Mashable

What Are the Top Social Networking Sites Globally?

January 25, 2009 By Des Walsh

I’m by nature a pretty trusting sort of person. But one of the effects of my having gone to China for a couple of weeks late in 2007 is that I can no longer look unquestioningly at a table of statistics about anything to do with the Internet.

Because so often the figures I read don’t seem to take account – or sufficient account – of the truly extraordinary amount of online activity in China.

Or indeed of activity focused on some other countries, such as, for instance, India and Brazil.

As a case in point, when scanning my feed reader today, I noticed a post from Mashable, headed “Top 20 Social Network sites, December 2008“.

Great! I thought. This will help me with a couple of presentations I have coming up over the next week or so.

Some of sites listed were familiar – household names you might say – others not so familiar or not at all. The problem was that there were sites I expected to see but weren’t there.

Here is the Mashable list in order of “topness” (you can see the detailed stats at their blog post):

MySpace.com
Facebook
Classmates Online
LinkedIn
Reunion.com
Windows Live Home
Club Penguin
AOL Community
Tagged.com
Flixster
Ning
Twitter.com
Imeem
Last.fm
MyYearbook
Bebo
hi5
meetup.com
Care2.com
Gaia Online

So where were, for example, Friendster and Orkut, ranked by Comscore in July last year just below hi5 but above Bebo?

The Mashable list is from Nielsen Online and is described as follows:

This is a custom list compiled by Nielsen Online PR, with help from our media analysts. While this list is not meant to be exhaustive, it should give you a good idea of the significant players in each space.

(Don’t know what the “in each space” means: the chart does not distinguish “spaces”.)

Does the absence of Friendster and Orkut mean that the measurements used by Nielsen excluded them, or is there a cultural or geographic or linguistic zone we are meant to understand as framing the Nielsen chart adopted by Mashable?

If you look from the perspective of Asia, Friendster, now in Japanese and Korean as well as Chinese and English, is hard not to notice – for example, Friendster is described by Singapore-based Nicholas Aaron Khoo as “the mother of all social networking sites”.

As for Orkut, it is apparently the most visited website in Brazil and the second most visited in India, thus no doubt accounting for its ranking by Comscore above bebo.

And I’m curious about where the China company TenCent’s QQ service ranks. According to a presentation written up on ReadWriteWeb last year, QQ with 300 million subscribers is significantly ahead of Facebook with only a fifth of that number at the time. Some might argue (as one commenter on the RWW post does, that as an IM service, QQ does not qualify as a social networking service), but I would love to find somewhere online some reasonably objective and detailed discussion of such issues and the basis on which “league table” lists are prepared.

What about Kaixin (a China “MySpace”), Tianji or Wealink (think Linkedin/business), Sina or Sohu (think Yahoo!). Where would they fit, or not, in a global league table?

And what would happen if revenue and or profitability were to be included as critera for “topness”? According to one source, QQ’s Qzone in China generated USD442 million revenie in 2007, as compared say to Facebook’s apparent revenue for 2007 of USD150 million: and of that QQ Zone figure, USD219.1 was profit – I don’t know whether Facebook made a profit but from what I’ve seen so far it did not. (Facebook revenue link via Techcrunch)

Whatever the details, I believe there is a bigger framework for discussion of “top” social networking sites than is indicated by tables such as that from Nielsen via Mashable. I’d like to see social media professionals asking more questions about the basis on which such tables are prepared, the underlying assumptions, what has not been covered, how the statistics have been gathered and processed.

The methodology.

In the interim, I hope that those who run “top whatever” lists will tell us whether we are to take those as being truly global, or – say – Anglophone or USA+Canada or whatever the underlying framework is. I don’t have a problem with some zones being excluded from a list: it would just be helpful to have an accompanying statement to that effect.

Is the Facebook Beacon Saga Really Over, or Don’t We Care About Privacy Anymore?

December 23, 2007 By Des Walsh

In November there was a brouhaha about Facebook’s Beacon innovation, which for a lot of people represented an unacceptable intrusion on privacy.

GigaOm saw it as “a privacy disaster waiting to happen”.

It looks to me as if we are concluding the year with, for practical purposes, Facebook off the hook, but the jury still out on the broader issues of social networking sites and privacy.

I must admit that, as I am a very intermittent user of Facebook and have lately had more than a few other things on my plate, it took me a while to figure out what all the fuss was about. But I felt there was something going on that I needed to know more about.

Today I finally got around to doing some research. My online searching indicated that the drama was intense in November and then fizzled out early in December. It also suggested that, while the Beacon story itself might not have legs, there were some bigger issues, about privacy and social networking sites, that had not by any stretch of the imagination been resolved.

There is a good explanation of what Facebook Beacon is and does, with illustrative screenshots, in a late November post on the New York Times blog, The Evolution of Facebook’s Beacon (via Jon Beattie).

On the privacy issue, the NY Times post reported:

Facebook executives say they do not want to add a universal opt-out button because then users would not be able to try out Beacon on different sites to see what it can offer. One Facebook executive predicts that consumers may “fall in love” with Beacon once they understand it.

On December 3, Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch provided an update with More Facebook Advertisers Bail From Beacon. Plus, New Concerns:

What has privacy advocates up in arms, and advertisers skittish, about Beacon is the way it seems to be spying on you as you surf the Web and then, on top of that, reporting what you just did to everyone you know.

Mashable and other sites reported that Facebook collects web user data not just on Facebook users but on others too.

A post on the Computerworld site points to the bigger picture of user tracking and privacy issues, in relation not just to Facebook but to social networking sites generally.

The controversy raised by the social networking site’s use of the Beacon technology has helped drag into the open the widespread but hitherto largely hidden problem of online consumer-tracking and information-sharing, according to privacy advocates.

On Read/Write Web on December 17, Josh Caton says now that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has apologized and Facebook has provided a global opt-out option, the Beacon “saga” is over.

That may be so, at least the “saga” bit, although I find Josh’s analysis somewhat Panglossian.

And I’m not sure whether I find Zuckerberg’s apology and “explanation” disingenuous or naive. If I was feeling unkind and lacking in Christmas sentiments of goodwill, I would say that, coming from one so young, it is depressing spin (yes, I harbour this romantic idea that young people are instinctively idealistic, no matter how much money is involved).

I simply don’t believe the privacy issues are resolved, not just for Facebook, but for social networking sites generally.

Nor do I believe the market will sort it out unaided or unguided. There are too many businesses wanting to mine and use every bit of data they can get on web user behaviour.

But while we are waiting for future developments, here’s how to block Beacon.

And while it might be “braces and a belt”, I’ve chosen also to activate the privacy option on my Facebook home page:

Click “privacy” on the upper right
Click “External Web Sites”
Check “Don’t allow any websites to send stories to my profile” and click “Save”.

As I understand, this just stops Facebook displaying your Web use data. It doesn’t stop third-party companies collecting the data and sending it to Facebook.

And if you trust them not to do anything improper with that data, fine.

I’m not so sure.