Pay Per Click Advertising and SEO » Social Networking

First signs of trouble for Wikipedia

James Oliver — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 17:13:15 +0000

For the last eight or so years Wikipedia has been a shining example of the positive side of the internet, not only due to its commitment to educating the world population for free but also as one of the best web 2.0 case studies imaginable. The site showed us exactly what is possible when people get user generated content right, spawning thousands of imitators in the process.

Now however, the site is experiencing the first bumps in its illustrious road and it’s all down to a lack of active editors, it seems the U in ‘UGC’ is starting to fail them. Research indicates that in the first quarter of this year 49’000 volunteers went dead, as in stopped actively contributing to the site.

This is obviously a big problem for Wikipedia – the site’s main strength is the willingness of its volunteers to get involved in the running of the site. Some however go one step further, talking about a new phase in the evolution of the internet as people move beyond user generated content. As always with vague statements like that, only time will tell.

UK Twitter Users revealed as Left Wing Londoners

James Oliver — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:37:44 +0000

According to a recent poll conducted by YouGov, the UK’s Twitter users are overwhelmingly London based and err towards the Liberal, or left wing political persuasion. They also, perhaps unsurprisingly, tend to be young, with 46 per cent of those surveyed, under the age of thirty-five.

Regular users of Twitter will not be surprised by these statistics, in fact the social network’s UK users have long had the reputation for left leaning comments. An example is the treatment regularly meted out to the more right-wing of the UK’s papers, particularly the Daily Mail which regularly receives torrents of derision and sarcasm on the micro-blogging site.

Twitter are unlikely to be too bothered about this news, considering the sign up rates and celebrity endorsements they currently enjoy. However, such a clear location and political bias in the people supplying the content does make you think twice about Twitter’s pretentions to being a rival to the Google search engine.

Photobucket valued at a mere $60 Million

James Oliver — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 09:26:44 +0000

As you may have heard, if you’ve been paying attention, MySpace/News Corp are currently in the process of trying to sell Photobucket, the video and image sharing service it acquired for $250 million dollars with an additional $50 million earnout in 2007. The buyer is a company called Ontela, who come with 40 million backing from Disney’s Steamboat Ventures arm. The deal with Ontela is thought to be at an advanced stage though sources close to both companies are putting the valuation at around $60 million, an 83% reduction from what MySpace paid.

If reports of the valuation are correct, then it’s one hell of an embarrassment for MySpace and its backer News Corp to have gotten a valuation so catastrophically wrong.

This kind of publicity is the last thing that MySpace needed. The social network is increasingly seen as losing out to the simpler more user friendly Facebook and the sheer publicity of Twitter, with many claiming that the only real USP it currently retains is customisability and some cache within the music business.

For the time being Ontela are not currently commenting on the story. Nor, unsurprisingly, are MySpace.

TwitterSpeak Legitimised by Dictionary Publisher

Matt Thomas — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 09:43:56 +0000

Today the influence of Twitter seems to have reached an exciting/depressing (delete as appropriate) new frontier, actual manipulation of the English language. Not content with simply dominating the celebrity pages, the social network is being credited with inspiring a huge percentage of the new words inducted into the new edition of the Collins English Dictionary this year.

The new words are made up not only of tech-speech like ‘woot’, ‘OMG’ and ‘noob’, but also of existing words or noises within language that have not needed to be written down until people started tweeting. We’re talking about words like ‘hmm’, ‘mwah’ and ‘meh’ that have been written down a lot as part of tweets thanks to a highly informal writing style of twitter that encourages people to write as they speak.

The publishers, Collins, claim that this year’s crop of new words shows ‘a preoccupation with digital culture music and climate change.’

3 Million English Articles on Wikipedia

Matt Thomas — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 12:48:24 +0000

Only eight years after its initial launch, online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia has reached three million English language articles. The piece that tipped them over the edge, a short piece about little known Norwegian film actress named Beate Eriksen, hit the site yesterday and took them to the magic number.

As impressive as the number of articles written in English is, it is not even a quarter of the whole number, the truly international website boasts more than 13 million articles written in over 200 different languages, by 10 million separate registered users, who have made an average of 32 edits.

