Turns out that according to Shareaholic, Facebook is the number one source of referral traffic with 25.6% of the market share in December and 26.4% of the market share in January. Other sites such as StumbleUpon, Google and Twitter also contribute to the numbers.

Newcomer Pinterest is generating a good amount of referral traffic. According to a report from Shareaholic, this site is generating more traffic than sites like Google Plus, LinkedIn and YouTube put together.

In December, Pinterest had 2.5% of the market share while in January they contributed 3.6% of the referrals. This growth is especially impressive when you consider that in July last year they sent only a miniscular 0.17% of referrals.

StumbleUpon, which holds the second position for referral traffic had 6.5% of the market share in December, but has fallen to 5.07% in January.

Facebook and StumbleUpon’s relatively large share of traffic referrals has been corroborated by reports from StatCounter in the past.

Although Google Plus contributes a very small amount of the total share of referrals – just 0.22% – other Google sites such as Google news, Google Images and Gmail continue to be major sources of traffic.

The ACSI has been conducting yearly studies about the performance of various online media brands of portals, search engines, news and information sites etc. This year for the first time they have included social media sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Wikipedia in their study.

Much to everyone’s surprise, the popular social media sites have not been ranked too highly on the customer satisfaction index.

On a scale of 0-100 Facebook has scored just 64, MySpace 63 and YouTube 73 points. The less popular but steady, Wikipedia has scored 77 points.

Larry Freed Chief Executive of Foresee Results says, “Customer satisfaction is a combination of what you get and what you expect [from a website]. The business model of starting out free and ad-free, then turning your site into something else over time works somewhere in tech, but from the average consumer standpoint it doesn’t work.”

Facebook which has faced several changes over the years, and which includes a lot of ads and gaming services has not satisfied its customers very well. Users also have some reservations about some of Facebook’s policies regarding privacy issues.

Wikipedia on the other hand, which is not a commercial site has maintained a steady format, thus allowing customers to achieve a certain level of comfort while accessing it.

One glaring omission in the study is Twitter. The reason for this is the fact that most users access it through third party apps rather than through Twitter.com, thus making it difficult to to collect accurate results. However it is likely to be included in the study from next year.

Facebook with a score of 64 ranks even lower than the IRS, and is in the bottom 5% of private companies studied along with airlines and cable companies. According to Larry Freed, one reason why users keep going back to Facebook in spite of low satisfaction, is that they do not have a better alternative at present.

Among other online categories studied, Google is at the top of the search engines with 80 points, but it has fallen 7 points since the previous study. While Bing which has been satudied for the first time, has 77 points followed by Yahoo! with 76 points, AOL with 74 points and Ask.com with 73 points.

Among the news categry Fox News was at the top with 82 points while MSNBC.com had 74 points and CNN.com had 73 points.

Facebook accounts for nearly half the traffic generated from social networks and other social media sites, contributing to 48% of the total. The next largest referrer is StumbleUpon, which sends 25% of the total social media traffic. Twitter ranks third and accounts for 10% of the traffic sent from social sites.

Top 7 Social Media sites that referred traffic to global websites in Jan – Mar 2010.

StatCounter has arrived at these figures after analysing 13 billion page views from all their member sites. Their CEO, Aodhan Cullen, says, “From a business perspective the findings suggest that there is merit in having a corporate Facebook page or Twitter account.”

Quite surprisingly, StumbleUpon has managed to remain the second largest driver of social media traffic through the last year. In the U.S.A; it was the topmost source of social traffic in March.

YouTube, reddit, Digg and MySpace are next in line, in terms of driving traffic, with 6%, 4%, 2% and 2% contribution to total social media referrals respectively.

However, Cullen warns that the social media market is known to fluctuate quite sharply and during the last Christmas and New Year season, Facebook was not only at the top but accounted for almost 75% of the traffic referrals.

Last year, the top three slots were occupied by StumbleUpon, Facebook and MySpace, in thet order.

Now, with the recent introduction of Annotations and @anywhere by Twitter and the ‘Like’ button by Facebook the situation could change all over again.

A survey of 22,000 US consumers conducted by BIGresearch shows that consumers are increasingly expressing a negative attitude towards mobile marketing.

The percentage of people who are not in favour of mobile marketing has grown since June 2008.

