Monthly Archives: September 2008

Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months

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Thanks to Mashable

September 16, 2008 – 2:09 pm PDT – by Adam Ostrow 3 Comments

The latest numbers are in, and Twitter is apparently growing at a torrid pace. According to stats just released from Nielsen Online, Twitter recorded 2.3 million unique visitors in August (US-only), an increase of 422% from the same period last year.

Moreover, visitors to Twitter spent 55% more time on the site on average – a total of more than 7 minutes per user. Those numbers point to rather robust growth for the site, especially considering many of its most rabid users access it through a third-party client like Twhirl or Tweetdeck.

Elsewhere in the social networking space, Facebook continued to narrow the gap on MySpace, a trend we also noticed last month. Unique visitors to the site grew to 38.2 million, representing a more than 10% month-over-month increase and a 100% jump year-over-year. MySpace saw 61.3 million unique visitors – up slightly from last month, but still essentially flat compared to the same period last year.

Some other trends worth noting:

- LinkedIn grew 146% year-over-year to 10.8 million unique visitors

- Imeem fell from 3.9 million unique visitors in July to 3.4 million in August. They could be one of the more impacted companies from this month’s expected launch of MySpace Music.

- Buzznet traffic fell 54% year-over-year to 1.8 million unique visitors. The company has recently made a number of acquisitions including Idolator and Qloud to bolster its audience.

Talk amongst yourselves: inviting users to participate in online conversations

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International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces

“Many small online communities would benefit from increased diversity or activity in their membership. Some communities run the risk of dying out due to lack of participation. Others struggle to achieve the critical mass necessary for diverse and engaging conversation. But what tools are available to these communities to increase participation? Our goal in this research was to spark contributions to the movielens.org discussion forum, where only 2% of the members write posts.

“We developed personalized invitations, messages designed to entice users to visit or contribute to the forum. In two field experiments, we ask (1) if personalized invitations increase activity in a discussion forum, (2) how the choice of algorithm for intelligently choosing content to emphasize in the invitation affects participation, and (3) how the suggestion made to the user affects their willingness to act. We find that invitations lead to increased participation, as measured by levels of reading and posting. More surprisingly, we find that invitations emphasizing the social nature of the discussion forum increase user activity, while invitations emphasizing other details of the discussion are less successful.” (International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, 2007).

GHandI is halfway through

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News on the UK’s prinicipal shift handover research on the Centre for HCI Design, City University’s nice (no pun intended) looking blog:

“The GHandI project started in January 2007, so we are now half way through this three year EPSRC-funded project. The project team have recently completed detailed studies of clincial handover in the following settings: a general medical ward, an emergency assessment unit, a paediatric surgical ward and a paediatric acute retrieval service. The collected data is now being analysed to develop a model of handover. We have been exploring possible technologies to support handover and we are also participating in the evaluation of a handover system in a major NHS Trust in London.”

There’s also an interesting chance to put forward your own proposals for evaluating new healthcare technologies in Boston; Potential participants should submit a position paper to the organizers (rebecca.randell.1@city.ac.uk) by October 23, 2008.

“It’s amazing how the little things matter”

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13 mins 57 secs into Scoble’s video interview on the new Facebook design with Facebook’s Mark Slee he asks my favourite kinda question; essentially ‘what are the small things that you guys have done, that might be unexpected, that others don’t bother to do?’ Mark looks kinda like he’s not been asked that before (15:05). Hey, ‘it’s clean and easy to use’ is the answer. But problem is that’s a generic answer, Scoble asked for something specific. So he asks again, in a different way, for what the guy is proudest of? Now a better answer. One, a better production interface which brings elements like videos and photos together for the first time in a simpler experience, and which makes it easier to share. On the consumption side the newsfeeds interface now come in different views, so they’ve taken the newsfeed interface which revolutionised the site a couple of years ago, and now allows users to interact with the feed and filter down exactly what they’re interested in. Thanks Mark. And nice to hear you use a PC.

The value of online communities

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Deloitte’s Service Study on value of online communities: Tribalization of business study.

Critique of value of communities: Companies learn online communities are often a waste, Deloitte doesn’t.

CERN says

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15:02, that’s it. Second beam all the way round (via Twitter)..

..and the LHC is up and running.

It’s a long way to the bottom

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Liked the piece in Social Media Today by Marc Meyer which asks whether we try to do too much with social media (‘Are we slaves to the rhythm of social media?‘):

“What do you think? What is acceptable? Frankly I try to limit my time into blocks built around the work day and even at home. But I can see where one could spend endless amounts of time building and maintaining social media personas from here to BFE and back. The question is. What is your ultimate plan or goal with social media? As a layperson and as a professional, do you have an end game result in mind? Do you have a plan?”

Personally, speaking as a relative outside to the mainstream of the web 2.0 world I would say I don’t want to follow the mainstream and think the more you out in the more you get out, though for most people that’s obviously true. Business like, I want to do the minimum to get the maximum return. How to do that of course requires a great deal of work and learning. Or to use the old quote about a guy’s struggle to get out of the ghetto: “It’s a long way to the bottom.”

Kaka says no sir, to England

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“Before it was Real Madrid, now it’s England that is in fashion,” said the Brazil playmaker. “The market is like that, just as Milan make offers, other clubs make offers to Milan. But I will never ask to leave.

“I have always been treated well by [the club] executives and my rapport is excellent. Perhaps one day they may change their approach with respect to me but I don’t see that happening. I will only leave if Milan decide to sell me or perhaps on the day when we no longer have the same objectives, and that day has not come.” (Report from the Guardian)

Blogging the Democratic National Convention

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Nice video on the work of bloggers in the Big Tent: “Link TV Producer, John Hamilton, meets several new media journalists who are covering this Democratic Convention from “The Big Tent,” where beer and high speed wi-fi flow copiously..”

Meet the bloggers at the DNC

Office 2.0 Conference ION case study

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“Can organizations build web communities with predictable success?  This workshop calls on our experiences of building ion (the institute online network) — the award winning collection of web based communities for the ICAEW member network — as well as other communities powered by WordFrame, and the available research material.  The Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales is the UK’s largest professional membership organization for accountants in the UK.  In the workshop we use this case study, combined with direct experiences to provide a set of guidelines to help you start and manage a successful and sustainable web community.” [More..]