Why 'Social Gmail' is no threat to Twitter or Facebook

February 8, 2010 —

[Word] leaked out today that Google would soon announce status updates to Gmail. The knee-jerk media reaction is to assume that Google is competing with, threatening the business of, or replacing Twitter or Facebook. "Watch out, Twitter and Facebook. Google is on your heels," proclaimed the Christian Science Monitor. Other sites spun the story similarly. But the idea is false. First it assumes that Twitter and Facebook are in any way similar, which they're not.

Twitter is a blogging service (a micro-blogging one, but a blogging service nonetheless). Its main purpose is one-to-many broadcasting to an unpredictable collection of humans who have decided to follow. Many Twitter users have zero, one or two followers. Many have tens or thousands. And a few have millions. Although one-on-on communication is possible on Twitter, most people broadcast to their followership, and then maybe use the "direct" Tweet function to follow up on what was broadcast.

Very, very few Twitter users have follower lists that in any way resemble their actual personal social group of family and friends. For example, I have more than 17,000 followers on Twitter, and I have no idea who most of these people are.

Meanwhile, Facebook is about exclusion. Facebook is the social space where, for most people, strangers aren't allowed. And users make an attempt to get every single friend and family member they can to "friend" them and make them part of the social network.

Facebook's friends list in fact do resemble actual personal social networks for many users.

So how on Earth could Gmail possible compete with both of these diametrically opposed approaches to social content?

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I keep forgetting that Yahoo! is so popular. 

The Pew Internet & American Life Project is one of seven projects that make up the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan, nonprofit "fact tank" that provides information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world. The Project produces reports exploring the impact of the internet on families, communities, work and home, daily life, education, health care, and civic and political life.

Two of Pew's current reports are

Social Media and Young Adults

by Amanda Lenhart, Kristen Purcell, Aaron Smith, Kathryn Zickuhr

Feb 3, 2010

Two Pew Internet Project surveys of teens and adults reveal a decline in blogging among teens and young adults and a modest rise among adults 30 and older. Even as blogging declines among those under 30, wireless connectivity continues to rise in this age group, as does social network use. Teens ages 12-17 do not use Twitter in large numbers, though high school-aged girls show the greatest enthusiasm for the application.

Internet, broadband, and cell phone statistics

by Lee Rainie

Jan 5, 2010

In a national survey between November 30 and December 27, 2009, we find:

74% of American adults (ages 18 and older) use the internet -- a slight drop from our survey in April 2009, which did not include Spanish interviews. At that time we found that 79% of English-speaking adults use the internet.

60% of American adults use broadband connections at home – a drop that is within the margin of error from 63% in April 2009.

55% of American adults connect to the internet wirelessly, either through a WiFi or WiMax connection via their laptops or through their handheld device like a smart phone. This figure did not change in a statistically significant way during 2009.

Email and RSS subscription alerts available. 

• Should You Be on Twitter?  (Readhead Writing)  Questions to ask yourself to decide. 
• The Ultimate Guide for Everything Twitter (Webdesigner Depot)  Outstanding place to start. 
• The Twitter Guide Book (Mashable)  Second place to go. 
• Help Resources / Getting Started (Mashable)  Third. 
• Guy Kawasaki 's notes for demonstrating Twitter.  Sorta idiosyncratic. 

And, search this very blog with "twitter," "microblogging." 

1. By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.
2. By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration.
3. Through 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail.
4. Within five years, 70 percent of collaboration and communications applications designed on PCs will be modeled after user experience lessons from smartphone collaboration applications.
5. Through 2015, only 25 percent of enterprises will routinely utilize social network analysis to improve performance and productivity.

Dartmouth folks can get the full report through our subscription here.

• For Beginners
• Finding Friends
• Keeping Followers
• Tweeting
• Developing Relationships
• Getting Value
• Snafus
• For Business
• Productivity and Organization
• Beyond Twitter

Very Interesting Social Media Statistics: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Linkedin and more…

by News Editor on February 1, 2010

The way we communicate online has gone through a sea-change over last few years – Infact, majority of netizens spend most of their time on social Media / Networking sites. Even though India Software companies are lagging behind in adoption of social media, others are flocking them in large numbers.

Twitter has been a rage over past 1 year, Facebook has become one of the most visited sites on the web, Professionals are flocking Linkedin and keep their profiles updated. Do you want to know the numbers behind these uber-popular social media sites?

