I’ve recently been looking over the current stats for the way the global social networking pie is shared out right now (in terms of users – not other standards like monetization potential for example). Once again we see Facebook and Myspace ahead in countries like the US, UK, Canada etc with Bebo and Orkut also having considerable presence in other territories. I can’t help but notice also that while these social networks have enjoyed (or endured) fairly significant changes in their positioning in the past couple of years – one remains always roughly fixed in its modest but steadily growing position – LinkedIn.
Yes the social network – that kind of isn’t – at least in the sense that maybe we should…
Continue Reading »
Power.com, the recently launched social network aggregator which lets users easily transfer data and files from one network to another has had some tricky hurdles to overcome already since its November 2008 launch. There was a lawsuit and fallout with Facebook over privacy and data storage which was eventually resolved (though Facebook is not currently one of the networks accesible via Power) and now Myspace is the latest to take issue with Power’s use of its users’ data…
Myspace has blocked the aggregator from accessing its data for the latter’s decision not to use Myspace’s OAuth system for user logins, citing considerable (and valid) security concerns. The development leaves Power with only Orkut and Hi5 as its remaining significant networks, representing a considerable setback…
Continue Reading »
The folks at Facebook have had a busy week. They began with announcing a forthcoming data portability product called Facebook Connect, (which marks the abandonment of their fundamental ‘walled garden’ approach to user data management) and then went on to ban Google’s own data portability service (Friend Connect) from their Facebook API, stating a violation of terms of use as the reason.
Some bloggers and commentators have been contemplating if this might mark a new phase in the development of social networking, with the earlier co-existence of the main players now giving way to a more open tug-of-war for market share. After all, new user uptake is slowing down, and one way for social networking sites to continue to grow will…
Continue Reading »
