TechnoCloud

Facebook is expanding its Facebook Credits payments system across the site in a move to boost revenues from games and virtual goods.

Facebook first introduced a limted trial of its Credits system in in May 2009 as a way for users to buy e-goods from the Facebook gift store and a small number of third-party apps, but is now rolling this out to more app developers.

Facebook takes a 30% commission in line with Apple’s App Store commission.

With the rise in social gaming the virtual gifts economy this is a major revenue opportunity for Facebook. As Apple have shown in their App Store, making payments easy and people are much more likely to spend on digital content.

In the background is the battle to be the web’s micropayment engine. Many products are competing to unlock this potential goldmine, from early attempts at online currencies like Beenz (now closed), to retailers like Amazon, to eBay-owned Paypal and social networks, but surely the web is just too big?

As social networks, and Facebook in particular, increase their share of web usage their chance of having the kind of reach to become an ‘easier’ solution grows, but they will still be one among many.

Facebook is fast catching Yahoo and Google as US web users’ home on the web, having already overtaken MySpace and Microsoft in the past year. It has doubled in the past 6 months to nearly 30 billion total minutes usage, against Yahoo’s 40bn and Google’s just over 35bn.

And why? Mobile access is certainly a factor, but isn’t it just human psychology in that news is interesting, news about your friends even more so. Indeed perhaps it’s news about ’strangers’ that is a big factor in MySpace’s fall from 17.5bn to 8bn in a year.

Nielsen claims that the time spent on social media sites rose 82% in 2009 across the US, UK, Australia, Brazil, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain and Italy, with consumers spending more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009. Facebook accounted for an impressive 67% of social media users.

And with mobile access making it easier than ever to stay connected this trend is going to continue, in turn making social gaming an increasingly interesting opportunity with the right model. Balance against this Facebook reducing the visibility of most apps on their platform to combat abuse of the notification system.

There are endless debates in the industry about how to measure social media ROI and indeed even if you can or should. However, these almost exclusively focus on off-site activity on social networks, e.g. what benefits are there from a Facebook page or a Twitter profile.

What is missing are credible statistics that cover on-site social media functionality.

There are a multitude of white label social networks all promising to add varying degrees of social media functionality to your site from simple commenting, all the way to building a quasi social network around your site’s content. The problem is that case studies on the effectiveness of these types of functionality are very thin on the ground.

Specifically, what impact on traffic, site loyalty, ad returns is there by adding the likes of a forum, commenting, profiles, reviews, rating…?

There is the difficult question of how you separate the rating or comment from the post itself. However, you can track before/after introductions of functionality; likewise, you can track the activity on a forum as a separate section of the site. So where are the case studies?

I’ve seen a range of client testimonials from white label social networks, but these by their nature are cherry-picked examples to showcase a service. What we need are credible case studies from sites themselves and from media measurement firms to really demonstrate the case for social media ROI, something that would benefit the industry as a whole in terms of take up of these services.

If these case studies are already out there, great, link to them in the comments. If not, it’s time to start creating them.

In a sudden rush of originality and inspiration, I’m going to share surely the first ever list of 2008’s most popular posts!

10. Gearing up for something more useful
The awful pun in the title didn’t stop the traffic as this look back at Google Gears’ first year scraped into the top 10.

9. Google will see you now
One of my pet topics, visual search, made it into ninth as Google joined the innovators trying to unlock this most difficult and potentially lucrative of challenges in the search marketplace.

8. Adding Google Adsense on Wordpress.com
The painful move away from hosted Wordpress and then back again, did at least have some benefits. A list of handy advice for those contemplating similar folly and a coveted position in the top 10.

7. Google searches related to
Clearly I wasn’t the only one wondering where that appeared from…

6. Wii want cricket
Well, beach cricket did arrive only to disappoint, leaving one of the big questions unanswered for 2009 - when is the massive cricket diaspora going to get wii cricket?

5. Google plays the April fool
Always a ratings winner, this year’s April fools were mixed in terms of amusement value, but not in traffic value, cracking the top five.

4. BBC News video embed
It may be a post on a woefully out-of-date experiment, but with BBC iPlayer embedding still to appear the Google searches keep delivering the punters to this old post.