The biggest non-english language on Wikipedia is German, which accounts for approximately 943,000 of the total number of articles, though it is closely followed by French, Polish and Chinese – a language that is surely set to grow in influence. As indeed will the site, especially considering that it grows by 1,300 articles every day.

Woman sacked after Facebook Tirade

Matt Thomas — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 09:00:12 +0000

A facebook post from a disgruntled worker known only as Lyndsey has led to her being dismissed from her job. The post, entitled ‘OMG I hate my job’ was doing the rounds all last week and even made it as far as the blogging site Digg, where it has reached an even bigger audience.

Lyndsey’s employer clearly felt that this was an indiscretion too many and replied to her unprofessional message by terminating her employment. The full response is definitely worth a look, though let me just give you the edited highlights to whet your appetite…

“Hi Lindsay, I guess you forgot about adding me on here?…You also seem to have forgotten that you have 2 weeks left on your 6 month trial period. Don’t bother coming in tomorrow. I’ll pop your P45 in the post, and you can come in whenever you like to pick up any stuff you’ve left here.”

It has been common knowledge for some time that employers routinely check out potential employees online and this case highlights the growing awareness that employers have when it comes to social networks.

Employees beware, you never know who’s watching you on Facebook.

British Military U-Turn on Facebook

James Oliver — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 09:00:32 +0000

It would appear that the British military is having some trouble making up its mind on the subject of social networking. Only a couple of months after the Sun and other publications reported that the top brass had banned facebook and other social media platforms at all military bases, it has emerged today that not only are they now allowing use of social networking sites, they are actually encouraging personnel to use them.

A thirteen page report of recommendations for serving personnel entitled ‘Online Engagement Guidelines’ has been circulated, which claims that, “Current and emerging internet technologies, such as simple self-publishing, sharing of user-generated content, and social networking, are of growing importance to Service and MoD civilian personnel in their personal and professional lives.”

The ‘professional lives’ part of that quote may have come as a surprise to a few people, given their stance until recently. The military seem to have finally come round to the fact that social networking sites can be great for PR for them as they add to a wider ubnderstanding of the duties of military personnel.

Wikipedia Down

James Oliver — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 12:28:15 +0000

Just noticed that Wikipedia is down. Looks like a server issue, well they’re saying it is,

‘Our servers are currently experiencing a technical problem. This is probably temporary and should be fixed soon. Please try again in a few minutes.’

So that’s another significant bit of downtime for a major site. This of course coming hot on the heels of the many Gmail, Facebook, MySpace outages earlier in the year. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for an explanation. When I know, you’ll know.

MySpace plans to launch Email Service

Jenny Sanderson — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 10:20:00 +0000

By the end of the year many MySpace users will have their very own ‘@myspace.com’ email address. The launch, scheduled for late 2009, will be low key and initially limited only to the USA. The scheme is intended to be rolled out to the rest of the world, though a plan for this is yet to be drafted. Sources within the popular social networking site have called the email plan the ‘logical extension’ of the brand and its existing ‘instant messaging tool.’

It’s being seen by some as a direct response to Facebook’s recent vanity URL development, which has allowed users to pick their own URLs. This new policy has proved incredibly popular, particularly with companies as it allows them to put a manageable and, more importantly, memorable url on a business card, poster etc.

Time will tell whether the MySpace URL will have a similar effect though, for me, the prospects for anything that increases the reliance of a social network’s user base can only be good.

US rise in Social Network use

Matt Thomas — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 09:09:03 +0000

With so much of the world now poking, tagging and micro blogging their way across the social networking landscape, you’d be forgiven for thinking that social networking didn’t have much room to grow. Well, apparently not. According to Nielsen Online, the amount of time the USA spends on social networking sites has risen by a whopping 83 per cent over the last year.

It’ll come as a surprise to no one that the bulk of that time was spent on Facebook. The resounding market leader was responsible for using up 13.9 billion minutes of American time over the past twelve months. However the real shock is just how much Facebook use has proliferated, the site now has 700% more users than it did in April 2008.

