From FT.com | Tech Blog | techfile 9.04.09.
Facebook registered its 200 millionth active user, continuing its stunning growth. Just in January the site claimed it had 150m users. That amounts to an additional 50m users in the past three months, or about 500,000 new users per day. Much of this new growth is coming internationally, however, where internet traffic is harder to monetise.
Twitter devotees are grayer than one might expect: The majority of Twitter’s roughly 10 million unique Web site visitors worldwide in February were 35 years old or older, according to comScore.
In the U.S, 10 percent of Twitter users were between 55 and 64, nearly the same amount of users as those between 18 and 24, which accounted for 10.6 percent of the total.
Twitter has seen its popularity explode in recent months, with the number of unique visitors to its site increasing by more than 1000 percent year-over-year in February, according to comScore.
Social media Web sites like MySpace and Facebook have also experienced an increase in older users recently. But the parade of elders came after younger users drove the initial surge in popularity (in Facebook’s case, of course, the service was initially limited to college students).
Twitter is a rare example of older people embracing a new Web technology at such an early stage, says Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis at comScore.
Very interesting blog post by Rory Cellan-Jones.
neither Google – YouTube's owners – nor the PRS will give chapter and verse on their previous licensing agreement, but neither are they disputing the size of the payouts. But the problem, in the words of someone close to the negotiations, is that the PRS seems to have signed “a rubbish deal” – at least as far as the songwriters are concerned. And that’s because it was struck when YouTube was in its infancy – oooh two or three years back – and nobody saw it growing into a major force in the music business.
Now the PRS has demanded a rate per stream from YouTube which Google says is just completely unrealistic – and would mean the search firm would lose money every time someone watched a music video.
Mind you, the German songwriters union has apparently looked at what the British are asking for – and demanded a rate 50 times higher.
Later on, Rory cites research by Credit Suisse which claims that Google is losing about $440 million a year on YouTube. It can’t last, folks — enjoy it while you can.
Interesting analysis by Joshua Porter of the difference between Twitter and FaceBook.
In general, there are two ways to model human relationships in software. An “asymmetric” model is how Twitter currently works. You can “follow” someone else without them following you back. It’s a one-way relationship that may or may not be mutual.
Relationship Symmetry in the Facebook model
Facebook, on the other hand, has always used a “symmetric” model, where each time you add someone as a friend they have to add you as a friend as well. This is a two-way relationship, and it is required to have any relationship at all. So as a Facebook user there is always a 1-1 relationship among your friends. Everyone who you have claimed as a friend has also claimed you as a friend.
The post goes on to cite Andrew Chen’s point that Twitter allows 4 types of relationships, while Facebook only allows for two. The two relationships of Facebook are “friend and Not Friend”. The four relationships of Twitter are:
1. People who follow you, but you don’t follow back
2. People who don’t follow you, but you follow them
3. You both follow each other (Friends!)
4. Neither of you follow each other
As Andrew points out, an asymmetric model allows for more types of relationships. I think the benefits go further than that. I think that the asymmetric model better mimics how real attention works…and how it has always worked.
Very thoughtful post by Joshua Schachter.
The worst problem is that shortening services add another layer of indirection to an already creaky system. A regular hyperlink implicates a browser, its DNS resolver, the publisher’s DNS server, and the publisher’s website. With a shortening service, you’re adding something that acts like a third DNS resolver, except one that is assembled out of unvetted PHP and MySQL, without the benevolent oversight of luminaries like Dan Kaminsky and St. Postel.
There are three other parties in the ecosystem of a link: the publisher (the site the link points to), the transit (places where that shortened link is used, such as Twitter or Typepad), and the clicker (the person who ultimately follows the shortened links). Each is harmed to some extent by URL shortening.
The transit’s main problem with these systems is that a link that used to be transparent is now opaque and requires a lookup operation. From my past experience with Delicious, I know that a huge proportion of shortened links are just a disguise for spam, so examining the expanded URL is a necessary step. The transit has to hit every shortened link to get at the underlying link and hope that it doesn’t get throttled. It also has to log and store every redirect it ever sees.
