Social network statistics – youth dropping out?

Some interesting research by comscore and ofcom was released recently showing the strength of UK social networks..

First up, from Comscore; data on the Top 10 Social Networking sites in the UK:

Secondly, also from comscore, showing that unsurprisingly younger audiences are more engaged today;

Finally research from Ofcom shows that it is amongst the older audiences that social networks are experiencing the most growth. 25-34 years olds on Facebook increased from 40% last year to 46% this year; whilst 35-54 years grew the fastest – up 8% to 35%.

What was most interesting though was that 15-24 year olds decreased by 5% to 50% over last year. It is the first time it has decreased so it is not exactly a trend but it will be interesting to see whether this is a blip or the start of some longer trend. Could youngsters be falling out of love with social networks? They are definitely still using the internet as much as before. My bet this is a blip and that usage will continue to grow.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Cyberkids abandon social networking (guardian.co.uk)
• Comscore: 2/3 of UK over 55s on social networks (thisisherd.com)

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

I have been watching Google Wave with no small amount of excitement.. if you haven’t seen or heard about it yet, I recommend you go here and watch at least the first 20 minutes of the video or here if you just want text.

What is most interesting to me is how it moves the needle forward in the email space online. The SMTP protocol was first defined in 1982, and has not changed drastically since. Google Wave is a re-envisioning of how communication on the web could be and it certainly looks like a productivity booster.

But why are Google doing it?

I dont see it adding revenue through advertising.

Are they able to track and understand user behaviour more with this protocol over email? Maybe, but even if this were the case, 3rd party providers could remove or disable this as the product is open source.

So that can’t be it.

There is potential for Google in both the consumer and business space.

On the consumer side, it is an improvement on current separate communication mechanisms along with a definite social element which could challenge Facebook or Microsoft  – though if it really became a threat, Facebook (or Microsoft) could roll this technology out themselves (and finally improve Facebook’s own messaging platform). I wonder if Wave technology will add to the Opensocial platform and become the glue that brings different social networks together. With Google Wave, it could be possible to see the same photo albums in Facebook and Myspace using Wace as an underlying technology. I wonder how this would tie into Facebook’s idea of relationships and privacy.

It is in the business space that I think Google has even more potential with the product. Google Docs has not done great, and in general Google has not been a huge success in the business arena which is still Microsoft’s stronghold. Google Wave for me seems to show significant productivity increases for groups of people both locally inside one office and across multiple offices. That alone could see it adopted by companies. Once it is inside the company, the ability to edit documents inside the wave client (similar to how they currently do it with Google Docs and Gmail) would mean people could start to use web applications more and more.. and start to use Microsoft applications less and less.

Of course, Google Wave might take a significant time to be used globally like email it today. My guess is it might need to integrate with email (SMTP) in the short term. But how long before Wave is a protocol in Exchange server? Exchange server is obviously moving towards being a web service itself, and Microsoft Office has launched lightweight web versions of Office (call Office Live Workspace) . Could we see a Microsoft Exchange/Office integration using Wave protocols. It would be great if the 2 companies worked together on improving the protocol.

Why else is Google doing Google Wave?

Twitter’s current strategy seems to be to woo celebrities to the network and in turn that will drag the mainstream along with it. The problem with this is that whilst reality tv is very popular reading the text of celebrities is not always that interesting. Hello magazine etc do a good job of just showing the interesting bits and can monitor Twitter for them. How many times will the mainstream come back to see if anything interesting has happened. Not enough if the numbers leaving Twitter are anything to go by.

There is one thing that will attract people back – I gave it away in the title – events. I do not mean just the business conferences that have been popular on Twitter with the tech and marketing crowd. I mean the concerts and clubs. There’s enough focus and length of time that people will stay interested in monitoring it via their phones and they’re likely to meet people who are into the same things as they are building up a followerbase.

The end result is that a person reaches a critical mass of followers quicker and even if that fails to happen after one event they are likely to come back for the second.. and third etc etc.

Of course Facebook is still in a strong position due to its size if it can move quickly enough.

A possible problem for Facebook that everyone in the tech world complains about is the lack of asymmetric friendships. On Facebook, you can only see someone’s newsfeed if they friend you back. On Twitter you can choose to follow someone and not have them follow you back. However, the privacy in Facebook is a strong feature for them over time – there are some stuff you just do not want the whole world to see. Facebook’s fan pages may well do the job and allow you to see all the other fans and the celebs and then listen/interact with them.

However, whilst there is greater usage of Facebook’s mobile apps than Twitter right now, the Twitter apps are more obviously able to handle event specific message streams than Facebook using its search functionality. Facebook would need to change its mobile apps at least to accomodate easy access to fan pages.

Finally, neither Twitter nor Facebook have realtime updates on mobiles which would be a boon for this type of usage. But one step at a time

(Image courtesy: Osei)

Dylan Fuller (from A Fuller View which I highly recommend subscribing to) commented on an earlier post asking what was the difference between life stream aggregators do and standard social networking – and even more importantly should he join them.

My short answer, was not right now. Here is the more longwinded answer!

Firstly, life stream aggregators vs standard social networking. Let’s list some of each to start with:

Standard Social Networks:
1. Facebook
2. Bebo
3. MySpace

Life Stream Aggregators
1. FriendFeed
2. Tumblr
3. Social Thing

If you look at the standard social networks they all offer pretty much the same thing with different emphases (MySpace was music, Facebook was connecting with friends). Here are some of the things they offer:

1. Ability to connect to friends
2. Photos
3. Public (and private) messaging
4. Status updates
5. News feed of events (usually) done by your friends.

Amongst Internetphiles, people have been moving more and more away from Facebook and towards individual specialised services and until recently there has been nothing to bring it all together.

Life stream Aggregators brings many of the different items (and more) listed above into one feed for all your friends across the web and across services. The real problem is one of scale.

It has one single feed and treats everyone the same. The feed gives so much information that you can never keep up with everything – and worse most of the information is not relevant. It suffers from the same issue as Twitter – if you follow too many people you lose the value of the service. What is needed is a way of saying I want to see in my main feed photos, news, mutterings from Group X, and only shared items and posts from Group Y. Even better I want to be able to have multiple feeds. Once this starts to happen, this could become a great tool to manage your attention data (ie see what you need to see at the right time).

In the meantime, if you are using specialised online services such as Twitter, Flickr, You Tube, Seesmic etc it is worthwhile keeping an eye on life stream aggregators (especially Friendfeed and Tumblr) and even worth trying with a small group of close friends.

On a separate note – I wonder when email will get integrated into this stream..

So you can now add your facebook friends to your windows live (or MSN) messenger account. (You can also add your msn messenger friends to facebook). I gave it a quick test and sure enough it pulled all my contacts out of Facebook and offered me the option of adding htem to my messenger account.

One problem.

It did not differentiate between those that already have a Messenger account; those that I am already connected to and everyone else.

Basically I have to spam all my friends asking them to sign up for Live Messenger, surely Microsoft can check who has a valid account or not? I am ignoring the fact my friends could be using Yahoo Messenger (whom I can also connect to using Live Messenger) – as I assume Yahoo will not let Microsoft check for a valid account.

Another major issue, is that it also only pulls in my main email address from Facebook – not my Live messenger account which I have filled out in my profile so anyone using this would connect to me using the wrong account anyway.

Oh dear.