EConsultancy recently published following mind-boggling statistics on their blog – Here is a peek into the numbers

Social Media Statistics

• Facebook claims that 50% of active users log into the site each day. This would mean at least 175m users every 24 hours.
• Twitter now has 75m user accounts, but only around 15m are active users on a regular basis.
• LinkedIn has over 50m members worldwide..
• Facebook currently has in excess of 350 million active users on global basis.Six months ago, this was 250m…This means over 40% growth in less than 6 months.
• Flickr now hosts more than 4 billion images.

Con't

January 29, 2010

Stop the World

Posted by George Packer

The other day, a copy of the new Baffler came in the mail. Back in the nineties, published out of Chicago and edited by Thomas Frank, The Baffler articulated an anti-cool sort of cool that appealed to young readers and writers on the margins of journalism and academia, subjecting the iconic brands of consumer capitalism to a quasi-Marxist critical scrutiny. During the Bush years it went out of business. Now it’s back, with a table of contents largely devoted to the economic crisis: a perfect moment for The Baffler’s kind of cultural criticism to be revived.

The writers are older, more established than before, the tone is more staid, and the presentation is defiantly old-fashioned. There’s even a blue nylon bookmark glued into the spine. “As the world careens one way we faithfully steer the other,” the editors state up front. “Print is dead, they say; we double down in our commitment to the printed word. Brevity is the fashion; we bring you long-form cultural criticism with an emphasis on stylistic quality.” A little like the appearance of Buckley’s National Review, whose original mission statement, back in 1955, declared that the magazine “stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

Buckley ended up riding history, and even guiding it. I’d like to believe that something with The Baffler’s anti-market world view could do the same. Anyway, I’m glad to see it back, and I’ll try to keep up with subsequent issues, even if I’m annoyed every second or third article by condescension or dogma.

The truth is, I feel like yelling Stop quite a bit these days. Every time I hear about Twitter I want to yell Stop. The notion of sending and getting brief updates to and from dozens or thousands of people every few minutes is an image from information hell. I’m told that Twitter is a river into which I can dip my cup whenever I want. But that supposes we’re all kneeling on the banks. In fact, if you’re at all like me, you’re trying to keep your footing out in midstream, with the water level always dangerously close to your nostrils. Twitter sounds less like sipping than drowning.

The most frightening picture of the future that I’ve read thus far in the new decade has nothing to do with terrorism or banking or the world’s water reserves—it’s an article by David Carr, the Times’s media critic, published on the decade’s first day, called “Why Twitter Will Endure.” “I’m in narrative on more things in a given moment than I ever thought possible,” Carr wrote. And: “Twitter becomes an always-on data stream from really bright people.” And: “The real value of the service is listening to a wired collective voice … the throbbing networked intelligence.” And: “On Twitter, you are your avatar and your avatar is you.” And finally: “There is always something more interesting on Twitter than whatever you happen to be working on.”

This last is what really worries me. Who doesn’t want to be taken out of the boredom or sameness or pain of the present at any given moment? That’s what drugs are for, and that’s why people become addicted to them. Carr himself was once a crack addict (he wrote about it in “The Night of the Gun”). Twitter is crack for media addicts. It scares me, not because I’m morally superior to it, but because I don’t think I could handle it. I’m afraid I’d end up letting my son go hungry.

I don’t have a BlackBerry, or an iPhone, or a Google phone, and I don’t intend to get an iPad. I’ve been careful not to mention this to sources in Washington, where conversation consists of two people occasionally glancing up from their BlackBerries and saying, “I’m listening.” I worry that I won’t be taken seriously as a Washington journalist, and phone calls from my retrograde Samsung cell phone will go unanswered. On Amtrak between New York and Washington I sit in the Quiet Car with my phone off, laptop stowed, completely unreachable, and find out if I’m still capable of reading for two hours. On arrival at Union Station, I find someplace to sit near the café in the lobby and get on its wireless network and check my e-mails, since I know that anyone canceling an interview at the last minute would have assumed I have a BlackBerry. More than once, out somewhere in the capital without the Internet, I’ve had to call home and ask my wife to log onto my e-mail account, just in case.

So I can hardly escape the demands of the throbbing networked intelligence, the nonstop nagging of the wired collective voice. Lately, I’ve begun to think—with real trepidation—that I’ll have to get a BlackBerry. I’m well aware that this is a perverse way to act like a political journalist and cover Washington. It’s like doing war reporting without a flak jacket or satellite phone. It’s a temporary and probably untenable compromise between the world of the work and the desire to protect my consciousness from it. Sooner or later, something will have to give. If it looks like I’m drowning, give a shout.

In fact, there is a reading list for nearly every learning technology, device, and tool--see here.