, social networking sites can seem pretty neat since there are a lot of people there, some of who are interesting.

What's really appealing about myspace is that although most people wildly misuse their "space", it is a place where they can be creative and put out things that they like. Those things are not what most programmers think they should like, but the point is that they can be in control and there's plenty of help available to make their profile look as they want it to.

Human beings in general seem to be more interested in whether something looks "cool" than whether you can read it or not. And that's fine, because they are people and they are expressing themselves. And on myspace, it's relatively easy to find them, which is where I think social networking has a huge advantage over standalone blogs.

Someone who put hours and hours into breaking myspace has a pretty interesting perspective on it. Funny, too. I'm Popular. [www.namb.la]

I'm doing my own site, aimed at more mature people than myspace, but it's not ready yet. To show social networking with an adult flair, I consider my best competition to be Tribe [tribe.net]. It used to have adult profiles and ... interesting ... pictures, but sadly their corporate backers decided that wasn't a brainy scheme and removed it. But it's still pretty much social networking for people who have passed the Myspace stage.

D

50 million?

omfglololololo!!!!!1111onenone!!!!11kthxbai...eh? Oh, sorry. Thought this was myspace. :(

-Raseri

friends

Lately people are desperate for friends and life partners. It's obviuos if you just pay attention to the media. How many dating sites are there? Chat rooms? Interest groups? In recent years I've noticed that less and less people seem to be able to go out, meet people, and make friends. This seems to especially be a problem for older rather than younger people. They only social skill they knew was going to bars, and when they realize they no longer want a drunk friend/partner, they face complete isolation. Any new tech that allows people to be social and safe will be popular.

What the...?

In June, 2 out of every 3 people online visited a social networking site

I don't remember filling out that survey

People have been doing that for years.

"Social Networking" sites is just a buzzword term for a variation of Internet chat channels and forums. People have been doing that for years. That was one of the original concepts behind the Internet, communication.

The social networking sites offer a few other features, but in the end it's just people wanting to talk with each other.

Like the BBS

I just finished watching the BBS Documentary [bbsdocumentary.com] and it reminded me about why BBS's were so cool. I mean, besides bringing the power of global communications to the common man at a low expense, it brought about this whole new online community.

Many of the interviews talk about how impersonal the internet is, the fact that you might be one in 50,000 people on a newsgroup versus one of 100 or 200 on a BBS. The fact is, before myspace-type sites, it was pretty difficult to create a small online community of your friends without some decent computer skills. Sure, there was IRC, but it was difficult to create static content there. Sure, there were search sites like Classmates.com but no one ever went to them.

Myspace is really quite primitive, as everyone knows. It's just a simple database blog. Where it shines is the search feature in combination with the ease of custom publishing. You can search for old friends, search by hometown, etc. And with the inclusion of music and video clips, it's a whole multimedia experience. I think that it's the closest thing to the old personal community feeling the BBS had than anything else.

Sure, there's a lot missing, but I think that if someone were to look at the sucessful old BBS' and modeled a new "Social Networking" site after them (real time chat, files, message boards, multi-player games based on login, just more areas and features), it could be real successful in a hurry. MySpace just doesn't do enough. It's all anyone has right now, of course.

Thanks to spam...

Since spam has all-but ruined the usefulness of e-mail for non-techies, social-networking lets me communicate with my non-techie friends from work and college without being bothered with keeping track of their current e-mail, their IM usernames and-so on. This is important for matters which are somewhat important, but not urgent enough to bother someone by ringing their cell phone. Prior to MySpace - I've had a few occasions where my friends e-mailed me and I missed their messages among all the Spam B-S that often disguises itself as legitimate mail with innocuous subjects like "Hey". I've also had the same issue when e-mailing other people "I e-mailed you two days ago, you didn't get my message?". And no, I am not a teen. I am 26 years old, post-college, and MySpace has become a good replacement for e-mail in keeping-in-touch with my peer-group which is in their late 20's and early 30's. The whole thing about MySpace being primarily for the teen group is definitely overplayed and not really true anymore.

What's actually being measured?

After reading the article, as well as the "Where do these #s come from" page, I still don't get the correlation. Why would the traffic patterns look in any way shape or form similar when comparing the Soc. Networking sites against, large search engine/portal sites. I don't have any experience in the monitoring of traffic, hits, visitors, etc. for either type of site; but even so, it still seems like apples & oranges to me.

I would think that search engines would have many visitors daily (both unique & repeat), but the actual end-to-end traffic would be minimal & bursty in nature (individual searches). (In addition, one could say that things are really skewed, because if a search site does it's job well, the visitor will find what they need & be sent off site). With the SN sites, I would think people are logging in, digging through their various personal pages, as well as those who they're networking with. I would imagine that this would create a lot more traffic, but probably not from unique visitors. It's the same people who are logged in for long periods creating all the traffic.

In addition, they showed no real comparisons between actual traffic flows, bandwidth usage, unique visitors, repeat visitors, etc.

I agree that Social Networking is gonna continue to gain ground & will be (if it's not already) huge. But why is that being compared against the large scale search, data aggregation, and directed advertising companies.

