Social Media
Google admits Buzz privacy fail
Feb 17th
Google officially admitted yesterday that it’s testing procedure surrounding their new offering Buzz was less than sufficient. Since it’s February 9th appearance, Google has had to do some serious retooling of the product, amid privacy concerns that sprang up almost immediately. Google says that they’re working “extremely hard” to fix the problem. “We’re very early in this space. This was one of our first big attempts,” Todd Jackson, Buzz product manager, told BBC News.
But how could one of the world’s largest online service providers overlook such a detail? It comes down to a simple lack of widespread testing. Buzz was only tested internally at Google, something the company normally does NOT do. Most often, when Google wants to bring a new product to market, they’ll tap into their unofficial “Google Trusted Tester” program, a network of family and friends of Google employees who have proven track records and are trusted with a high degree of confidentiality. These “Trusted Testers” are in exchange, given early access to a soon to be launched Google product. Unfortunately, Buzz did not receive the same treatment. “We’ve been testing Buzz internally at Google for a while. Of course, getting feedback from 20,000 Googlers isn’t quite the same as letting Gmail users play with Buzz in the wild,” comments Jackson.
To battle the negative buzz now surrounding Buzz, Google has set up a “war room” at their Mountain View, CA. headquarters that is strictly devoted to sorting out the Buzz issues.
Social Networking usage: South Africa
Feb 8th
When it comes to social media usage stats, African countries usually fly below the radar. However, Africa’s southern most nation, South Africa currently ranks number 29th on Facebook’s global user list, and demonstrates a number of similarities with much larger using countries.
The recent South African Friendship 2.0 survey found that the average South African Facebook user is in their 30’s, employed full time, and describe themselves as sociable and outgoing. The survey sampled South Africans aged 16 years or older.
With a massive 82 percent, Facebook is the dominant social networking platform in South Africa. Again, South Africa ranks number 29 on Facebook’s global usage statistics (by country), and has an estimated 2.6 million users per month that generate over 1.1 billion page views. Over half of Facebooking South Africans access the site via their mobile devices, 1.58 million. To put this in perspective, of those surveyed, only 18 percent responded that they have a MySpace profile.
Social Media Statistics
Feb 2nd
Opinions abound on Social Media. How it works, where it works best, how individuals and businesses can use it best, etc. Each of these opinions have their own intrinsic value, but sometimes, nothing beats cold hard numbers. As Joe Friday said, “All we want are the facts, ma’am,”- let’s take a look at some Social Media statistics.
- Facebook receives and shares more than 3.5 billion pieces of content (links, news stories, blog posts) on a weekly basis.
- Facebook pages have generated more than 5.3 billion fans.
- Approximately 700,000 local businesses have active Facebook fan pages.
- Approximately 70 percent of Facebook users arrive from outside the United States.
- Over 250 Facebook applications have over 1 million combined users each month.
- Since December 2008, more than 80,000 websites have integrated Facebook Connect. More than 60 million Facebook users actively use this service across any number of these 80,000+ sites that offer the feature.
- 55-65 year old females make up the fastest growing segment on Facebook
- Facebook paid $0 to have their entire site translated into Spanish via a crowdsourced Wiki. The site was translated in less than 4 weeks.
Baby Boomers flock to Social Networking in 2009
Feb 1st
There’s no arguing that 2009 was a banner year for online social networking platforms. Obviously, the big players in the field, Facebook and Twitter, saw a healthy increase in user activity. A new report from eMarketer might just point to the reason why: Baby Boomers went from online consumers of digital media to social busy-bees.
The report analyzes 4 unique market segments, Millenials (14-26), Gen X (27-43), Baby Boomers (44-63) and Mature (63-75). Not surprisingly, both Millenials and Gen X ‘ers (myself included) have maintained consistently high levels of social media profiles over the past three years. Conversely, Baby Boomers and Matures saw a massive growth rate in 2009.
Looking at the numbers, 31 percent of Baby Boomers and 14 percent of Matures actively attended to (i.e. status updates, photo uploads, etc.) their profiles in 2008, while one year later, these numbers have seen a significant jump: 46 percent and 36 percent, respectively, in 2009.
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