67% of consumers surveyed said they dislike text ads, up from 64% in 2008. 60% dislike voicemail ads, also up from 57% in 2008. And 60% dislike video ads, up from 56% in 2008.

In fact, 52% of consumers surveyed actually felt that mobile marketing is an invasion of privacy. This number too is up from 2008.

The majority of users expressed the view that marketers should take prior permission before sending any such ads to consumers.

These findings are sure to give some sleepless nights to mobile marketers, who must now find a way to get their ads across to users without upsetting them, as that would defeat the whole purpose of advertising.

On a more general note, it was found that the mobile marketing audience consists of 58% males. The average age of these users is 39.2 years. These users also tend to access social networks in large numbers. 38% use Facebook, 23% use MySpace and 13% use Twitter on a regular basis.

The latest statistics, collected by Brian Solis of Google Ad Planner, and published on Information is Beautiful, show that women also dominate the social web.

While the numbers seem to be more or less equal on a few of the social sites like LinkedIn, DeviantArt and YouTube, it has been found that the men are far outnumbered by the number of women on most of the other sites like Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter, MySpace etc.

The percentages of women using some of the popular social sites are as follows:

The only site on which men were found to outnumber women was Digg, which has 4.7 million more men (64% of the user base).

While there will definitely be those who say that women dominate the social Web because women often have more time to spend on unimportant matters, like chatting with their friends, because more women stay at home all the time as compared to the number of men, it is also very possible that women spend more time on social networks than men because they are the ones who really care about people and like to nurture and strengthen relationships.

Whatever the reasons for this difference, these demographics will certainly be very useful to marketers, as they give a very good indication of what sort of products and campaigns should be displayed on the social networks in order to get good conversion rates.

According to comScore research, the total number of ad impressions on all social sites put together accounts for 21.1% of the total online ad displays in the U.S.

The most popular social sites, MySpace and Facebook, together received the vast majority of ad impressions. Individually, MySpace received 9.2% and Facebook received 8.2% of all online ad impressions.

Less popular sites like Tagged.com, Hi5, Bebo, Classmates.com and many others account for the remaining 3.7% of all online ad impressions. Each of them receives about 0.1% of the total, with the exception of Tagged.com which has 0.6% and MocoSpace.com which has 0.2%.

The popularity of social networks has increased rapidly in the last few years, so it is quite natural that advertisers would try and make use of this medium to reach the maximum possible target audience. Another motivating factor for using the social networks is the high reach and frequency of usage among target segments against low costs .

Jeff Hackett, Senior VP at comScore, says, “Social media is becoming an increasingly attractive vehicle for major advertisers seeking to optimise campaign reach and frequency, and small advertisers desiring to reach a highly targeted audience.”

One should, however, note the fact that although the number of ad impressions on social sites is over 20%, the actual number of clicks and conversions received from social networks could be significantly lower. If that is the case, social networks are no more than excellent branding channels.

In May 2009, the two social networks were running neck and neck, but in June Facebook has left MySpace far behind. Facebook registered 77 million unique visitors in the month, up from 70.8 million unique visitors in May.

On the other hand, MySpace, which had 70.25 million unique visitors in May, dropped to 68.4 million unique visitors in June.

The rise of Facebook in the U.S. has been quite steep. In May the popular social network gained 2.8 million unique visitors, while in June the figure was close to 7 million.

By comparison, MySpace lost 700,000 unique visitors in May and a further 4 million unique visitors in June.

Similar trends seem to be replicated on a worldwide scale. In India, for instance, MySpace had 848,000 unique visitors in May while Facebook had 6.4 million unique visitors.

MySpace, which is under a new management, has laid off around two thirds of their international staff in countries where it is not doing too well.

In spite of the steep drop in the number of unique visitors, MySpace still gets a larger number of page views, than Facebook in the U.S. but even that may change soon.

In June MySpace had 32.4 billion page views which is 10% less than what they had in May. In contrast, Facebook had had 21.3 billion page views in June, which is 12% more than they had in May.

On a worldwide scale, MySpace had 38 billion page views compared to 47.4 billion page views a year ago, while Facebook had 44 billion page views in April last year and a whopping 87 billion page views in the same month this year.

Facebook has achieved 250 million members now and is still growing at a great speed. This figure has doubled up from what it was only a year ago.

