Social Networking Becoming more Invisible But More Ubiquitous?

The Economist notes that while social networking efforts haven’t found profitable financial models, there is evidence that they are migrating to more of a common model that is less proprietary and more in the background, like air.

“Historically, online media tend to start this way. The early services, such as CompuServe, Prodigy or AOL, began as ‘walled gardens’ before they opened up to become websites. The early e-mail services could send messages only within their own walls (rather as Facebook’s messaging does today). Instant-messaging, too, started closed, but is gradually opening up. In social networking, this evolution is just beginning. Parts of the industry are collaborating in a ‘data portability workgroup’ to let people move their friend lists and other information around the web. Others are pushing OpenID, a plan to create a single, federated sign-on system that people can use across many sites.

“The opening of social networks may now accelerate thanks to that older next big thing, web-mail. As a technology, mail has come to seem rather old-fashioned. But Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and other firms are now discovering that they may already have the ideal infrastructure for social networking in the form of the address books, in-boxes and calendars of their users. ‘E-mail in the wider sense is the most important social network,’ says David Ascher, who manages Thunderbird, a cutting-edge open-source e-mail application, for the Mozilla Foundation, which also oversees the popular Firefox web browser.

“That is because the extended in-box contains invaluable and dynamically updated information about human connections. On Facebook, a social graph notoriously deteriorates after the initial thrill of finding old friends from school wears off. By contrast, an e-mail account has access to the entire address book and can infer information from the frequency and intensity of contact as it occurs. Joe gets e-mails from Jack and Jane, but opens only Jane’s; Joe has Jane in his calendar tomorrow, and is instant-messaging with her right now; Joe tagged Jack ‘work only’; in his address book. Perhaps Joe’s party photos should be visible to Jane, but not Jack.

“This kind of social intelligence can be applied across many services on the open web. Better yet, if there is no pressure to make a business out of it, it can remain intimate and discreet. Facebook has an economic incentive to publish ever more data about its users, says Mr Ascher, whereas Thunderbird, which is an open-source project, can let users minimize what they share. Social networking may end up being everywhere, and yet nowhere.”

socialcapital.wordpress.com

What Facebook Really Says About You

What does your Facebook or My Space page say about you? Maybe more than you realise.
Social networking sites soared in popularity

Research has found users of social networking sites fall into one of five distinct types of people - which may reveal more about you than the rest of your profile.

According to a study users fall into one of the following categories:

Alpha socialisers: Mostly male, under 25s, who use sites in intense short bursts to flirt, meet new people and be entertained.

Attention seekers: Mostly female, who crave attention and comments from others, often posting photos and customising their profiles.

Followers: Males and females of all ages who join sites to keep up with what their peers are doing.

Faithfuls: Older males and females generally aged over 20, who typically use social networking sites to rekindle old friendships, often from school or university.

Functionals: Mostly older males who tended to be single-minded in using sites for a particular use.

The study found three types of people who would not use social networking sites.

They were those concerned about safety, those who were technically inexperienced or people who consider it a waste of time.

The research, by communications watchdog Ofcom, also found nearly half of all children with access to the internet had their own personal profile on a social networking site.

A total of 49% of eight to 17-year-olds had their own profile, while 22% of adults also used such sites.

But it was more common for adults than children to have profiles on more than one networking site.

news.sky.com

Facebook & Myspace For Online Dating

Why You Should Use Facebook And Myspace For Online Dating

by Victor Williamson
http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Victor_Williamson

With millions and millions of users now joining social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace, it is not surprising that some of those users are using these social networks to meet and date others. The first question that probably comes to your mind is “Why would you use Facebook or Myspace to date?”

There is actually a lot of reasons why you should use these social networks! I will list just four of the top reasons that you should use Facebook or Myspace to meet others.

1. Time Commitment - As with other online dating sites, you can meet others on Facebook and Myspace while working around your daily activities and schedule. Not only can you work around your schedule but it takes very little time to communicate and get to know others over the internet. These two benefits makes social networks a very convenient and efficient way to meet members of the opposite sex.

2. Member Base - The user base of social networks are in the millions and are continuing to grow. This massive growth makes Facebook and Myspace the perfect place to meet other singles since the dating pool is so large.

3. Social Tools - The third reason why you should use social networks to meet others is the tools these networks make available. As social networks, Facebook and Myspace have tons of tools built into their systems for people to interact and these very same tools can be harnessed for communicating not only with friends but with singles.

