Tech Readers » Social Network

Google+ Now Having 62 Million Users, Adding 625,000 a Day

Mikey Mell — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 12:22:40 +0000

When it comes to the estimates about the social network’s growth, the only name that comes in our mind is that of Paul Allen. Although, he isn’t an official Google+ watcher, still his estimates have appeared close to the accurate, if not accurate in the past. He recently claims that the Google+ has over 62 million users and also the social platform is gaining 625,000 new users on daily basis. It is important to note here that Allen is also the founder of Ancestory.com.

Allen stated on his Google+ profile on Tuesday, “It may be the holidays, the TV commercials, the Android 4 signups, celebrity and brand appeal, or positive word of mouthmor a combination of all these factors, but there is no question that the number of new users signing up for Google+ each day has accelerated markedly in the past several weeks.”

The approach Allen used to make his estimates is very unique – unique in the way that he along with his staff runs hundreds of queries on surnames they have been tracking since July, and in this way surmise the growth of the network.

According to Allen, if the social network continues to grow at this rate, it will have over 100 million users by February 25, 2012, while 200 million users the August 3. He further states that the social network will reach to 300 million users by the same time next year.

Allen’s estimates, however, doesn’t give us any hint about how many of 62 million are active users of the social network. According to Experian Hitwise, the numbers of active users are also increasing, but depict the fraction of the Google+ users’ base. Hitwise says that the total number of visits to Google+ for the week ending on December 17 were 9.4 million – the most recent week tracked, clearly up from the 7.2 million visits from the week in November. But not enough to beat 15 million visits that Google+ experienced for the week ending on September 24, when the social network was opened to the public worldwide.

The last official numbers announced by Google+ was during a conference call with analyst, when Larry Page, CEO of Google announced the figures to be 40 million.

75% of Worldwide Cellphone Users Send Text Messages

Mikey Mell — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 19:08:15 +0000

In the recent few years, mobile phones have become an essential part of everyday life. With the increasing use of mobile phones, the trend of text messaging has also increased. A survey was conducted in 21 countries about cellphone users regarding their mobile habits that revealed that 75% of the cellphone users send text messages.

A study was conducted by a Pew Research Center Global Attitudes Project that focused on the global use of digital communication tools, including mobile and social networks. Unsurprisingly, the research revealed that both young and educated are the first to adopt new technologies. While people less than 30 year of age with college degrees are more into exploring mobile phone functions and social networks.

One-half of the participants send photos or videos, while only 23% of them use the Internet.

Such behaviors are usually associated with most well-developed countries because there is a big reason to assume so, but to your utter surprise texting is most popular in Kenya and Indonesia, the two poorest countries, according to study. The study further reveals that sending photos and videos is most popular in Japan (72%), then Mexico with 61%, Spain with 59%, follow by Egypt with 58%. As for using mobile data, it seems that the trend is most popular in developed countries with Israel and Japan sharing the top spot with 47%, followed by 43% in US. Complete results are given in the table.

The study also focused on examining the worldwide popularity of social networking. It is a matter of common observation that social networking is common in countries where Internet access isn’t a major issue. Considering this point, Israel is on the top with 53% usage, followed by 50% in US, and then comes Britain and Russia with 43% each, slightly trailed by Spain with 42%. Interestingly, the users in non-developed countries use social network not less than the richer countries.

The study was conducted from March 21 to May 15. It surveyed about 700 to 4,029 mobile users per country by telephone, while in person in the countries like US, Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, China, Indonesia, Japan, Pakistan, Mexico and Kenya.

Will Microsoft Launch A Social Network

Zaheer — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 15:17:42 +0000

Microsoft is under pressure from all nooks especially after it posted dismal financials for the recently ended quarter. The slow PC sales and focus of consumers over tablets are considered to be the prime reasons for its poor financials. The tech analysts are murmuring that Microsoft might be building its social network to join the league of Google and Facebook in order to boost its earning numbers. The PC maker hasn’t really innovated with its products and its solutions are not perceived to be as the value addition by the customers. In order to break the jinx Microsoft should essentially innovate its services on the move.

