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
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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.

Facebook to Offer More Privacy Control

A new feature allows users to choose which of their contacts will have access to their personal information and which won't.

By Jessica Guynn, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

PALO ALTO -- Facebook Inc. is rolling out tighter privacy controls that allow users to decide which friends can see their profile information and other personal details, the popular social networking site announced during a briefing at its headquarters Tuesday.

Facebook's 67 million users will be able to better distinguish between friends, family and co-workers and share information accordingly, the company said. The changes will take effect today.

The Palo Alto-based company also showed an instant-messaging, or chat, feature that it plans to launch in coming weeks. Unlike with other site features, users will be able to communicate in real time.

Privacy has been a touchy subject for the social networking site. Though it offers more controls than most social networks, it has come under fire from users who didn't like the way their information was shared with others. The latest incident involved a feature called Beacon, which informed friends about users' activity and purchases on the Web. Faced with a growing backlash, Facebook late last year allowed users to turn off the feature.

Facebook, founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg while he was a Harvard undergrad, has evolved from a site that caters to college students to one that attracts people of all ages and backgrounds from around the globe. Its fast-growing population means Facebook must give users more control over the type of information they share with, for example, co-workers versus family members, the company said.

Facebook users can now control who sees what details about them on their profiles, such as their e-mail address or photos. They can also send messages to selected friends.

The new privacy feature piggybacks on the "friends list" feature introduced in December that helps members organize their friends into groups. Users can create up to 100 friends lists.

Matt Cohler, vice president of strategy and business operations, said Facebook was trying to give users easy tools that helped them communicate more effectively. Facebook now admits to missteps with Beacon, saying it rolled out the feature too soon and didn't fix it quickly enough.

"With Beacon, we just screwed up," Cohler said. "We think it's an excellent product and we will continue working on it. . . . . We want Facebook to be a part of the fabric of how people share information in every aspect. Every way we can extend that is important to us."

Ning Surpasses 200,000 Social Networks - But Is It Cash Flow Positive?

Marc Andreessen posts at his blog that Ning has now passed 200,000 social networks using the Ning platform. Ning is a simple to use service that allows you to create a social network site for anything you want. You get user pages, photos, videos, discussions and the rest of the tools commonly used in social networking.

If you’re a podcaster and want a social network for your fan club it’s worth checking out. You can see a great example of Ning being used by Ask a Ninja to support it’s fan club. It’s a pretty easy to use service and provides a lot of functionality.

Marc provides some very interesting statistics about the growth of Ning. They now have over 200,000 social networks and will quickly surpass 300,000.

• Over 70% of the networks on Ning are active, as defined by “used in the last 30 days”. This is a considerably higher percentage than we would have thought when we created the service, given that we make it so easy to create a network that you can do it in two minutes, for free — I would have assumed there would be more throwaways. It turns out that people really like using social networks!


• As that “70% active” statistic indicates, the long tail is most definitely alive and well on Ning — activity on the system as a whole is spread out broadly across the base of active networks. This continues even as the largest networks on Ning are getting much larger than ever before.


• There are now more — actually, a lot more — social networks on Ning than there are on the rest of the Internet in total, including all of the other services that let you create your own social network combined (i.e., all of our honorable competitors combined). (Note: I highlighted this part)


• Our growth rate continues to accelerate as the overall penetration of social networking across the Internet expands. As more and more people all over the world use social networking — including the big one-size-fits-all social networking services that many people use first — people become more interested in creating and using their own social networks for many topics that they care about. This is a very large market, and it’s growing very fast.


• Finally, fewer than 1% of our current networks fall into the adult category — a number that’s frankly surprisingly low, but one with which we’re just fine.

I think this is great. I like Ning a lot and hope it is hugely successful.

I had two main reactions to the post. My first reaction was to challenge the boast that Ning’s 200,000 social networks is more than the rest of the Internet in total. I think he’s got that way wrong. Social networks have been around for a long time on the Internet in the form of forums. And there are way, way more than 200,000 forums on the Internet.

But my second reaction was to ask what’s missing from this data that matters. What’s missing is information about whether Ning is here to stay or not. Networks, users and page views are all good, but money is what matters.

I want to know if Ning is cash flow positive. Have they figured out a way to make their social networking business profitable? I want to know because if I recommend to a podcaster or company that they should use Ning as their social networking platform, I want to be sure that Ning will not go away someday.