It looks as though they are all set to continue growing still further, with innovations such as Facebook Connect, which is competing not only to other social networks but also to Twitter and Google Friend Connect.

The Mobile Search Benchmark is a means of ranking mobile search providers, with regards to five different criteria. They are, discoverability, readiness, availability, response time and consistency for a search operation carried out through a mobile handset.

Only the larger, better-known search providers have been considered for this survey. The selection was based on comScore’s Expanded Search Query Report published in July 2008.

Nine companies were selected for this survey: Yahoo!, Amazon, Ask, Google, AOL, Craigslist, eBay, MySpace and MSN. Facebook was not included in this survey, as their mobile web applications did not meet the technical requirements of this study.

To ensure a uniform playing field for all participants, a predetermined task was set out, with a fixed set of steps to be used while performing the search operation on each participating provider. One had to first navigate to the home page of the mobile web site, type a search query, and then click on ‘search’. The search results page would then be displayed and would show the search result obtained for that specific query, which were then graded.

According to the study, Yahoo! has currently been ranked the best site for mobile search operations. The provider rankings within individual categories were as follows:

Discoverability

Ability of a consumer to discover the location of a company’s mobile site on the Web.

1. Google
   MySpace
   Yahoo!
2. AOL
   eBay
   MSN
3. Amazon
4. Ask
5. Craigslist

Readiness

Ability of the mobile web site to be rendered on popular mobile devices.

1. Ask
   eBay
   Yahoo!
2. Amazon
   AOL
   Craigslist
   Google
   MSN
3. MySpace

Availability

Percentage of successful transactions out of the total number of transaction attempts.

1. Google
2. Amazon
3. Craigslist
4. eBay
5. Yahoo!
6. MySpace
7. AOL
8. Ask
9. MSN

Response Time

Time required to download each page in an entire multi-step transaction.

1. Amazon
2. Google
3. Craigslist
4. Ask
5. Yahoo!
6. AOL
7. MySpace
8. MSN
9. eBay

Consistency

Standard deviation of the response time of completed transactions

1. Amazon
2. Craigslist
3. Google
4. Ask
5. Yahoo!
6. AOL
7. MySpace
8. eBay
9. MSN

Overall Ranking

1. Yahoo!
2. Google
   Amazon
   Ask
3. AOL
   Craigslist
   eBay
4. MySpace
5. MSN

The research also measured performance of mobile sites in other industry verticals. AirTran was found to be the highest ranked mobile airline site and Bank of America was ranked top for mobile banking.

Overall, though, the results indicated that mobile websites are 30% less efficient than traditional Internet sites.

Data collected by Hitwise during the month of February 2009 shows that the maximum downstream visits from Twitter went to Google (5.20% of downstream traffic share) followed closely by visits to Facebook (5.11%). Twitpic (3.43%), MySpace (3.19%) and Twitter Search (1.98%) followed at 3rd, 4th and 5th places respectively.

Next in line were Yahoo! Mail (1.91%), YouTube (1.88%), Twitter Support (1.80%), Gmail (1.79%) and Yahoo! (1.29%) in order of downstream traffic share.

The high percentage of traffic driven to search engines could be due to users searching for details on topics of interest that they read about on Twitter. For example, when a user sees a number of Tweets about an event, the first impulse would most likely be to go to a search engine like Google to find out more about it.

Further analysis of the categories of post-Twitter visits shows that 40% of users went across to computer and internet sites such as social networks, search engines and email services.

Entertainment sites such as those related to photography and multimedia are visited by less than 20% of users, while less than 10% of users go from Twitter to lifestyle sites such as blogs, personal websites or news and media sites.

Far more users were found to go to social networks and entertainment sites from Twitter than they do from search engines, other social networks and email services.

On the other hand, fewer people go from Twitter to search engines, email services, business and finance sites and shopping and classified sites than they do from search engines, social networks and email services.

These details seem to indicate that Twitter is used like most social networks are, and while Twitter can be effectively used by content owners to distribute their content, it might not be the best channel to drive new business.

Doug Anmuth, who is an analyst at Barclay’s, believes that Google is re-evaluating their deal with MySpace. The current deal between the two companies requires Google to pay $900 million to MySpace over a span of three and a half years, which end only in mid 2010.

Google has not been able to reap the expected financial benefits from this deal so far and it seems very likely, given the current worldwide economic climate, that they may decide to pull out of an unsatisfactory partnership.

