• DriveMeCrazy Wants You to Complain About Bad Drivers
    With the average commute approaching 25 minutes according to the American Time Use Survey, Americans are spending more time behind the wheel than ever. Unsurprisingly, a new wave of social networks is focusing on the experience of driving, enabled by increasing penetration of smartphones equipped with GPS and voice recognition capabilities. Also unsurprisingly, the networks hope to capitalize on a nearly universal demand to vent anger at bad drivers.
  • Creepy Is as Creepy Does, Mama Always Said
    In a finding which surprised only marketers, a new Gallup poll has revealed that most of the American public supports the idea of a "Do Not Track" registry akin to the "Do Not Call" registry limiting telemarketing. 67% of those surveyed said they don't want marketers to be able to track their online behavior; 61% said they don't believe it's worth being tracked even in return for free access to online content. This isn't the only area where online media appears to be out of step with the general public. Although I don't have any polling data about Facebook's use …
  • Enterprise Social Media Set to Surge
    One of the interesting but (so far) often unnoticed aspects of the social media boom is the rapid growth of proprietary social networks established by businesses to facilitate online collaboration. While still a relatively small subset of the social universe, "enterprise" social media is expanding at a double-digit pace according to Gartner, which sees worldwide spending on enterprise social media software jumping 14.9% from $578.2 million in 2009 to $664 million in 2010. Looking ahead, Gartner sees spending on enterprise social media software increasing another 15.7% to $769.2 million in 2011.
  • Social Media Leads to Divorce? B.S.
    One of the new pastimes on the Interwebs is attempting to link social media to all manner of social ills, from premarital sex and drug use among teens to huge losses in economic productivity to Justin Bieber. While I won't deny that social media may have some unintended negative impacts, most of these fear-mongering reports turn out to be false alarms. In the latest iteration, chronic worriers and their friends in the news media are warning that social media is leading to divorce. Except, it isn't.
  • Facebook Revenues Hit $2 Billion in 2010
    Mark Zuckerberg is Time's Person of the Year, and he has the cash to prove it, as Facebook is on track to collect $2 billion in revenues in 2010, according to Bloomberg -- most of it from online advertising and the sale of virtual goods by casual game partners like Zynga. That's more than twice Facebook's estimated 2009 revenues of $800 million-ish; it also represents a significant upward revision of earlier estimates pegging 2010 revenues at around $1.5 billion.
  • Whither Profitability, Twitter?
    Venture capitalists continue to throw money at social media, with the vague hope hope that some of it will stick. Most recently, Twitter announced today that it has raised another $200 million from venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and a number of other investors. That brings total capitalization to $360 million, and gives Twitter an overall value of $3.7 billion -- but the $64,000 question is, when can investors expect a return on their money from the microblogging service, founded in July 2006?
  • The Cult of Zuck
    We've watched as Mark Zuckerberg took his first public steps, like a baby fawn stumbling away from its mother (and remember how that turned out for Bambi?), from his digital womb to his ascendance as an awkward dot-com wunderkind, to a totally less awkward mogul. Now a Time magazine Person of the Year (the youngest since Charles Lindbergh in 1927 -- way back when the honor was still called Man of the Year and people still read the story in the magazine instead of the Huffington Post synopsis), the 26-year-old, whether he wants it or not ("I usually don't like …
  • Can Location-Based Nets Woo Women with Privacy?
    Google has launched Latitude for the iPhone as a native iOS service, hoping to build on its already-substantial user base of nine million accessing the location-based network via Android. Even without the benefit of iPhone iOS compatibility, the total number of Latitude users has jumped 200% from one million in February 2009 to three million in May 2010, then another 200% to nine million today. That makes it bigger than Foursquare, with five million registered users, but smaller than Facebook Places, with about 30 million. These may seem like big numbers -- "million" has such a delightful sound -- but …
  • Gawker Finds Out Social Media Is Still the Wild West
    Gawker.com was one of the first big success stories of online media: as a Web log (rather than a Web site associated with a legacy print publication) covering New York's media and celebrity culture, it demonstrated the power of social media, as well as its commercial viability, with rapid growth after its debut under owner Nick Denton and founding editor Elizabeth Spiers back in 2003. Sister sites like Jezebel and Gizmodo did the same for fashion and gadgetry, respectively. Thus it is ironic that this pioneering social media site should be brought to a standstill by social media, through social …
  • Social and Search, Part 2: Crunching the Numbers
    In yesterday's post I talked about the potential (or lack of potential) for social media to help boost search marketing revenues -- but I didn't get into the numbers, so today I thought I would look at some figures which might be relevant to the discussion. Although there's no way to do a decisive analysis in, I'm hoping to at least get a handle on possible correlations between social media, overall Web traffic, search usage, and the part that really matters: money.
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