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Apart fron Natural Born Clickers, this is a massive audience that cannot be tapped

• 
• • John Naughton
  • The Observer, Sunday 6 December 2009

It was announced last week that the population of Facebook now exceeds that of America. Since mid-September the social networking service has added 50 million users, which means it now finds itself with 350 million of them. I am sure that Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, takes the same view of his subscribers as PG Wodehouse attributed to the male codfish – "which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all". But even Zuckerberg must be wondering how he can monetise the little darlings.

Interesting - though very pessimistic - article about the impossibility of monetising Facebooks 350 million users or those of other social networks.
Noteworthy though: banners keep performing worse and worse. The number of people who click on banner ads fell from 32% in 2007 to 16% in 2009.
And only 8% of internet audience are responsible for 85% banner clicks - those are the "Natural Born Clickers". Full article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/dec/06/facebook-350m-users-advertising

 

I met my first serious girlfriend after my first divorce—yes, there are more of both—through a proto-Facebook created at Google. It was 2004, and it's name was Orkut. But social networks go back to 1995.

Click to zoom in

It all started with Classmates.com, which apparently has 50,000,000 users now. On the top of the pyramid is Facebook and its 300 million users, followed by MySpace's 263 million. In the middle you have a huge constellation of sites, most of which I just can't recognize. Trombi? Vampirefreaks? Bigadda? Cafemom? Geni? Itsmy? Qzone? Xanga?

Please, stop saying words. [Focus—Thanks David Keyes]

Send an email to Jesus Diaz, the author of this post, at wrfhf@tvmzbqb.pbzjesus@gizmodo.com.

The plan we've come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.

Some changes are coming ... The network model is evolving...

I have been playing close attention of late to the rapid proliferation of the various portable identity services. I now look to see if it's implemented on any site I visit, and if so, which ones it uses and how it uses them.

Examples of these portable identity services include Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect. These allow a visitor to log-in to the site using his/her Facebook or Google credentials and identity. Any activity or interaction on that site gets associated with this identity (name and avatar mostly), and with an opt-in by the visitor, that activity shows up back on Facebook or other social networks.

In addition to Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect, there is Twitter-based login using the OAuth API. This movement is taking a big leap forward now based upon LinkedIn's new platform and two dueling announcements yesterday.

LinkedIn now offers a similar portable identity service using its own implementation of OAuth. Since it became available last Monday, I've been seeking examples of sites that have implemented it, and found one today. NutshellMail, a nice service that aggregates summaries of activities among various social graphs in one e-mail, seems to use this to allow connection with a LinkedIn network.

Yesterday, Facebook and Yahoo rolled out the ability for visitors to Yahoo to login using Facebook Connect. An impact of this is for people in my social graph on Facebook to know what I'm searching for using Yahoo (if I choose to let them know) -- adding another dimension to social search. On the same day, Google added the ability for users of its Friend Connect service to login using Twitter OAuth, the first time I've seen two portable identity services mashed together.

I'm not one for predictions, but I believe this is going to explode in 2010 and take the impact of social media to another level.

UPDATE: I heard from NutshellMail via Twitter that it hasn't yet integrated with LinkedIn using OAuth, but plan to do so very soon.

Si alguien encuentra la cronología de las Redes Sociales en España que me lo diga!

I know a lot of people in the tech and design community in New York but don’t know any knife-makers or doctors,” said Mr. Karnjanaprakorn. “I wanted to meet people in other industries — someone I would never meet otherwise but would really get a lot of value out of meeting.

By/Association is a private service for personal introductions to remarkable people. http://byassoc.com/