Web Trends & Strategies

Matthew Fraser and Soumitra Dutta, both working at INSEAD, have published a very interesting paper Social networking sites thriving in tough times in The Business Times, October 24, 2008.

In particular fallout of the global financial meltdown they observe a trend for people to adopt more widely Online Social Networking services.

for instance:

It would reasonable to predict that social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Plaxo, Ning – and even Facebook – will see their membership ranks soar in coming weeks and months as widespread insecurity drives people to connect with others to boost their social capital.

or

It may be hard to feel sorry for bonus-bloated investment bankers, but many are frantically dusting off their CVs and rushing to online social networks in the hope of repositioning their careers.

In this article, they make a reference to their new book:

Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom Matthew Fraser and Soumitra Dutta, November 2008, about How Online social networking will transform your life, Work and World.

In a blog posting, a company doing some website monitoring, has looked at 12 of the top social networks to answer a simple, but highly interesting question: Where are they the most popular?

The social networks they included in this survey were MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, Friendster, LinkedIn, Orkut, Last.fm, LiveJournal, Xanga, Bebo, Imeem and Twitter.

The results include a number of maps showing the level of adoption of different services around de world.

The conclusion:

As we already mentioned, this survey clearly shows that social networks are truly global affairs. It also shows that the geographic focus varies greatly between different social networks.

Read the post at: Social network popularity around the world; Pingdom AB, August 12, 2008

No, Facebook is not going in the third place, but is now coming first, as a Media Trend report seems to indicate.

It was sort of inevitable given Facebook’s monster growth over the last few years, but April 2008 was the milestone: Facebook officially caught up to MySpace in terms of unique monthly worldwide visitors, according to data released by Comscore and shown above. Both services are attracting around 115 million people to their respective sites each month.

see the original new here in TechCrunch.