The social networking giant, Facebook, is constantly changing its services and offering great products to the consumers. In bid to sustain the existing market share, Microsoft too would be looking to even out from the social frontiers. However, it will be difficult for them to boost up the revenue numbers upfront primarily of it being a late entrant in the industry segment.

The social connectivity and innovation is focusing the tech giants in living up to the customer expectations. As a result, their products are in line with the industry needs and stand to offer higher value. Who knows that by the end of fiscal there might be a new social network from Microsoft?

Don’t Overload Your Social Network

Zaheer — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 20:56:42 +0000

The plethora of apps, fake profiles and spam social networks are not an unknown entity from the end users. While the users wish to connect with their friends, colleagues, family members and known acquaintances they often flood their network by adding one too many friends. However, this could be a serious invasion to privacy and unknowingly the end users might even add up people with fake profiles to their social network on the move. And eventually the chances of profile hacking increase exponentially with such kind of unresponsive attempts. Therefore, one must not over load their network to such an extent that it becomes unmanageable.

Facebook allows a maximum of 5,000 friends per account and apart from may be celebrity profiles the queue up friend requests can be expected on fake celebrity profiles. One should be cautious while trying to send friend request to a popular public figure on the social network because you can never be sure if that is the real person.

The need of the hour is to clean up your social profile and get rid of friends who are not in your inert set. Perhaps you should concentrate on extending relationships with the highly cherished friends of school, college and work.

How To Start Online Social Network From Scratch

Zaheer — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 13:15:34 +0000

The number of social networking sites has scooted up in the recent past especially marked with the surge in users wanting to get connected with each other. However, if you have missed the social networking bus you can very well stay connected with your friends or colleagues in just about no time at all. One of the best ways to socialize online is through Facebook. You can create a free Facebook account online with your mail ID and create a social profile. In order to let other people recognize you ensure to upload a profile picture with few other album pictures.

The social engines are smart enough to recognize your friends and you can add them to your social circle on the move in a seamless manner. Eventually when your friends start adding your profile a pool of friends can be formed. You can leverage from the chat tools to ping them or share latest tweets on your wall itself. The added friends will be able to comment or like posts or pictures. And eventually your social circle will be formed in just about no time at all.

Therefore, take apt measures and connect with friends online through social streams. You can get to leverage from social games and share information in real time. The social network can be started from scratch and you can organize your friends under various labels such as School buddies, College Friends, Crushes and a lot more custom labels can be defined too.

Murdoch Sells Myspace

Tech Readers — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 21:59:21 +0000

Social network MySpace was sold for $35 million (€24 million) to a company that specializes in online advertising, Specific Media, advances the All Things Digital blog.

News Corp., held by Rupert Murdoch, who in 2005 bought the social network for $ 580 million (€ 403 million), still maintains a position of less than 5%.

Under the agreement, the singer and American actor Justin Timberlake, who holds an interest in Specific Media, also becomes an entrepreneur in the media area, a role that he played in the movie “The Social Network”.

Timberlake will have an office at the headquarters of MySpace and a staff of about a half dozen people working with him on developing ideas for the network, told the Associated Press, the general manager of Specific Media, Tim Vanderhook.

Specific Media expects, according to its general manager, to “revitalize” MySpace with the help of Timberlake.

There is need for a space where fans can interact with their favorite artists, listen to music, watch videos, share and discover cool stuff or just being connected

Said actor and singer in a statement, adding that MySpace has the potential to be this place.

This purchase will also mean a drastic reduction of costs, which affected about half of the people on MySpace, about 200 workers.

Friendster to Erase Users Data on May 31, Launch New Website

Tech Readers — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 10:19:50 +0000

Friendster, the pioneer of social networking started in 2001 has been struggling very hard for the survival. Website announced on Tuesday that it will revamp the site design to give a new identity and also it will erase most of the users’ data store on Friendster website.