If Ning stopped, I may be able to get the data out of Ning, but then what do I do. The data is set up to be used in Ning’s infrastructure. I don’t see where I would go to get the same kind of service and the business interruption would be very costly. Anyone who is setting up a Ning social network and not considering this risk is being foolish.

So I have to ask Mr. Andreessen and Ning, how can we be sure Ning is here to stay? Open up the books and show us a nice secure balance sheet and a cash positive business, or at least something that convinces people that Ning is here to stay.

by Alex Nesbitt
digitalpodcast.com

AOL/Bebo Buy Could Create Second-Largest Social Platform

In a move that should help them secure a bigger slice of the social networking world, AOL has entered into an agreement to purchase social platform Bebo. The social platform boasts 40 million unique users worldwide; once joined with AOL's AIM and ICQ systems AOL that number will grow to 80 million uniques.

With 80 million unique users, the AOL/Bebo baby will be larger than Facebook (67 million uniques) but still smaller than MySpace.

What exactly is AOL getting?

According to comScore, Bebo is one of the fastest growing social networks with 688% growth from January 2007 to January 2008. Facebook showed only 11% growth and MySpace 8% growth during the same period. Though their total unique users are much fewer than MySpace or Facebook, Bebo users spend more time in the social space. Bebo users spent 217 minutes in the social space in January while Facebook users spent 198 minutes and MySpace users spent only 156 minutes.

HitWise found that Bebo was the fourth most popular social platform following MySpace, Facebook and MyYearbook in February 2008. More than 80% of Bebo traffic for February was return traffic. In the UK, Bebo is the brand most searched for, leading both Ebay and Facebook.

Looking ahead into 2008, Bebo has plans to launch social platforms in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain. AOL, also, has announced plans to spread their social wings a bit more with some reporting that the company plans to expand into 30 more countries by 2009.


by Kristina Knight
bizreport.com

AOL buys social network Bebo for $850 million

In an unexpected move, AOL has acquired social-networking site Bebo. The price tag: $850 million in cash.

Rumors had floated over the past few months that Bebo, which has over 40 million members, was up for sale. Reports suggested a $1 billion price tag, but there were few hints as to potential buyers. Though Bebo had already partnered with AOL's AIM messaging client to facilitate friend-invite interoperability between the two services, even the most creative blogger speculation didn't seem to point to AOL eventually buying the social network.

Ironically, AOL itself has been talked about as an acquisition target. Jeffrey Bewkes, CEO of Time Warner, which operates AOL, has spoken recently about plans to spin off or sell divisions of the company.

AOL has made it clear that buying Bebo is a move geared toward international growth, as the youth-oriented social network is wildly popular in the U.K., Ireland, and New Zealand. AOL reported that it has launched "17 international web sites over the last year and has plans to expand to 30 countries outside the U.S. by the end of 2008," as well as international versions of its home page and some services. Bebo, meanwhile, plans to launch five localized versions of its service this year (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands), and AOL will make it a major part of the company's international expansion strategy.

"Bebo is the perfect complement to AOL's personal communications network and puts us in a leading position in social media," said AOL chairman and CEO Randy Falco in a statement. "What drew us to Bebo was its substantial and fast-growing worldwide user-base, its vision of a truly social web, and the monetization opportunities...This positions us to offer advertisers even greater reach and marketers significant insights into the desires and needs of consumers."

Additionally, despite the fact that performance monitoring firms have pegged it as sluggish, Bebo's technology was likely appealing to AOL. The social network's developer platform supports both OpenSocial and Facebook applications; it also has an "Open Media" platform for audio and video content from big-media names like CBS and MTV as well as online production outlets like Next New Networks and Ustream. AOL, meanwhile, has opened up AIM to developers.

In a conference call on Thursday, Falco and Ron Grant, AOL's president and COO, as well as Bebo president Joanna Shields, said that integration between Bebo and AOL's AIM and ICQ messaging properties will be crucial. Combined, they said, AOL will own a "social graph" of 80 million people, bigger than the 67 million that the independently-run Facebook currently counts but still significantly smaller than News Corp.'s MySpace.com.

"The distribution aspect of linking up with AIM and ICQ is an extraordinary opportunity for us," Shields said in the conference call.

