Social Networking | Idle Musings

Posts Categorized Social Networking

Staggering YouTube Usage Stats

In Social Networking, Video on Sep-12-2008 with
no comments

comScore recently released its July ‘08 data on videos viewed online. I don’t think anybody is surprised Google dominated, but I don’t think anybody would think they’d have almost 50 percent market share.

According to the figures more than 11 billion videos were viewed in July. Of that 11 billion, Google (including YouTube) accounted for almost 5 billion. Its closest competitor, Fox Interactive (including MySpace TV), only had 445 million views. Microsoft rounded out the top three by serving more than 280 million videos.

Another interesting stat from comScore, 75 percent of all Americans viewed a video online in July and the average viewer watched more than 230 minutes of video during the month. And in another stunning showing of Google’s sheer dominance, the average YouTube user watched 54.8 videos in July, while the average MySpace viewer watched just 7.8 during the same period of time.

Digg Dialog Launches

In Media, Social Networking on Aug-29-2008 with
no comments

This is pretty darn cool. Digg has just launched a new service called Digg Dialog. The concept is pretty simple. It is announced that a specific person will attend, users submit questions, and people digg the questions just like normally do with news stories. Those that hit the stated requirements and receive the most diggs get asked. For the launch event they partnered with CNN iReport and Digg CEO Jay Adelson peppered Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi with a number of questions that you never hear addressed by the traditional media. Social networking and community involvement at its best.

Delicious Relaunches With Redesign

In Social Networking, Technology on Jul-31-2008 with
no comments

Well this is interesting. I just noticed popular social bookmarketing site Delicious (thanks for getting rid of the periods in your name BTW), has just totally redesigned their site. Well a total redesign may not be accurate. It is still similar to the previous version, just cleaner and easier to get around. Heck, they even have a quick video if you are confused.

The TechCrunch Web Tablet Project

In Social Networking, Technology on Jul-23-2008 with
no comments

TechCrunch, if you are aware of the site, is about the most popular (if not most popular) blog related to information technology (IT) news. If you are in the industry it is a must read. Shortly after their launch they started to branch out in other directions with events and small conferences.

Now they are branching out again:

Today at Techcrunch we announced that we are building our own web tablet hardware device. This all stems back from a conversation a few weeks ago when we were discussing the ultimate web browsing/cloud computing client hardware. The iPhone is nice but too small, and most laptops are over-powered for the task. With applications on the web most of us just need a web browser most of the time, so the ideal device would be a light-weight small tablet running nothing more than Firefox on a decent screen and with a WiFi connection.

How do they plan to achieve something where so many other billion dollar companies with unlimited resources failed. They’re going to use their giant user base to solict ideas and actually develop the product. This is going to be very interesting to watch.

The Pursuit of Accidents

In Social Networking, Technology, Twitter on Apr-15-2008 with
no comments

I’ve been a fan of Evan Williams for a long time. Evan is the founder of Blogger (sold to Google), Odeo (ran into the iTunes juggernut), and now the super hip Twitter. The above sketch is neat in and of itself on many different levels, and eventually became Twitter, got me thinking about an article I read several months ago in the Economist called The Accidental Innovator:

Evan Williams accidentally stumbled upon three insights. First, that genuinely new ideas are, well, accidentally stumbled upon rather than sought out; second, that new ideas are by definition hard to explain to others, because words can express only what is already known; and third, that good ideas seem obvious in retrospect.

The article goes on to note:

The irony of trying to plan accidents, and orchestrate their frequent occurrence, is not lost on Mr Williams. So he tries mental tricks. One is to ask “what can we take away to create something new?” A decade ago, you could have started with Yahoo! and taken away all the clutter around the search box to get Google. When he took Blogger and took away everything except one 140-character line, he had Twitter. Radical constraints, he believes, can lead to breakthroughs in simplicity and entirely new things.