In fact, if one takes a closer look at some of Google’s recent financial decisions, it is quite obvious that the search giant is protecting its margins by making some not-so-subtle changes in their policy as regards distribution deals. They are being more prudent where spending money is concerned.

The past few months have seen Google let go of a potential mobile search partnership deal with Verizon Mobile to avoid competing on price and margins with Microsoft. They also did not renew their toolbar distribution deal with Dell and have allowed Microsoft to happily walk in on what was previously Google territory.

Since Google is firmly established as the search market leader, they do not really need to get distribution deals at any cost. This is probably a wise decision for now.

Microsoft, on the other hand, is trying very hard to increase market share in search operations. If Google disengages from the deal with MySpace, Microsoft might swoop in to take their place, even at a higher price than such a deal would be worth.

A recent story run on TechCrunch says that according to trusted but anonymous sources, AOL is planning to sell Bebo as its performance has been far below expectations.

Both AOL and Bebo have denied this, saying “there is no truth to this rumor”.

According to sources, when AOL bought Bebo last March, Bebo was marketed as a clever startup that was able to win over ad agencies and clients by presenting itself very well. Ad agencies convinced their clients that they must get on to Bebo, which was growing more popular by the day in the relatively new social network market.

When AOL saw this, they obviously felt that it would be a wise move to buy Bebo, and accordingly they did so on March 13 2008 for $850 million.

Time, however, proved that Bebo did not perform as well as expected. While Bebo is popular in the U.K. with 10.5 million users, its worldwide user base is just 22.6 million.

Facebook’s meteoric rise in popularity is the biggest factor contributing to Bebo’s failure. That, and the fact that singular social networks are no longer as popular as they were, due to the growing popularity of the open social platforms is partly responsible for this. The current economic climate makes the performance of the company look even poorer. While Facebook is believed to have earned $250 million last year, and MySpace much more than that, Bebo has managed only $20 million.

A spokesperson at Bebo, however, rubbishes the rumors of a possible sell off by AOL, saying that Bebo has launched a new tool, Social Inbox, just last month. It is doing very well and will allow users to read emails from various sites and also access other social services like Twitter and Flickr. It will also integrate AOL’s instant messaging service. AOL is also reportedly planning further expansion with Bebo.

Only time will tell whether the rumors turn out to be true or not.

The new system, called Facebook Connect, connects Facebook users to other websites. Through Connect, it is possible for a user to see what his contacts are doing on other sites. The contacts in turn can also see what that user is doing.

Connect is Facebook’s way of keeping up with other social sites like MySpace, which have already launched similar services. News of the service broke earlier this year, though this is the first official announcement from Facebook.

This new service will be able to ensure that Facebook is the only site its users have to be logged into in order to be able to access any other site of their choice.

To start with Facebook users will be able to connect with Discovery channel, Digg, video site Hulu and The San Francisco Chronicle. Gradually other sites will also be accessible through Connect after Facebook has verified how these sites will use the data collected about its users, thus taking care of the privacy concerns of users.

Details of the service are rather sketchy, and as CNet News points out, user privacy concerns have not been addressed in the announcement.
These new tools on Facebook and MySpace will eventually allow people to get together (without actually doing so), to do various things such as watch a videos or news and also chat about it at the same time.

Facebook executives hope that as more and more such facilities are offered through the social network, more users will use them and that in turn will attract advertisers, thus helping the site to earn good revenue. They might face some serious competition from Google, though, as their OpenSocial platform aims for the same objective, and seems likely to win as more people use Google and Google’s open policy might be more appealing in the long run than Facebook’s closed doors.

FaceTime Communications has been conducting studies through NewDiligence, measuring the impact of social media. Employees at the companies surveyed responded by emphatically stating that they have a right to download whatever applications they choose, to help them do their job.

Employees in 60% of the companies considered under this study, were found to be using 8 or more applications from the social medium.

Frank Cabri, Vice President of Marketing and Product Management at FaceTime says, “This year’s study reveals [that employees'] social media habits have extended into the workplace and may be contributing to security and data leakage incidents.”

51% of employees surveyed said they visit social media sites in relation to their work at least once a day. 73% of IT managers said they have to deal with at least one security incident, such as viruses, Trojans, worms or spyware due to the use of social media sites, amounting to about 34 such incidents per month.

