Myspace’s making a comeback…

... and it’s looking very promising.

A lot of feedback has been around the Pinterest-esque look and how sexy the video is making it out to be, but time will tell when we finally log-in and play with it (currently invite-only). Fingers crossed there will be some interesting integrations with Spotify and Soundcloud.

Facebook. Why it’s the Daddy of Social Media.

There’s been so much hype about social media in the last 12 months but beyond the hype lies some fascinating data. Twitter has been grabbing a lot of the media headlines, but it is important to keep some perspective around the relative scales of the social sites and in particular the continued growth of Facebook.

 
Above: Facebook dominates search trends. Whilst most rank sites by UBs and UVs, Facebook is the #1 site in the world in terms of time spent and search volume.

In 2008, Facebook did the unthinkable and overtook Google and YouTube for trending search volume. Since then it has continued its climb relentlessly. To put a relative scale on the graph above it is interesting to compare it with the spikes caused by Obama during election and inauguration. You quickly get the idea. Facebook has become a giant and shows no sign of slowing at present. In Australia over 5 million users spend an average of over 4 hours on the site each month, (compare that with less than an hour with Google).

Facebook Stats July 2009 (via Facebook):

International Usage

About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States

General Growth

More than 250 million active users

More than 120 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day

More than two-thirds of Facebook users are outside of college

The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older

User Engagement

Average user has 120 friends on the site

More than 5 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)

More than 30 million users update their statuses at least once each day

More than 8 million users become fans of Pages each day

Applications

More than 1 billion photos uploaded to the site each month

More than 10 million videos uploaded each month

More than 1 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each week

More than 2.5 million events created each month

More than 45 million active user groups exist on the site

Mobile

There are more than 30 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.

 

Posted by @eunmac

interesting

Info found from a friends blog  – I will keep identity secret! BUT;

Myspace secretly building webmail product

Hot off the press and all secret squirrels at this stage but Myspace are building a webmail product to rivel hotmail, Yahoo! mail, gmail etc. It’s a big step given that only 6% of users spend time with social networks mail products. But if users were to migrate to use their Myspace mail as their main account this would be huge for Myspace. Traffic would increase to perhaps double / trebble the current numbers and also increase dwell time massively giving them a huge advantage over Facebook.

Do you feel like you are being chased?

A very funny animation highlighting how hard it is being social these days

MySpace Australia Developer Launch

On Wednesday night I attended the launch for the MySpace developer platform. I was asked to create a simple application for the platform that gets the current users local postcode and retrieves from truelocal a list of businesses in the area according to five categories (Café’s & Restaurants, Clubs, Hairdressers, Bars & Pubs, Take Away Food). I then used jQuery to display the results in an accordion. All in all a fun learning experience and i’ve put together five points about why YOU should be thinking about writing apps for MySpace!

1. MySpace provides an easy to use JavaScript library that implements the OpenSocial API which makes it easy to read in a users data.

2. Porting an application written for MySpace to other social networking sites that follow the OpenSocial API should be a fairly trivial task.

3. They have a great online community of developers at http://developer.myspace.com

4. A rich REST API for server to server calls

5. At the moment the interface is quite young and undergoing rapid changes but in the future will allow for applications to tap deep into a users social graph.

Here are three things to be wary of when looking to develop MySpace Open Social apps.

1. Access to the full set of Open Social calls are only half implemented and interacting with a users friend network isn’t implemented.

2. Developing can be time consuming as a developer cannot test applications locally, they have to copy and paste the code into a web form and then submit it.

3. Access to popular JavaScript libraries will soon be limited once they implement “caja” (pronounced caha) a Google spec that attempts to make third party JavaScript safely interact with a clients browser when embedded into a site.  Although MySpace does promise access to the most popular libraries via a white list when creating an application so things shouldn’t be that bad.