Actually, they've got a long way to go

Okay, so I've read all 970(ish) bytes of the article text (that includes their summary) and it doesn't look like the text matches the graphics all that well. The top 10 "social networking" sites combined have less than half of the visitors as the top 2 search sites. They've barely doubled their aggregate visitors in the high-growth 30 months preceding. Heck, if you look at the graph from October '04 to March '06, Google alone matched the volume increase of the entire top-10 SNS.

Sorry, but I find it hard to call this earth shattering.

Isn't MySpace a "social portal"

Isn't "social network" when used in the context of MySpace actually indeed a "portal". I know an awful lot of people, and OLDER people at that (mid 20's to 30) that have MySpace.com as their browser's start page. The only really obvious item lacking on MySpace is "NEWS". And, that is probably a welcome escape for a lot of people...

MySpace is their "social portal", but they jump to Google News for their "News Portal"...

Re:Isn't MySpace a "social portal"

I know an awful lot of people, and OLDER people at that (mid 20's to 30)

WTF? What are you, eight years old? Since when is someone in their 20's "older"?

Damn kids. Get off my lawn!

The increase is driven by ...

... all those spam blogs on Blogger networking with one another. They're very social about it, too.

It seems to me that the survey doesn't boost the cause for social networking, but leads to the opposite conclusion - that even the 10 largest social networking sites added together don't add up to the traffic seen by Yahoo or Google. Count me underwhelmed.

Spammers

Once the spammers take over the social networking sites, people will be back to being anonymous and detached from the sites they go to.

Google and Yahoo "Portals"?

Ok...Every time I read an article like this, and I see sites like Google and Yahoo referenced as "portals", I go a little crazy. I think of sites like, http://weed.com/ [weed.com] as a true portal. I know the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_portal [wikipedia.org] is a little broad, saying that they are, "sites on the World Wide Web that typically provide personalized capabilities to their visitors," but c'mon here...just because you can customize your Google or Yahoo homepage doesn't make it a Portal IMHO. A true portal to me is a domain squatter buying a name like, googles.com or ytahoo.com and putting a crapload of ads and "related" searches on it. I really think there needs to be a clear distinction between the two types of sites, instead of a branching term for any site that offfers custom content. Seriously...that would mean http://www.amazon.com/ [amazon.com] is a portal because I can customize my User Account screen.

Slashdot = Myspace for nerds

If you think about it, Slashdot isn't all that much different from Myspace. Instead of a bunch of poorly written sites by attention whores trying to get people to look at them, you have a bunch of comments by karma whores trying to get people to mod them up. With Myspace you are trying to get people interested in your life so you feel special. On Slashdot, we assume everyone else is posting from his parent's basement too, so we try to get people interested in our ideas instead.

Summarizing with a catchy rhyme: Slashdot makes you think, MySpace makes you blink.

God!

Anyone that can't meet and talk and socialize with other people with other means than going to an online site should seriously throw the computer out of the window and start thinking of other methods. I mean if that's the case the computer is likely to have caused the lack of fantasy. I can understand services for instant messenging and sites focusing on special areas. I mean you might not be able to meet to many The Clash fans in you neighborhood. Then there's email for you too. If that's not enough consider going to a local gaming club, pub, café or start training at a gym or something. No offense meant but I'm concerned that people socialize more and more far away from each other. It's never going to be the same has having a chat with your friend at town. (Probably no one claimed it would but please see my point)

SNS are in the fashion business

SNS are in the fashion business which is both to their advantage and disadvantage. Millions will flock to a currently fashionable site but equally an unfashionable site will die overnight as the users move elsewhere.

How about Social networking vs major news media?

I'll visit a social network site (slashdot and digg) anyday over Reuters or CNN. If I can't get both sides of the picture, fuck it.

Who cares?

Both "portals" and "social networking" sites are for utter tools.

Fuck, anyone who even uses the word "portal" anymore needs to have his ass kicked back to 1999.

Top 10 vs. 1

Social networking sites are now close to eclipsing traffic to the giants -- Google and Yahoo

Well, sure, that's sounds impressive, until you RTFA and see that the support for that is that visitors to the top 10 "social networking" sites combined (including Google offering Blogger.com) are approaching the US traffic of Google or Yahoo! individually.

Of course, by the definition they use ("For this particular analysis we wanted to include sites where people create personal profiles with the opportunity to receive/initiate direct interaction and/or knowledge with peers.") both Google and Yahoo! really should have been included as social networking sites, as both provide that defining functionality. And if they did that, then, wow, the top ten social networking sites combined would have way more US traffic than Google or Yahoo! taken individually.

MSN Messenger is the culprit

I can't believe how people assume that the rise in traffic is related to their community and Web 2.0 and stuff like that.

People use MSN Messenger. Lots of people. They see an orange star right beside a contact's name. They click the star and they see a "presentation card" window, that hilights that new content that has been added to myspace account, more specifically pictures.

So you se that your female contact has new pictures posted and them usually include her female friends!

No male adolescent user can resist not going to see those pictures.

I bet 95% of mySpace traffic comes from clicks in MSN Messenger.

That Slashdotters miss this very important fact, I can't not understand.

About the other social network sites, like hi5, they seem to remind you to visit them very often, via email.