Employees are also known to use the social media sites for personal purposes while at work. While LinkedIn is most commonly used social network for work, YouTube, Facebook and MySpace are frequently accessed for personal use.

It goes without saying that companies have to spend time and money to repair malware attacks and corporate data leaks caused by the use of Web 2.0 and social media applications by their employees. On an average it takes about 22 IT employee hours to repair one incident. At an average of $70 pay scale, this amounts to over $50,000 wasted per month. The cost involved for larger organisations is estimated to be in the range of $125,000 per month.

In 2008, 93% of all the companies surveyed had employees using social media applications, compared to 85% just a year ago. Surprisingly, only about 40% of the respondents claimed that they monitored and managed applications such as P2P communictions software, and only 25% of respondents bothered to secure Web 2.0 applications.

Needless to say, IT managers and employees are often at loggerheads with each other over the use of these social media sites.

FaceTime Report on the Collaborative Internet

Interestingly though, a couple of days after the FaceTime study was released, a study by Demos found that attempts to control employees’ use of such software could damage firms in the long run by limiting the way staff communicate. This could leave employers facing a conundrum – should they ban social networking in the workplace or not?

Facebook also continues to hold the honour of being the fastest growing social network in the world. As of June this year, they had 132 million unique visitors, having grown by 153% in the last year.

Hi5 has also done very well with 100% growth, and Friendster has shown 50% growth in the same period of time. Orkut and Bebo are next in line, with a 41% and 32% growth rate respectively. MySpace, which has shown only 3% growth, seems to pale in comparison.

comScore also provided details of the growth of social networking by geographic distribution. The 131 million North American users of social networks signalled a growth of just 9%, compared to the 35% growth rate, which pushed the user base to 165 million visitors across Europe.

Asia continues to be the largest social network user base, combined with the Pacific Islands. There are 200 million social network users in the region, and this number continues to grow, having already grown 23% year-on-year.

In most places outside of North America and the UK, Facebook was an almost unknown entity a year ago. However, now that they have launched versions in a number of other languages, they have started doing well, especially in Europe, where the network grew over 300%, which is surely one of the major factors contributing their growth.

Even now, there is still a lot of scope for further improvement. As mentioned last week, Facebook and MySpace are not doing too well in Japan, in spite of the former’s 458% growth in the Asia Pacific region.

In fact, according to a post on TechCrunch, a local social network, Mixi.jp, has beaten both of them, and is currently the 6th most popular site in Japan, while MySpace is way behind at number 95 and Facebook does not even figure in the top 100 list.

It is not as if the Japanese are not inclined towards social networks, but it is essential for these sites to adapt to the social and cultural customs of the region.

If these networks think that whatever is appreciated in Western society will be accepted all over the world they are wrong!

In Japan, for instance, far more importance is given to the community as a whole, than to an individual, and security concerns are very important. Facebook for instance, advocates the use of real names and photographs in their profile, which is not a very welcome idea in Japan.

Also Facebook’s translations leave a lot to be desired and most of the third-party apps on Facebook are useless to the Japanese who are not fluent in English. Another major issue could be the absence of blogs on Facebook, which are a big draw in Japan.

Mixi, on the other hand, has been able to meet the demands of the Japanese culture and hence it is doing very well.

MySpace and Facebook opened up to the Japanese market 3-4 years after their respective launches in the U.S. In the meanwhile, Mixi has had plenty of time to established itself and has now turned into a $1 billion company, unhindered by competition from these international giants.

The absence of mobile optimised versions of Facebook and MySpace on Japanese handsets could also have been yet  another cause for their failure, as Japanese consumers use the mobile Web far more than consumers in the US, UK or Europe.

It so happens that Japan has one of the largest online advertising markets in the world, which is incentive enough for these social networks to go out of their way to establish themselves there.

Facebook has now decided to take matters in hand, and redesign their site to make it look simpler and cleaner, while still giving clients control over their profiles. The new design is due to be launched sometime this month, and as a preview, they have already started releasing some new screenshots. They have also launched two new metrics, on a 7 day and 30 day basis, which will allow them to gauge the effectiveness of the applications on weekly and monthly basis.

These changes will eventually result in a better and faster Facebook.

In effect they will be offering their clients, a variety of tabs, such as Applications, Newsfeed etc. which will allow the client to show only whatever part they wish to, at a given time, instead of showing everything at once, and thus cluttering up the page.