According to an email sent to the users expects them “a new and improved Friendster site in the coming weeks.” The email also intimated the registered users that their data including photos, messages, blog posts, and more will be deleted on May 31. What will be left is your basic profile with list of friends.

No need to panic, Friendster launched an exporter app which will allow you to download all your data. Friendster didn’t talk much about the new identity but it is expected that they are positioning it as a causal gaming place.

Twitter: “Promoted Accounts” in Pipeline

Tech Readers — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 07:48:01 +0000

It seems that twitter is more intended to monetize on the desire to collect more followers with the introduction of Promoted Accounts.

The company has a plan to introduce its newest promoted advertising product on Wednesday at the IAB Conference in New York. According to All Things Digital, it is fairly simple that “Businesses can pay to be included in the ‘Who to Follow’ feature.” By doing this, you will definitely get more followers along with additional visibility.

The plan for Promoted Accounts was remain in debate for quite a long time. It was first leaked out two months before, but then it was only in conceptual stages. But now the company has decided to move forward with that initiative. It is not tough to understand why company has decided to monetize on a brand’s desire to have more influence, for with Promoted tweets over $100,000, it is relatively easy to achieve this task.

The focus of Promoted Accounts is pretty much same like that of Promoted Tweets, that is, to target the users who are more receptive to following any specific brands. For instance, if you are a member of PETA, twitter will not suggest you the company like Tyson Food to follow.

Keep visiting the pages for upcoming news and details from the IAB Conference on Twitter’s recent monetization efforts.

Social Network Content Creation Remains Stable

Tech Readers — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 10:38:53 +0000

As the number of people using Facebook or Twitter is increasing day in and day out, the number of tweets per month has exceeded two billion with an existing 500 million users. According to the research done by Forrester, the participation of the users is definitely on the higher side but the actual content creation of the social networks has plateaued.

Forrester’s Social Technographics Profile makes an analysis of consumer social behaviors and trends on an annual basis. For making things easy to analyze, Forrester sorts social network users in different types, such as Creators, Conversationalists, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators and Inactives. Forrester didn’t find any reasonable activity in the Creators category (the user that creates social content).

A decline has been seen in Creator audience in United States by one percent in last one year, i.e. from 24% in 2009 to 23% in 2010. The only country that showed a rise in Creators during the last year was Japan, that is, from 34% to 36%.

If we talk about social media, we will see that the majority of content creation is primarily restricted to the existing content creator users. A report from Forrester states that, “one third of the Internet users in the United States daily watch user generated videos on the sites like YouTube, but hardly 10% of the United States Internet users upload videos they have created for public sites.”

Whatever the behavior of the users is, the social networking is still on the rise, says the Forrester. The immense increase has been seen in the Joiners type of Internet users (those who join social networks). This trend is common in most of the countries including United States, where the number of Internet users under Joiner category raised up to 59% from 51% between the year 2009 and 2010.

8 Social Networks with Highest Page Views Per Visitor

Tech Readers — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 17:25:21 +0000

Internet is used globally and every user has his own preferences regarding websites. We tried to figure out that what kind of websites get the most page views and it is for this reason Pingdom.com examined the top 1,000 websites on the Internet to discover the truth.

Our main focus was on monthly page views per unique visitor. To compute these statistics we made use of traffic data from Google AD Planner, and finally sorted out a top list of page views per visitor. The results are pretty much expected, though still interesting.

Page Views per Visitor Top 10

The following charts contain the top 10 sites in terms of more page views per visitor. These sites are chosen from the top 1,000 sites on the internet.

