The December 2009 data from comScore (SCOR) were released Tuesday, and the results for the social media sector are nothing short of staggering. Fifty-four percent (112 million) of the 205 million-strong U.S. internet-user population are on Facebook, with 27% (57 million) still using News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace. But according to data from both comScore and Experian Hitwise (EXPN), the most active users were on Tagged, MyYearbook and Orkut. And Facebook users were more active than those on MySpace.

There’s no doubt that plenty is happening in the social media space, but there are some facts that just might surprise you, either because of the speed of change or the discovery of players that may not have occurred to you.



1. Growing impact of social networking on surfing habit: in the U.S., 25% of all page views came from the top social networking sites and that is up 83% from the 13.8% posted in December 2008.

2. Social media is still growing: one in 10 went to a social networking site in December 2009, up almost 100% from December 2008’s 5.8%. Compare this to the page view data and you get a sense of how sticky the social media sites are.

3. Social media sites are more vulnerable to trends: From December 2008 to December 20009, MySpace and Facebook switched spots. a year ago, 64% of visits to the top 10 social networks belonged to MySpace, with 29% going to Facebook. by December 2009, 28% went to MySpace, with 68% at Facebook.

4. Facebook’s prowess: Facebook’s market share surged 286% year-over-year, but it wound up being good for everyone, since it grew the market at the same time.

5. Market share growth was a bit rare: aside from Facebook, only Tagged gained market share, as an increasingly crowded market required players to fight a little harder for eyeballs. Tagged amped up its share by 35%.

Later today, Google is due to launch a social product that will compete with the currently popular social networks - Facebook


and Twitter. As Wall Street Journal reported, Gmail will get a new module that will stream media and status updates of online friends. This module sounds like a Gmail Labs feature which could be enabled or disabled by account holder’s choice.
However, it’s less likely to be a rival since Google itself has integrated Twitter updates in its search. Maybe Google will bring Orkut updates integration in Gmail - well, that’s just one of the many possibilities. Michael Arrington, TechCrunch CEO, noted that Google’s upcoming social product will go beyond Gmail integration.

Google has already enabled watching YouTube videos in Gmail Chat. Also, YouTube, Flickr and Picasa media previews in mail have been there since a while. Whatever the integration into Gmail would be like, there’s always a kill switch to bring the service back to normal.

If Google’s upcoming social product affects Gmail, the fear of outages and security always persists. Not to forget that this announcement follows Facebook’s homepage redesign and as we know, Google’s online rival Microsoft is one of the stake holders in Facebook. In August 2009, Yahoo had introduced social features in its mail, search and messenger service.

Twitter has reached profitability after signing deals with Google and Microsoft to make the micro-blogging service searchable on the Internet, BusinessWeek magazine reported on Monday.

BusinessWeek, which was purchased in October by financial news agency Bloomberg, said Twitter had signed a 15-million-dollar data-mining deal with Google and a 10-million-dollar agreement with Microsoft.

“The deals were huge,” Bloomberg BusinessWeek quoted an unidentified person “familiar with the company’s finances” as saying. “With two scoops of the pen, a lot of revenue came in.”

The magazine said the agreements to make Twitter messages known as “tweets” searchable by Google and Microsoft’s new search engine Bing “carry sufficient value to help Twitter achieve a small profit for 2009.”

It said Twitter also achieved profitability by renegotiating deals with telecommunications companies to bring down costs.

Twitter has been working on ways to make money from its globally popular service, and revenue producing ideas mentioned to date include selling premium accounts that businesses could use for marketing or image building.

The San Francisco-based startup has won millions of users since the service that allows people to pepper one another with 140-character-or-less messages launched in August 2006.

Are you ready for another tech bubble? Paul Kedrosky is. The venture capitalist and blogger believes that 2010 may see a wave of initial public offerings from companies that do various forms of social networking.Kedrosky points to the decision by Yelp Inc. of San Francisco to allegedly turn down a US$550-million acquisition offer from Google Inc. as one important piece of evidence for his theory. Yelp, a site that allows people to review local businesses, may be waiting for an even bigger payday — from investors like us.

Zynga Game Network Inc., a social gaming site, is another prime candidate for an IPO, in Kedrosky’s opinion. It recently raised US$180-million in private funding although it doesn’t appear to need the money. And, of course, there are the giants of the social networking world-Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc.

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Social networking is no longer limited to MySpace or Facebook. Witness Currensee, a Boston-based social trading network and decision-making tool for foreign exchange traders.

“We want to be the trusted source for Forex collaboration, for purchasing products, for  making friends,” Currensee CEO Dave Lemont says. “This is the first time people have been able to collaborate on real-time information (through) social trading.”

Both trust and transparency underpin the Currensee business model. Members must create a valid account with their true information in order to join the Currensee Marketplace and network with peers.

“People know the person they’re working with is showing their real information,” Lemont says. “They see that this is really what someone is doing (while trading). We also show peoples’ real performance – again, there’s that level of trust and transparency.”

Currensee works like other social networks in the sense that you can only see someone’s information when you make them your friend. In this case, that means members can only see one another’s trading activity if they are part of one another’s networks.

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