They hope that being able to reduce the clutter from their site, will help them to entice more users, or at the very least, please their existing customers and keep them on the site for longer periods of time.

However they will have to keep in mind the fact, that as long as they continue to allow third party apps developers, their page will continue to keep getting flooded with new stuff, at least some of which, will be nonsensical and spammy. At the same time it is imperative for them, to relay some ads to their customers, from time to time, in order to remain commercially viable.

Customers have been requested to send their feedback to profilespreview@facebook.com. Facebook will evaluate these suggestions and incorporate them if possible in their new design.

http://www.facebook.com/FacebookPreviews

In the process of improving their market share, they have indirectly helped Google Video, because they work together. By itself Google Video accounts for barely 4% share of the market.

YouTube’s positive growth has obviously occurred at the expense of other sites. Their nearest rival, MySpace, which commanded a healthy 16% of the market last year, has fallen to just about 9% this May, while even Google Video has fallen from 7.8% to 3.73% in the space of one year. Yahoo! Video, which was always a small player, holding only 2.77% of the market share last year, has fallen to just 1.92% this year.

In fact Veoh, which has the smallest market share in the top 5 category, is the only one other than YouTube, to have shown a positive move from 0.86% to 1.13% which is almost 32% better than their performance last year. This must be at least part of the reason why television network ABC have recently decided to enter into a distribution deal with them.

Further information from Hitwise shows that the total number of people visiting video sites has reduced by 9% compared to last year, and presently accounts for only 1.14% of all visits to the Internet. At the same time, those who do visit the video sites, seem to be spending more time there, as there has been an increase of 6% in the total number of hours that are being spent, watching online videos. 82% of YouTube clients, and 64% of MySpace clients, have been going back to the same site repeatedly.

Whether YouTube’s huge lead in the video market will stifle creativity and innovativeness remains to be seen.

It actually began in April, when the two were running neck and neck, with Facebook having 116.4 million unique visitors and MySpace having 115.7 million. But in May, the difference was quite decisive with Facebook having 123.9 million visitors, and MySpace having 114.6 million visitors.

In terms of percentage, Facebook is 6% higher than its previous months figures, while MySpace has actually lost 1% of visitors. Year on year, Facebook has grown 162% from 47.2 million visitors last May, while MySpace has grown only 5%, from 109.5 million visitors last May.

Also the number of page views worldwide, was 50.7 billion for Facebook, and only 45.4 billion for MySpace.

However, there is hope for MySpace to pick up lost ground, as they have launched their redesigned site only a few days ago, which clients should find easier to use.

Facebook has also been talking about redesigning, but nothing has been done yet.

While these are worldwide figures, in the U.S., which remains the largest ad market, MySpace continues to lead, with a huge margin of 73.7 million unique visitors, against 35.6 million for Facebook. These figures for MySpace are 2% higher than in the previous month, while Facebook has shown no significant change between April and May, and will thus have to try hard to catch up with its biggest rival.

Worldwide figures of other social networks, for the month of May, show that they are nowhere near the top two, with Hi5 having 49.6 million, Friendster having 38.1 million, Orkut having 32.2 million and Bebo having 25.1 million unique visitors respectively.

According to Balogh, they are “rewiring Yahoo! from the inside out, to create a development platform at Yahoo! that will literally open up all of the assets of Yahoo! to developers across the Web in a way that [they] have never done before.”

The open strategy aims to make the consumer experience throughout Yahoo! a social one. As a first step towards doing so, they have invited a select group of developers to start using SearchMonkey – the Yahoo! Open Search project that was officially launched in February.

Yahoo! SearchMonkey

TechCrunch has provided a detailed write up about creating applications and enhanced search results with SearchMonkey.

Y!Open, the first stage of this strategy is due to launch sometime later this year. The overall strategy, though, is not limited to just search. It aims to open up all parts of Yahoo! such as Yahoo! Mail, Frontpage, MyYahoo!, Mobile and others.

All these services will be available through a single unified profile, and Yahoo! Mail will be its centerpiece. This way all existing customers from its various sites will automatically be integrated into the new social area, instead of having to sign up for multiple sites.

A central application platform will be the base on which developers can host or hook in applications. Current APIs will be developed further, along with OpenSocial, so developers can build more applications and distribute them across the Yahoo! spectrum.