Sites ranked by monthly page views per unique visitor
#	Site	Category	Unique visitors	Page views	Page views / visitor
1	orkut.com.br	Social network	38,000,000	70,000,000,000	1,842
2	tuenti.com	Social network	5,600,000	9,400,000,000	1,679
3	facebook.com	Social network	550,000,000	630,000,000,000	1,145
4	vkontakte.ru	Social network	26,000,000	22,000,000,000	846
5	hyves.nl	Social network	5,000,000	3,300,000,000	660
6	wer-kennt-wen.de	Social network	5,500,000	3,000,000,000	545
7	schuelervz.net	Social network	5,000,000	2,700,000,000	540
8	meinvz.net	Social network	4,100,000	1,900,000,000	463
9	ikariam.com	Online games	4,200,000	1,900,000,000	452
10	leboncoin.fr	Classifieds	8,200,000	3,400,000,000	415

The top eight results are pretty much expected as these all are social networks.

Although, the numbers of page views per visitor for Facebook are really striking, the Orkut’s Brazilian site has even better than Facebook, according to the Ad Planner data. The Orkut’s Brazilian site has 61% more page views per visitor than Facebook.

Definitely these numbers clearly shows that how popular Orkut is in Brazil, because the page views per visitor for global Orkut site is far less than that of Brazilian Orkut site, i.e. less than one twelfth or 142 monthly page views per visitor. This shows us that only site design is not the issue there are other factors, such as market penetration and demographics that play there role as well.

The data contains another site that surpasses the number of page views per visitors of Facebook. The site is Tuenti or also known as Spanish Facebook.

Another site that bests Facebook in terms of page views per visitor is a social network called Tuenti, sometimes called the “Spanish Facebook.”

Overall Page View Dominance

According to statistics, Facebook didn’t rank on the top in terms of page views per visitor, but it definitely outclasses all the other websites in terms of total page views each month. One major reason for this is that it has large number of visitors. The estimated number of monthly page views of Facebook is around 630 billion.

Keeping in view all the statistics, it is not wrong to say that only Facebook among the top 100 websites on the Internet accounts for 54% of the page views. These measures don’t include the Google search, as it is not included in Google Ad Planner.

All the nine social networks present in the top 100 websites on the Internet including Facebook make up the 65% of the total page views.

Why it Matters

Although, it seems quite awkward to use page views per visitor to measure the site popularity, it is somehow a useful way. If your site is getting a lot of page views from its user, then the things must be going in the right direction for you.

Nowadays, popular sites are a good source of advertisement. These sites serve ads to make money. The more page views mean more and more people are viewing those ads. Many people think that social networks are the ideal advertising driven websites. This might be true to some extent, but in fact these networks focus more on their users’ information than other sites. A sort of addictive type of service inspires users to visit the pages and in turn raises the page views per user in turn.

Research: Females More Active than Males on Social Networks

Tech Readers — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 08:38:36 +0000

Most of the people who use Internet are registered on at least one Social Media website but have you ever thought how many of the registered users are males or females? There are tons of social Network websites around. Some of them are: Facebook, Twitter, Digg, MySpace, Orkut, LinkedIn, etc. etc. etc. There is a long list.

pingdom.com conducted a research on this topic and took 19 Social Network websites to see how many male and female users are on these websites. This list has all big names like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace as well as popular Social News websites such as Digg, Reddit, Slashdot etc.

Full list of sites in this mini study: Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, Slashdot, Reddit, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, FriendFeed, Last.fm, Friendster, LiveJournal, Hi5, Imeem, Ning, Xanga, Classmates.com, Bebo.

The demographics data for United States that is being used in this research was taken from the Google’s AdPlanners service.

Male/Female Social Network Website User Statistics

Lets have a quick look on the results;

Females more than Male Users: 84% (16 out of 19 Social Media Websites)
Social News websites have more male users than females.
Twitter and Facebook Ratio: Almost same. 59% and 57% respectively.
Most female-dominated Websites: Bebo (66% females), closely followed by MySpace and Classmates.com (64%).
Average ratio of all 19 websites: 47% male, 53% female.

And here’s a chart with the male/female ratio for all the sites, for your viewing pleasure:

Now the question arises, what is the reason most Social Media websites attract females more than males?

