I attended a Facebook session last week which went into the updates of the social networking organisation. Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more connected. It certainly has achieved this since its launch in February 2004. I learnt a lot at the session and wanted to share some of the stats with you.
Facebook cupcake
Key Facebook Facts
There are 30 million active users of Facebook in the UK (not including those under 13 years)
Each person has an average of 218 friends
20 million people use Facebook daily
There is a 50/50 split between male and female users
Quickest growing demographic are those over 35 years old
13- 24 year old are the most active
There are more than 3 billion stories posted each month.
Read more »
Buzz is less than a month old and has already got itself into trouble regarding privacy issues. The controversial “auto-follow” which Google called “auto-suggest” means that Buzz automatically sets you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most. This is great if you email people who are your friends, but you don’t want to follow work colleagues or your boss, who you also have to email on a regular basis.
However, Google are now serving its ads with other people’s content. This means that Buzz republishes the content, the full article, not just parts of it, in Gmail without asking permission. Apparently it also strips advertising from that content serving Google ads so this means people are losing money. There was an interesting post on Econsultancy’s website which goes into greater detail according to one blogger’s experience.
So it seems that Google’s attempt to try and spread itself into social media has not got off to a good start. On the plus side though, the location-based features in Google Buzz for mobile seems great. Buzz updates is not limited to 140 characters like Twitter.
I will be monitoring Google Buzz over the coming months and will update this post to reflect the news.
On Wednesday, Google announced their new social media product “Google Buzz”
Google Buzz
According to the guardian, Buzz has been rolled out to all of Gmail’s 150 million users worldwide, though not yet to those using Gmail inside organisations, where it is expected to arrive next month.
When it was being tested internally, it was called Taco Town, and proved popular for sharing high-definition videos, said Hugo Barra, a product manager. “Google is really good at sorting information,” he said. “That’s what we intend to do with social information as well.” Some critics say this is Google’s attempt at twitter and it is not really offering anything new and exciting. However, if Buzz were to be used by all Gmail users, then it would have more users than MySpace. Facebook is currently the number 1 social networking site with 400 million users.
But what about mobiles? Well it does not work on all mobile phones yet, just the iPhone and the Google Nexus. I am sure Google is working on making sure Buzz is available on more handsets.
So how will Google compete in an already saturated market place? Apparently, Google already tried to build social networking systems before. In 2004, it launched a Facebook like site called Orkut and successful in Brazil. Google bought Jaiku in 2007, a Twitter-like system but was abandoned by the company in January 2009.
According to techradar , Yahoo and Microsoft already offered similar services. Yahoo launched http://buzz.yahoo.com/ two years ago. And Microsoft say their Hotmail customers have benefited from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008.
It seems like Google have copied the name from Yahoo and the idea from facebook and twitter without offering anything new. It will be interesting to see if Google can make Buzz work.
Social networking sites | Jo Turnbull | 
October 8, 2011 9:56 am | 
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