Yahoo! Application Platform (Y!AP) is also due to be launched soon and is expected to give direct competition to the Google App Engine. Y!AP will allow developers to host a certain number of applications for free. Developers will be able to move data from within the network to other networks. E.g. The Yahoo! contact list could be integrated with Plaxo.

Eventually all of Yahoo!’s properties will be amalgamated into one macro social site and this will optimize usage of its underutilized social graph. This will be a rewiring of Yahoo!’s properties in a big way. The idea is to make it easier for users to share information with other users on other sites and thus keep up with social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

No definite time frame has been set for all these initiatives, so only time will tell how much of this will actually occur and whether it will really be serious competition to Google. Talks of these open initiatives have been heard off and on since last September. Critics think the new announcement are just futile attempts from Yahoo! to try and maintain their foothold in the market. One also wonders if all this will make any difference to Microsoft’s takeover plans.

According to this study, 20.8 million Internet users in the U.K. have visited at least one of the 10 most popular social media websites in January 2008, accounting for 63% of the country’s online population. Compared to 17.1 million (42%) visiitors in January 2007, the figure represents a 21.6% growth in popularity of social media.

YouTube has overtaken Wikipedia, to become the new most popular social media website. Also Facebook and Slide, which were nowhere in the top 10 list last year, are now prominently figured in it at position 3 and 7 respectively, while Friends Reunited and Google Video which were in the top 10, have slid down to 16 and 14 respectively.

Social media sites that started out as a tiny part of the Internet have grown to become its main lifeline, which is proved by the fact that about two thirds of online Britons visit these sites.

Last year’s stars MySpace and Bebo, which was acquired by AOL today, have lost favour with UK audiences. Facebook is the most popular social network, but it too seems to be loosing its glamour as its growth has reportedly slowed down.

Social network PerfSpot, instead took the top spot as the fastest growing social media site, having grown by 713% in the last 9 months, which is even more than Facebook’s 712% over the last year.

Six of the fastest growing 10 sites are video sites, of which vidShadow has grown by 639% in just 2 months from November 2007. While most of the social media sites in the top 10 ranking are networks, the video sites are the fastest growing, which means they could even overtake the networks during the course of 2008. With the rapid improvements seen in video technology and easy accessibility, video sites seem to hfave become the hot favorite in the U.K.

MySpace Mobile had primarily been a service based on subscriptions available to Helio and AT&T subscribers until now. However, the new version will work on all the networks in US. MySpace users will be able to carry out the normal functions such as sending and receiving messages and friend requests, searching for friends, updating blogs, posting bulletins and commenting on pictures.

In the initial stages, the ads will be in the form of banners and sponsored links. In due course, MySpace will focus on targeted advertising and location based ads.

The launch can be seen as an initiative by Fox Interactive to expand the reach of MySpace and step up to the competitive threat posed by Facebook. Social networking sites are increasingly being banned in educational institutes and work places. This has prompted users to turn to their mobile handsets to access these sites. In addition, the number of mobile Internet users accessing social networks from their phones while on the go has increased significantly. MySpace wants to tap into this mobile user base with this new ad-funded version of their site.

So what does News Corp gain with this acquisition? If the rumors are substantiated, this acquisition could be used to retain and regain both users as well as readers. This is possible through an integrated incorporation of news content in LinkedIn and layering its network’s features on the online site of Wall Street Journal. The declining business classifieds of Wall Street Journal and its other newspapers can also be bolstered by this acquisition. News Corp’s move has quite an advertising potential.

News Corp is recently attracting marketers with the launch of more in house ad network tools through its acquisition of MySpace.

Social networking sites are fast becoming one of the most sought after media distribution channels. In this light, the integration of Wall Street Journal and LinkedIn by News Corp can be a positive step forward.

LinkedIn would definitely gain more mainstream attention through this merger. However comparisons are inevitable with that of the acquisition of MySpace. To begin with, LinkedIn users are not as active as those of MySpace and the traffic is less. But on the other hand, the users of LinkedIn belong to a select professional group with steady incomes. All in all, in order to cash on this new acquisition and give some competition to Facebook, News Corp should think of technologically upgrading LinkedIn. A few more social features will be a nice idea, because there might be more potential in a site that offers more than just an educational and professional background of a person.