Slashdot Mirror
Social Networks Gaining on Internet Portals
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"
2 out of every 3 people online visited a social networking site
/.)?
I don't get it. Maybe I'm just too old, but they hold practically zero interest for me. Too old or just too busy (but not to busy for
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
omfglololololo!!!!!1111onenone!!!!11kthxbai...eh? Oh, sorry. Thought this was myspace. :(
-Raseri
Writhe your naked ass to the mindless groove.
Lately people are desperate for friends and life partners. It's obviuos if you just pay attention to the media. How many dating sites are there? Chat rooms? Interest groups? In recent years I've noticed that less and less people seem to be able to go out, meet people, and make friends. This seems to especially be a problem for older rather than younger people. They only social skill they knew was going to bars, and when they realize they no longer want a drunk friend/partner, they face complete isolation. Any new tech that allows people to be social and safe will be popular.
"if only i had known i would have been a locksmith." -albert einstein
Is it just me, or was this section really difficult to parse? "1. In June, 2
Please, for the sake of my sanity.
"Social Networking" sites is just a buzzword term for a variation of Internet chat channels and forums. People have been doing that for years. That was one of the original concepts behind the Internet, communication.
The social networking sites offer a few other features, but in the end it's just people wanting to talk with each other.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
I just finished watching the BBS Documentary and it reminded me about why BBS's were so cool. I mean, besides bringing the power of global communications to the common man at a low expense, it brought about this whole new online community.
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.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Since spam has all-but ruined the usefulness of e-mail for non-techies, social-networking lets me communicate with my non-techie friends from work and college without being bothered with keeping track of their current e-mail, their IM usernames and-so on. This is important for matters which are somewhat important, but not urgent enough to bother someone by ringing their cell phone. Prior to MySpace - I've had a few occasions where my friends e-mailed me and I missed their messages among all the Spam B-S that often disguises itself as legitimate mail with innocuous subjects like "Hey". I've also had the same issue when e-mailing other people "I e-mailed you two days ago, you didn't get my message?". And no, I am not a teen. I am 26 years old, post-college, and MySpace has become a good replacement for e-mail in keeping-in-touch with my peer-group which is in their late 20's and early 30's. The whole thing about MySpace being primarily for the teen group is definitely overplayed and not really true anymore.
Maybe /. is a social networking site, and we've just missed the reclassification that everything from the usenet (well, bbs, for that matter) on up to forums and the personal blog sites have been social networking. It's just a new flashy term for what we've always been doing. *shrug*
/. time has been somewhat limited of late, I seem to have gotten in inordinate number of first posts in recent weeks. Several years to get the first one, a couple of months to score another three. Go figure.
Oddly, even though my
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
After reading the article, as well as the "Where do these #s come from" page, I still don't get the correlation. Why would the traffic patterns look in any way shape or form similar when comparing the Soc. Networking sites against, large search engine/portal sites. I don't have any experience in the monitoring of traffic, hits, visitors, etc. for either type of site; but even so, it still seems like apples & oranges to me.
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.
Okay, so I've read all 970(ish) bytes of the article text (that includes their summary) and it doesn't look like the text matches the graphics all that well. The top 10 "social networking" sites combined have less than half of the visitors as the top 2 search sites. They've barely doubled their aggregate visitors in the high-growth 30 months preceding. Heck, if you look at the graph from October '04 to March '06, Google alone matched the volume increase of the entire top-10 SNS.
Sorry, but I find it hard to call this earth shattering.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Congratulations, you're using a social networking site! They're not all MySpace, you know.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Isn't "social network" when used in the context of MySpace actually indeed a "portal". I know an awful lot of people, and OLDER people at that (mid 20's to 30) that have MySpace.com as their browser's start page. The only really obvious item lacking on MySpace is "NEWS". And, that is probably a welcome escape for a lot of people...
MySpace is their "social portal", but they jump to Google News for their "News Portal"...
... all those spam blogs on Blogger networking with one another. They're very social about it, too.
It seems to me that the survey doesn't boost the cause for social networking, but leads to the opposite conclusion - that even the 10 largest social networking sites added together don't add up to the traffic seen by Yahoo or Google. Count me underwhelmed.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
Once the spammers take over the social networking sites, people will be back to being anonymous and detached from the sites they go to.
They're handy for organising events between friends. The pub etc. Sometimes you meet new people through them which can be interesting.