However, Facebook’s growth looks positively anaemic when compared with Twitter, who can boast a 3,712% increase on last year. These stats should help Twitter shed the perception held by many that it is a platform that people tire of quickly.

Not doing so well is MySpace, which has seen a major drop off in usage, 31%, to be precise. This figure is made all the more bleak by the overall buoyancy of the market. In this case it seem s that a rising tide doesn’t quite lift all ships.

Apple latest Company to be linked to Twitter Purchase

Jenny Sanderson — Thu, 07 May 2009 09:13:02 +0000

That’s right, Apple have become the latest company in a (very) long line to be linked with a move to buy twitter.

Before I continue, let me just point out that this rumour originated on Valleywag, a blog known for being just a little bit rumour happy, but even so, the story has been picked up by some of the more reputable blogs, including CNET and UPI.com so I guess it merits further discussion.

The question is, why would Apple actually want Twitter? They’re primarily a hardware company and the software they do have tends to be used mainly to push that hardware, i.e., iTunes existing solely to plug the iPod… How would Twitter get people to buy Mac books, for example?

Of course, it’s possible that this is all part of some elaborate plan on Apple’s part and personally I hope it is, it would be fascinating to see a company like Apple turn the probably half a billion dollar expense of buying Twitter into a long term profit. However, unfortunately I think this may just be the Valleywag guys getting a bit over excited.

Twitter’s poor Retention Rate

Matt Thomas — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 11:54:50 +0000

Doubts have been cast over the longevity of social networking site Twitter after a report from Nielsen Online revealed that as many as 60 per cent of new twitter users stopped using the site a month after signing up. Now, in many other industries a retention rate of four out of ten might well be seen as pretty good, however in the cut throat world of social networking the fact that so many people are quitting after such a short period is very troubling.

This information is likely to heavily affect the ongoing buyout discussions surrounding the site. If the site is failing to hook this many people then potential buyers may well be tempted to revise down their evaluations to consider active users as opposed to gross users.

It is thought by many that the explosion in usage of twitter by corporations has adversely affected the user experience for the individuals that twitter is trying to target. These days, the site seems to feature as many announcements about ‘fiscal growth this quarter’ and ‘new products available today’ as it does actual updates from people. It is however, at this stage, unclear what, if anything, twitter plans to do about it.

Oprah kicks Twitter to the Next Level

Matt Thomas — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 16:21:23 +0000

Due to her fairly low profile on this side of the Atlantic British people often don’t quite realise the huge impact that talk show host, publisher and entrepreneur, Oprah Winfrey has in the USA. To put it in perspective for Brits, she fronts the highest-rated talk show in American TV history and has done for almost 25 years, she can basically decide the top ten bestsellers list through her show’s literary segment and for a long time, she was the world’s only black billionaire.

She is, to put it mildly, very popular in the US.

When this lady does something publicly, people tend to take notice. This is why, depending on who you believe, Twitter now has between 500,000 and 1.2 million new users after a high profile (everything tshe does is high profile) endorsement from the undisputed queen of chat.

The deluge of soccer moms creating twitter accounts has left some old school Twitter fans cold however, apparently they feel that the cool factor has been disturbed, they’re also worried that the, admittedly frail, system won’t be able to cope. The latter fear so far appears to be un founded, it looks like the Twitter faithful are simply going have to learn to share.

Top Click Media, live on Twitter

Matt Thomas — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 10:12:01 +0000

Exciting news guys! Last week we finally launched our company Twitter page. From now on, me and the rest of the TCM blog team will be using the micro blogging site to keep the public updated with our first thoughts on all the breaking stories of the day before we expand on those thoughts in our official blog.

We’re certainly having a lot of fun playing with it and, from first indications, it would seem as if a decent number of the twit-o-sphere are enjoying reading it. By close of play on our first day we had more than two hundred followers, by the end of the week we had more than three hundred as people within the SEO & PPC industries followed us to find out more.

Anyway, if you fancy being the first to hear the latest news on the world of PPC and SEO as well as all the company news, then please feel free to follow us. We’d be happy to have you.