Social Networks Gaining on Internet Portals 96
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"
People have been doing that for years. (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:In the minority again (Score:2, Insightful)
What's actually being measured? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, but I find it hard to call this earth shattering.
Then again, maybe you're not. (Score:5, Insightful)
Congratulations, you're using a social networking site! They're not all MySpace, you know.
Re:In the minority again (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Google and Yahoo "Portals"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In the minority again (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't consider the popularity of social networking sites to be a technology trend. Sure, there's technology involved, but there's little technically new. This trend is social, and that's why many