Still, at the core, the Bebo acquisition is all about the advertising. It comes at a time when AOL is still struggling to make the transition to a leader in online advertising after amassing nearly $1 billion worth in acquisitions--Tacoda, Buy.at, Quigo, and AdTech, to name a few--into its Platform-A ad network, as well as social-media buys like Goowy. Bebo, like most other social-networking sites, relies on ad revenue, and as projections claim that social-media ad buys will keep rising (eMarketer predicts 75 percent year over year), AOL undoubtedly wants a piece of the pie.

But it's still an uphill climb for AOL. Just this week, the company confirmed that Platform-A president Curt Viebranz was departing the company amid a management shakeup.

Joanna Shields, president of the San Francisco-based Bebo, will continue to run the social network and will report to Ron Grant. The deal was brokered on AOL's side by Bank of America Securities and Deutsche Bank Securities. Bebo had hired investment bank Allen & Co. when it opted to put itself up for sale.

Grant estimated in Thursday's conference call that the deal will ideally be complete within a month.

Is social networking a waste of time?

timesonline.co.uk

There has been much fuss of late over the loss of productivity brought on by employees multi-tasking between actual work and social networking. One estimate puts the cost to British industry at £6.5 billion per annum in lost productivity and questionable bandwidth usage. Another survey estimates that Britain’s social media fanatics are spending as much as 12 hours per week on these sites, no doubt eating into valuable work time.

But what is the impact of this collective Facebook/MySpace/Bebo addiction on high school and university students, our bright future? A new survey this week by IT specialists Global Secure Systems, (the ones who took a look at the impact on businesses and arrived at the £6.5 billion figure), says students are also guilty of sneaking in a fair bit of social networking during the school day.

In their survey of 500 English school children between the ages of 13 and 17, 51 per cent confess to checking their social network profiles during lessons. Over a quarter admit their in-school daily social network fix exceeds over 30 minutes each day.

If this sounds surprising, you haven’t been to school lately. Laptop-toting school kids are the norm these days, as are Wifi-enabled campuses. And when the laptop is in the locker, there are net-enabled smart phones at the ready. Add to the equation the rocket-fast texting ability of your typical 16-year-old and you get an explosion of social networking opportunities at the most unlikely points in the school day.

No educator would knowingly allow such a distraction in their classroom, and yet it appears to be happening right under their noses. It’s hard enough getting the PlayStation generation to focus for even a half-hour on a lecture of, say, King John and the Magna Carta. Try competing with the latest lunchroom gossip being broadcasted to mobiles, Facebook and Twitter. The significance of establishing modern-day democracy pales in comparison.

Before you shake your head and mutter something starting with the phrase “In my day…”, admit it – how many of you have shirked off work on an important business project to tend to a personal email, text or, these days, a Facebook query? How many of you have done it today? How many of you are doing it now?

We adults might regard tidying up our profile, sending messages to friends or contacts, joining the odd (or oddball) group or participating in a movie knowledge quiz to be a harmless distraction, the kind of thing that keeps us sane during the workday. (While writing this column, I have been twice drawn to my Facebook profile to attend to small matters, but that’s it. No more for me today. Okay, maybe after lunch.) But teens are deadly serious about social networks. For them, failing to attend to these duties could end friendships, sink reputations and mean missed opportunities to climb the fickle and precarious social ladder of young adulthood. I say we ought to go easy on them if they are neglecting some of their responsibilities while they fuss around with their online persona.

As a university lecturer at John Cabot University in Rome I encourage my students, all in their early twenties, to embrace social media and every other Web 2.0 application out there. Yes, posting photos of you and your semi-clad friends boozing it up late at night could sink your chances with a prospective employer, who will no doubt be snooping around for this very type of incriminating evidence. But the good far outweighs the bad. I encourage the students to be creative, to promote our online student newspaper, which just over a year from launch is pulling in steadily rising traffic. No doubt all the blog, Facebook and MySpace mentions are helping. I’ve had students who use social networking sites to build and promote projects on fighting poverty and eradicating hunger, organising music gigs, art and photo exhibitions, plus coordinating meet-ups for political rallies.

I admire the growing number of young students who dedicate hours to designing complicated widgets and applications too. Yes, they’re probably neglecting their history paper to complete it, but the end product is a far more valuable lesson learned in creativity, courage and computer coding. When I look at all the creativity, the collaboration and the activism being generated in these networks, I am hopeful for the future. Perhaps it is we educators who need to learn how to harness this power into our everyday classroom lessons.

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Bernhard Warner, a freelance journalist and media consultant, writes about technology, the internet and media industries.