3. Build your own supermodel
Can there really be that many fans of Weird Science trying to build their own supermodel? It appears there are, as this old post continues to deliver.

2. Review of Chrome - the good, the bad and the too early
No surprise to see one of the stories of 2008 high up the list, as this not entirely postive review of Google’s Chrome browser made the top 2.

1. Lies, damn lies and social networking statistics
Everyone’s looking for them and Google keeps sending them to Technocloud to find them, helped no doubt by the catchy title. This post bemoaning the lack of decent social networking statistics, while offering up some of my own, pipped even Chrome to the top.

It’s been an interesting, challenging and exciting year. Best wishes to all for 2009.

A recent post seems to have struck a chord with Google with ‘Lies, damn lies and social networking statistics‘ currently among the top few positions on Google in a number of markets for the search term social networking statistics.

As an update, Wired claimed in March 2008 that MySpace had an average growth rate of 513%, moving from 20m users (2005) to 225m (2008), with Facebook’s equivalent figure 550%.

For me though, the interesting question is less the size of the overall market - we already know it’s big - but the next challenge of monetising those audiences. It’s somewhat ironic that in a sector where there is such richness of personal data, that ad targeting remains in its infancy and the low value network ad dominates.

So why is that and what’s holding back the full potential of the social networking ad market? Let’s summarise some of the key reasons:

• Concerns from advertisers about associating themselves with the uncertainties of user generated content.
• The shear size of the inventory available.
• Lack of relevancy of ads. It’s partly a technical challenge, but rightly, there are legal and privacy issues with processing user data as Facebook Beacon found out to their cost in having to scale back their ambitions.
• Mindset - are those surfing social networks in the right mindset to respond to advertising? Google Adsense works because it’s contextual and the better ads help task-orientated users solve a problem.
• Lack of innovative creative tailored to those environments.
• Leave your thoughts in the comments section.

These challenges can be at least partially addressed through ad targeting technology, informed consent from users and better data about what users respond to and what they don’t. Also the emergence of niche social networks offers more potential to provide advertisers with a targeted audience focused on a particular activity and in theory more receptive to relevant ads within that niche.

Get close to solving these problems and the really interesting statistics will be the financial ones…

Meaningful and detailed social networking statistics can prove elusive, certainly on the open net, so all the better to see a good summary of data from Facebook, MySpace and the lower profile Reunion on Jeremiah’s Web Strategy blog.

Perhaps the most interesting in the post is the Forrester prediction that Facebook will overtake MySpace in terms of registered users by end 2008. Feels about right until you look at the stats on display.

The stats claim 60m active users at present versus 110m for MySpace (but don’t state registered user numbers) - would it really double in a year given its high penetration in the key US market (85% of universities)? And yet, there’s the stat about active users doubling every six months, so it’s possible.

And what about MySpace’s likely growth, particularly when you consider one of the other statistics? Facebook’s average of 250k registrations a day versus MySpace’s 300k. Some catching up to do surely?

Brings to mind the old adage about the three types of lie: “lies, damn lies and (social networking) statistics”, as Jeremiah alludes to in a follow up post.

You have to wonder when you find sites like Fatdoor.  It describes itself as a:

fun and easy way to get to know your neighbors, create local communities and keep tabs on the neighborhood.

I can’t help but think there are more effective ways that involve less technology.  Maybe next we’ll see a social networking site that provides a fun and easy way of establishing a relationship with your children.

Another oh-so-handy reference list from the recently list obsessed Mashable, profiling the increasing ‘How to’ video niche.

While YouTube and its many clones try to be all things to all people, these How To sites are proving that there is a market for niche video communities. The best of these sites are more focused, easier to navigate and are proving themselves able to co-exist alongside the traffic phenomenon that is YouTube.

This trend carries over to the series of niche social networks that cater to every topic from the environment, to pets, to writing and everything in between, some more successfully than others, alongside the traffic giants of MySpace, Facebook and Bebo.

Let me be (ahem, among) the first to categorise this sector: social nicheworking. Let’s see how well that phrase catches on…

Every wonder what the world of social networking looks like as a map? No? Me neither.

However, if ever you do, a comic book artist has drawn this map which reflects relative audience sizes. Unfortunately, you can’t quite make out the TechnoCloud pixel - the map equivalent of a desert island with single palm tree…