The publisher’s problems are milder. It’s possible that the redirection steps steals search juice — I don’t know how search engines handle these kinds of redirects. It certainly makes it harder to track down links to the published site if the publisher ever needs to reach their authors. And the publisher may lose information about the source of its traffic.
But the biggest burden falls on the clicker, the person who follows the links. The extra layer of indirection slows down browsing with additional DNS lookups and server hits. A new and potentially unreliable middleman now sits between the link and its destination. And the long-term archivability of the hyperlink now depends on the health of a third party…
I hadn’t thought of this, and indeed have been cheerfully using bit.ly without thinking about the consequences. And then I came on this perceptive post by Om Malik on the business model underpinning bit.ly:
Yesterday, New York-based startup incubator Betaworks raised $2 million in funding for its URL-shortener project, Bit.ly, and spun it out as an independent company. The funding raised some eyebrows, with some speculating if Bit.ly, one of the dozens of link-shortening services, was worth a rumored $8 million. I fall in the camp of those who think Bit.ly is worth the money.
Here’s why: The most important aspect of Bit.ly is not that it can shorten URLs. Instead its real prowess lies in its ability to track the click-performance of those URLs, and conversations around those links. It doesn’t matter where those URLs are embedded — Facebook, Twitter, blogs, email, instant messages or SMS messages — a click is a click and Bit.ly counts it, in real time. Last week alone, nearly 25 million of these Bit.ly URLs were clicked.
By clicking on these URLs, people are essentially voting on the stories behind these links. Now if Bit.ly collated all these links and ranked them by popularity, you would have a visualization of the top stories across the web. In other words, it would be a highly distributed form of Digg.com, the social news service that depends on people submitting and voting for stories from across the web. Don’t be surprised if Bit.ly formally launches such as an offering real soon. This will help them monetize their service via advertising…
Useful video by Robert Scoble.
Yep. Early indication here.
Courtrooms have already begun dealing with jurors Googling, Facebooking, and Twittering their way through the case. Now, some courtrooms are starting to set regulations ahead of time. The Associated Press is reporting that the Idaho Supreme Court’s criminal jury instruction committee is discussing guidelines that would prevent jurors from using electronic devices to post their thoughts or do research on cases that are in progress.
While nothing has yet been approved, if instructions for jurors are approved, they would be recommended for use in both magistrate and district courts throughout Idaho, the AP said.
Meanwhile, the National Basketball Association has fined Mark Cuban — who has a reputation for complaining — $25,000 for comments he made in Twitter about the officials…
Thanks to Glyn Moody for spotting it.
It just goes to show that nothing’s straightforward — not even Twitter.
The rapper 50 Cent is among the legion of stars who have recently embraced Twitter to reach fans who crave near-continuous access to their lives and thoughts. On March 1, he shared this insight with the more than 200,000 people who follow him: “My ambition leads me through a tunnel that never ends.”
Those were 50 Cent’s words, but it was not exactly him tweeting. Rather, it was Chris Romero, known as Broadway, the director of the rapper’s Web empire, who typed in those words after reading them in an interview.
“He doesn’t actually use Twitter,” Mr. Romero said of 50 Cent, whose real name is Curtis Jackson III, “but the energy of it is all him.”
In its short history, Twitter — a microblogging tool that uses 140 characters in bursts of text — has become an important marketing tool for celebrities, politicians and businesses, promising a level of intimacy never before approached online, as well as giving the public the ability to speak directly to people and institutions once comfortably on a pedestal.
But someone has to do all that writing, even if each entry is barely a sentence long…
Just for the record, I really wrote this post! Honest.
Another table of rankings. This one’s interesting because it uses a number of different dimensions — influence, signal-to-noise ratio, their generosity, velocity, and clout. Can’t access definitions of these at the moment though — just getting a blank window.