4. First Impressions. The last reason I would give for this dating trend is the information available on these networks. Facebook and Myspace both display user profiles which will allow you to not only see pictures of the person you are interested in, but also get an idea of their interests, hobbies, values, and other useful information that may help you to make a better match. These sites give you a much more informed first impression.

So are you a member of a social network? Are you Single? Then why aren’t you using these social networks to meet members of the opposite sex? If you want more reasons, tips, and advice for meeting people using these social networks go check out www.datedemon.com To sign up or check out these social networking sites go to www.facebook.com or myspace.com
___________
Victor Williamson is a dating advice author for www.datedemon.com

Small Scale Social Networking Sites Also the Most Effective?

by Niklas Kunkel
blog-tutor.com

You submit your articles everyday to Digg, Technorati, and Delicious, in the hopes that one of them will gain traction and net you some traffic. However no one besides you ever votes your stuff up, and so you’re caught in the endless cycle that never lands you more than a few clicks a day. With Digg and other Social Networking sites, such as Technorati and Delicious, dominated by the big players in blogging, the idea of leveraging off of social networking for smaller blogs seems unrealistic if not impossible. The problem is you’re targeting the completely wrong audience!

Easier To Get Front-page Status

Look for smaller social media sites rather than the immensely popular ones. Since these smaller social media sites are just now becoming popular it’s a lot easier to be noticed. Users regularly check the newly submitted page and since your post isn’t bumped down in less than an hour you actually have a chance of hitting the front page through other browsing users.In addition, it frequently only takes about 3-5 votes to be placed on the front page compared to diggs 800 or so.

An Audience More Valuable Than Any Other

Sure landing on the front page doesn’t net you as much traffic as say Digg, but this traffic is actually more valuable than any traffic Digg could ever send you! Many of the smaller Social Networking sites are specifically focused on certain niches or topics. By focusing your attention exclusively on the handful that exist in your niche your essentially picking the audience that is most likely interested in your blog. Sites like Digg are frequented by casual users that as a habit click the daily links for interesting news and not by the content. However, in these small scale social networking sites all the users are interested in that niche or topic and thus have a much higher chance of being interested in your blog. In addition these users have a much higher chance of actually bookmarking your blog and coming back another day. I cannot tell you how useless your blog is if the only readers it ever gets is from random jumps of social networking users that never come back again. You want the social networking sites to help your traffic, but not depend on it!

Ensuring Future Success

Not only that, but these users are the Web 2.0 children. They are the first ones to adapt to new methods on the web and start new communities like these new social networking sites. Each and every user from that site is registered at that social networking site and knows how to use it. By capturing the interests of these premium users your ensuring future success, because these are the kinds of people that submit and vote up articles. It may seem tiresome submitting your articles to multiple sites at first, but over time your readers from those sites will start to submit and vote them up for you, leaving you with less and less work.

Cross-Linking Among Social Networking Sites

Even more enticing is the fact that a large majority of those users are people who frequent multiple social networking sites. If your article hits the front page of a small social networking site, a user who is registered at say Delicious may discover your post and submit it to Delicious as well. What many people don’t know is that many of the current top Diggers got there by spam-submitting successful articles from all the smaller social networking sites on the Internet. From an ethical standpoint that may seem like something negative, but in the eyes of a blogger you love these people. These are the lunatics that actually like doing lots of work and submitting articles. I say give them what they want and have them work for you!



Articles that reach the front page on one site frequently appear on other social networking sites over a period of days. In the page of my stats above you can clearly see how horrible my site was doing before I started using social networking sites. I had a decent amount of users who liked my content, but the problem was it was growing at a very slow rate. If you look at March 10th, when I submitted one of my sites to a small and tight-knit social networking site my traffic instantly flew up as I hit the front-page shortly after. Here you can observer the ricocheting effect of the social networking traffic as over the course of the next few days my site was submitted to multiple other social networking sites and gained an outstanding level of traffic. One after the other my article spread from one site to the next until I was reaching new highs in traffic than previously before.

In a future post I will be constructing a list of all the smaller undiscovered social media sites categorized by their niche that can help jump-start the traffic on your blog, so subscribe to my RSS feed so you can be the first to know when it’s published. Just click on the RSS icon in the top right corner of the page.