TechnoCloud

You might be surprised to hear that the second biggest app store after Apple’s App Store is in fact, Getjar, a cross-platform aggregator of apps. It has over 50k apps on offer across 97% of phones and has had close to 1bn downloads of free and paid apps. It benefits from confusion over app availability and discovery and makes its money through referral fees from the app publisher.

Over 70% of its downloads are Java apps, with Nokia’s Symbian second with 12%.

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.

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.

Amid what Google describes as a potentially infinite web, the search engine has identified a landmark trillion meaningful URLs (unique URLs). This is quite some figure when you consider that they passed the billion mark only back in 2000.

The mind-boggling figure illustrates the challenge for search engines in trying to judge value among so many competitive sources of information and in an environment where there are both fair (white hat SEO) and foul (black hat SEO) means to present content.

Understandable is the emergence of social software to facilitate peer-review of content sources to better identify value. After all, value is in the eyes of the beholder, with part of that value derived from one’s own community.

The likes of Delicious and Friendfeed offer forms of community search both allowing you to apply search filters through your own network. From my experiments, I find these useful in finding quality content, but not for providing the comprehensive reach that the major search engines offer.

While Google uses your own search history data to improve search results, it does of course use the wider community through apportioning value to inbound links (what’s of value to the community is of value to you). That community is narrowed by attaching more value to links from related topic websites to better idenfity the kind of niche communities that you benefit from on social software.

As yet, neither offer the best combination of the personal and the comprehensive to find the ideal search mix for the individual. There remain challenges in key areas, such as privacy, simplicity, data portability and applying the right filters at the right times. Then we can start talking about finding that trillion-in-one URL.

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.

Here’s a chart based on threads on LinkedIn and VentureBeat that shows the hottest startups of Silicon Valley.  The usual suspects are represented and a few besides.  Worth a look.

Interesting post from Micropersuasion adding to the growing questioning of page views as a meaningful metric.

Given the growth in technologies, such as Ajax and even humble old Flash, which allow users to interact with page content without refreshing the page, the page view was already on questionnable ground - not that the industry could agree on how best to measure them in the first place…

Add to this the network effects of influencers that take an idea or brand and discuss it outside of the source site on their blog or social space and it challenges the traditional ad standard of ‘reach’ with an alternative measure ‘depth’ - although you should still look to measure the wider reach of a campaign from the wider network effects of ‘depth’.

I can see how the ‘depth’ argument works well for brands using online advertising and PR as ways to raise awareness, stimulate conversations and drive sales of their products.

It’s less clear for content publishers trying to monetise their content through advertising - how to charge and for what? Are unique users the metric, or are channel or site sponsorships the right model or are other models better suited to this space? Time will tell. It’s debatable how important page views were anyway in the wider world of stats and cost-per-click and cost-per-action advertising.

For content publishers non-intrusive ad-supported widgets may be a tool to monetise some of the depth and for wider network effects to be the PR that drives users back to the source content and widgets. 2007 is going to be an interesting year.

A recent Nielsen Useit column seems to confirm that the ‘1% rule’ is alive and well. He states that:

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

Although the percentages differ the numbers are echoed in a previous Guardian article that states the 1% rule arguing that:

It’s an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will “interact” with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.

The stats do of course vary depending on the nature of the community. Given the debatable copyright status of a large proportion of YouTube’s content, the numbers are more firmly skewed to those viewing rather than interacting and creating content. Whereas the video editing environment at the likes of Jumpcut and Motionbox has a higher percentage of users interacting and creating.

However, I predict that the 1% rule and its respective percentages will have to evolve as the nature of people’s level of interaction with online media evolves. With the increasing growth of multi-media personal publishing and interaction tools available the barriers to entry are rapidly reducing to creation and certainly interaction.

Challenges to the 1% rule

Take video editing community Jumpcut’s acquisition by Yahoo. As Yahoo begins to integrate Jumpcut’s software into their wider offering the prompts to remix and engage with media will increase in visibility and usage.

Likewise, Google announced in its deal with Warner Music Group that it was looking to facilitate user-generated content by allowing users access to Warner content ”for use in their creative user-generated productions”. That deal will be one of many.

As the social networking generation (which grows ever wider) continues to evolve, there is a whole body of users familiar with embedding and interacting with content and a growing body of tools for them to enable them to do so.

For businesses that monetise traffic, increased interaction with content equals increased traffic and increased new content which leads to more traffic - certainly firm commercial reasons to continue the trend.

Principles remain

Certain basic principles of the 1% rule will remain. There will remain a hard core of users that drive a community by investing considerable amounts of time in it. Equally there will remain a majority of lurkers surfing the community - time pressures, competing interests and familiarity with technology dictate that.

However, both the increasing ease of creating content and ease of interacting with it, mean that the 1% of creators and the 9-10% of interactors will grow putting the neat 1% rule in doubt.