Internet Statistics for the Year 2009

Tech Readers — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 19:53:35 +0000

We all use Internet almost daily and life without Internet is very boring believe me. Like me most of you would be curious that how was 2009 for Internet. What’s the number of newly added websites? How many emails were sent during 2009? What was the number of Internet users? This article will help you keep up-to-date with the Internet changes in previous year.

Following figures were obtained from a number of resources on the web. If you are interested in reading more details, you can follow the references mentioned at the end of article. But, I am sure; this article will help you in an easy way. If you think that some information is incorrect, do not hesitate to tell me. I will rectify the error as soon as possible.

Email

90 trillion – Emails sent On the Internet in the year 2009
247 billion – Average number of email/day.
1.4 billion – Email users worldwide.
100 million – Number of email users added to previous year.
81% – Spam emails.
92% – Peak spam levels late in 2009.
24% – Increase in spam since 2009.
200 billion – Spam emails/day (assuming 81% Spam).

Websites

234 million –Number of websites as of December 2009.
47 million – Added websites in 2009.

Web Servers

13.9% – The growth of Apache websites in 2009.
-22.1% – The growth of IIS websites in 2009.
35.0% – The growth of Google GFE websites in 2009.
384.4% – The growth of Nginx websites in 2009.
-72.4% – The growth of Lighttpd websites in 2009.

Domain Names at the end of 2009

.COM Domains: 81.8 million
.Net Domains: 12.3 million
.ORG Domains: 7.8 million
Country Code Top-Level Domains i.e. .PK, .UK, .DE, .IN: 76.3 million
All Top-Level Domains as of Oct. 2009: 187 million
Increase in Domain Names: 8%

Internet Users

Worldwide Internet Users as on Sept. 2009: 1,73 billion
Increase in Internet Users since Previous Year: 18%

Continent-wise Internet Users

Asia: 738,257,230 Users
Europe: 418,029,796 Users
North America: 252,908,000 Users
Latin America / Caribbean: 179,031,479 Users
Africa: 67,371,700 Users
Middle East: 57,425,046 Users
Oceania / Australia: 20,970,490 Users

Social Media

Number of Blogs: 126 million
Social Network Websites (more women than men): 84%
Numbers of Tweets on Twitter/Day as of Nov. 2009: 27.3 million
Twitter Users in USA: 50%
Facebook Users: 350 million
Number of Facebook Login Everyday: 50% (175 Million)
Active Facebook Apps: 500,000

Images

Images Hosted on Flickr as of Oct. 2009: 4 billion
Images Uploaded each Month on Facebook: 2.5 billion
Number of Images Uploaded on Facebook/Year: 30 billion

Videos

Videos on Youtube: 1 billion
Videos viewed per month as of Nov. 2009: 12.2 billion
Videos viewed/ month on Hulu in US as of Nov. 2009: 924 million
Average Video/Internet User in a month: 182 (USA)
Internet Users Who View Online Videos: 82% (USA)
Youtube Online Video Market Share (USA): 39.4%
Youtube Videos on Blogs: 81.9%

Malicious Software

Number of Zombie Computers Created per Day: 148,000
Malicious Code Threats (viruses, Trojans, etc.) at the Start of 2009: 2.6 million
Malicious Code Signatures Added by Symantec in Fourth Quarter of 2009: 921,143

I will try to add some more information soon but its late and I am tired now. Stay in touch to see some statistics in graphical action.

Data sources: Website and web server stats from Netcraft. Domain name stats from Verisign and Webhosting.info. Internet user stats from Internet World Stats. Web browser stats from Net Applications. Email stats from Radicati Group. Spam stats from McAfee. Malware stats from Symantec (and here) and McAfee. Online video stats from Comscore and YouTube. Photo stats from Flickr and Facebook. Social media stats from BlogPulse, Pingdom (here and here), Twittercounter, Facebook, Sysomos and GigaOm.

Tech Readers » Social Network

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Internet Statistics for the Year 2009

Email

Websites

Web Servers

Domain Names at the end of 2009

Internet Users

Social Media

Images

Videos

Malicious Software

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