I predict that the preponderance of non users will be substantially higher than 30% amongst Slashdot users.
Deleted
Ok...Every time I read an article like this, and I see sites like Google and Yahoo referenced as "portals", I go a little crazy. I think of sites like, http://weed.com/ as a true portal. I know the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_portal is a little broad, saying that they are, "sites on the World Wide Web that typically provide personalized capabilities to their visitors," but c'mon here...just because you can customize your Google or Yahoo homepage doesn't make it a Portal IMHO. A true portal to me is a domain squatter buying a name like, googles.com or ytahoo.com and putting a crapload of ads and "related" searches on it. I really think there needs to be a clear distinction between the two types of sites, instead of a branching term for any site that offfers custom content. Seriously...that would mean http://www.amazon.com/ is a portal because I can customize my User Account screen.
"Every time a bell rings, a Dell laptop bursts into flame."
If you think about it, Slashdot isn't all that much different from Myspace. Instead of a bunch of poorly written sites by attention whores trying to get people to look at them, you have a bunch of comments by karma whores trying to get people to mod them up. With Myspace you are trying to get people interested in your life so you feel special. On Slashdot, we assume everyone else is posting from his parent's basement too, so we try to get people interested in our ideas instead.
Summarizing with a catchy rhyme: Slashdot makes you think, MySpace makes you blink.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
So we don't "need" social networking to set up events. Most are well planned due to the baggage that are small children. I don't hang out with large groups of friends, so there's no need to broadcast where I'll be bar hopping so everyone I know can join me. Which really brings me back to "I'm too old". Not to do all that stuff, but to need that kind of networking. Families do that to people, and they (usually) don't need internet sites to organize impromtu get togethers.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
... how many slashdot users have you fucked?
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Maybe /. is a social networking site
"So it's social. Demented and sad, but social."
--Bender
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Anyone that can't meet and talk and socialize with other people with other means than going to an online site should seriously throw the computer out of the window and start thinking of other methods. I mean if that's the case the computer is likely to have caused the lack of fantasy. I can understand services for instant messenging and sites focusing on special areas. I mean you might not be able to meet to many The Clash fans in you neighborhood. Then there's email for you too. If that's not enough consider going to a local gaming club, pub, café or start training at a gym or something. No offense meant but I'm concerned that people socialize more and more far away from each other. It's never going to be the same has having a chat with your friend at town. (Probably no one claimed it would but please see my point)
+1 Agree -1 Disagree
SNS are in the fashion business which is both to their advantage and disadvantage. Millions will flock to a currently fashionable site but equally an unfashionable site will die overnight as the users move elsewhere.
I'll visit a social network site (slashdot and digg) anyday over Reuters or CNN. If I can't get both sides of the picture, fuck it.
You're nothing; like me.
There may be a group that can save us all from Myspace, the spammers. I knew those guys would come in handy sooner or later. With the tecnological catastrophy that is Myspace, they'll get around to killing it off and it'll be great to watch. Then all of those attention whores can go cry to each other in real life between classes in high school. Myspace may not be a contributor, but it certainly shows how stupid kids are getting.
Both "portals" and "social networking" sites are for utter tools.
Fuck, anyone who even uses the word "portal" anymore needs to have his ass kicked back to 1999.
Well, sure, that's sounds impressive, until you RTFA and see that the support for that is that visitors to the top 10 "social networking" sites combined (including Google offering Blogger.com) are approaching the US traffic of Google or Yahoo! individually.
Of course, by the definition they use ("For this particular analysis we wanted to include sites where people create personal profiles with the opportunity to receive/initiate direct interaction and/or knowledge with peers.") both Google and Yahoo! really should have been included as social networking sites, as both provide that defining functionality. And if they did that, then, wow, the top ten social networking sites combined would have way more US traffic than Google or Yahoo! taken individually.
I can't believe how people assume that the rise in traffic is related to their community and Web 2.0 and stuff like that.
People use MSN Messenger. Lots of people. They see an orange star right beside a contact's name. They click the star and they see a "presentation card" window, that hilights that new content that has been added to myspace account, more specifically pictures.
So you se that your female contact has new pictures posted and them usually include her female friends!
No male adolescent user can resist not going to see those pictures.
I bet 95% of mySpace traffic comes from clicks in MSN Messenger.
That Slashdotters miss this very important fact, I can't not understand.
About the other social network sites, like hi5, they seem to remind you to visit them very often, via email.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.