Russia's avid social networkers

Russians are the most engaged social networkers in the world, spending an average of 6.6 hours in social sites a month, based on comScore's survey of online social networking in 40 countries. "Of the 1.1 billion people age 15 and older worldwide who accessed the Internet from a home or work location in May 2009, 734.2 million visited at least one social networking site during the month, representing a penetration of 65% of the worldwide Internet audience," comScore's press release says. The rest of the Top 10 countries in May were Brazil (6.3 hrs), Canada (5.6), Puerto Rico (5.3), Spain (5.3), Finland (4.7), UK (4.6), Germany (4.5), US (4.2), and Colombia (4.1). Russia's Top 3 social network sites were Vkontakte.ru (18.9 million people or 45% of Russia's Net users), Odnoklassniki.ru (24%), and Mail.Ru-My World (20%). Facebook (2%) and MySpace Sites (1%) were 7th and 9th place, respectively.

Will India switch to Facebook?

Facebook has serious designs on India, but "for years [Google's] Orkut has dominated the Indian social-networking scene," Business Week reports. Facebook added Hindi and five other Indian languages last month, bringing the total number of languages it supports to 57, "with several dozen more in the works." Some question why, though, since such a high percentage of India's Net-using population speak English, especially connected young urbanites. The real draw for Facebook, probably, is English-speaking friends overseas who already use Facebook. A New Delhi-based source told Business Week that none of her US friends use Orkut, so she had to join Facebook. On the other hand, globally, linguistic diversity and issues may not be the issue so much as differences in how digital media and technologies are used from country to country, an interesting piece in Ad Age suggests, also using India as an example.

Parental social networkers multiplying

Well, an actual group labeled "parents" wasn't measured, but I suspect parents figured prominently in a Nielsen study that found 35-to-49-year-olds are the fastest-growing group in social-network sites. "Time spent on these sites is growing three times faster than the overall Internet rate ... [and] more than two-thirds of the world's online population now visits social networking and blogging sites," USATODAY reports, citing the study. In fact, one out of every 11 minutes of the average Web user's time is spent in a social site, the USATODAY article says, and one out of every 6 minutes in the UK, reports the BBC. The Nielsen study looked at nine countries. Among these, Brazil was No. 1 in social networking and blogging with 80% of Net users visiting such sites. Spain and the US were Nos. 2 and 3, at 75% and 67%, respectively, according to USATODAY. Social networking has surpassed Web email among top computer activities across the user population, the (others are search, portals, and PC software). As for mobile social networking, the numbers of Britons accessing a social site via their phone was up 249% (the BBC doesn't say, but that's probably in the past year). If you're a parent in Facebook or MySpace, check out "Virtual helicopter parenting" and, in the Los Angeles Times, "Big Mother is watching."

Stark contrast: 2 social-media stories out of Oz

Livewire, a social network site for youth with disabilities and chronic illnesses, just launched in Australia to help them have a more normal sense of friendship (less fixated on their disabilities) than they may be able to have offline, Reuters reports. Aiming to serve the some 450,000 Australians aged 10-21 "currently living with a serious illness, chronic health condition or disability ... Livewire recruits members from referrals through it's parent organization, the Starlight Children's Foundation, and through hospitals that treat disabilities or chronic cases." Meanwhile, the Sydney Morning Herald quotes a Melbourne youth worker as saying cyberbullying in Australia had reached "epidemic proportions." He called on the government to change laws to give police more powers and "said in recent weeks a 17-year-old high school student jumped to his death off the West Gate Bridge after reading death threats online." It's possible we need to focus more on civil behavior and citizenship education offline and early detection online than on crime and prosecution. At least in the US, police have always had the authority to deal with physical threats in any venue.

Social networking growth in India

India has a population of 1.1 billion, out of which a mere 19 million people visited social network sites this past December, comScore reports. Still, social networking growth was significant last year: 51% overall. Google's Orkut, popular in Brazil, is No. 1 in India too, at 12.8 million visitors in December, an increase of 81% over the previous year. Facebook, at 4 million December visitors, is No. 2 (150% growth). Indigenous sites bharatstudent.com (88% growth) and ibibo.com were in 3rd and 5th places, respectively, but ibibo lost ground, traffic-wise, between Decembers 2007 and '08. In 4th place, San Francisco-based Hi5.com had the highest year-on-year growth at 182%. Meanwhile, the Times of India reports on the Internet as "a great social research tool."

Pact for solid social Web safety measures in Europe

This is timely news for global Safer Internet Day (today): 17 social-media companies across Europe have struck a deal with the European Commission to put in place safeguards for young social networkers by April, The Guardian reports. US-based Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube are among the signatories. [Brief editorial comment: this is much more viable an agreement than trying to impose age verification on sites based only in a single country, which is what the US attorneys general are pushing for and which the EC has already ruled out as a solution for safer social networking.] Safeguards include prominent "report abuse" buttons; under-18 profiles private by default; clear, prominent privacy instructions; under-18 profiles not searchable; and keeping underage users (usually under-13s) from setting up accounts, reports paidContent:UK (MySpace and Facebook already have these in place). "The agreement brings a number of small sites into line with their bigger rivals - signatories also include Bebo, French video website DailyMotion and Habbo Hotel, the popular virtual world for children," according to the BBC, which adds that the safety measures are similar to those in the British Home Office's best practices guidelines, put forth last April (see this item). Meanwhile, Commission today kicked off its first cyberbullying-awareness campaign with a one-minute video (see the top of this BBC piece). [Another brief editorial comment: More evidence of online-safety enlightenment in Europe while a step forward here - the Internet Safety Technical Task Force's report released last month - is being discredited by the state attorneys general.]

200 virtual worlds for kids

That's virtual worlds for youth that are now "live, planned, or in active development," according to Virtual Worlds Management. In its coverage, CNET reports that "the under-7 market (if there is such a thing) is the most heavily targeted with 107 worlds aiming for market share," with "the teen market ... relatively wide open." Virtual Worlds Management also found an increase in virtual worlds aimed at families with kids 3+, CNET says. The array of countries where these "worlds" are based is amazing: Besides North America, they're in Spain, China, Ukraine, France, Israel, Hong Kong, Denmark, Singapore, Japan, Finland, Belgium, Austria, New Zealand, Sweden, Germany, and Poland - virtually all linked to from the Virtual Worlds Management page above.

Social (networking) scene in Canada

Canadians have definitely taken to social networking. "Some 17 million have a Facebook profile, 4.5 million are on MySpace, 14.5 million visit YouTube every month, and 3.6 million upload photos to the sharing site Flickr.com," the Toronto Globe & Mail reports. It doesn't even mention home-grown Nexopia, based in Edmonton, with about 1.4 million users. The Globe & Mail article (and accompanying Q&A with readers) is about privacy concerns regardless of users' ages ("social networkers shape their identity with these sites, essentially broadcasting their public image around the world"), pointing to a problem social sites are dealing with wherever their users are: "Many social-networking sites have privacy systems in place, but many users ignore them, only to find out - too late - that they shouldn't have left their photos, blog postings and personal information available for anyone to discover." Here are Part 2, "When a widget attacks your profile," and Part 3, "Underage kids flock to social networks." South of the border, an article in the Kansas City Star suggests this "public explosion in self-documentation" is a generational thing. Is it?

Euro social networking: Full speed ahead

The social Web has solid support from the European Commission. In fact, the EC's now looking ahead to Web 3.0, which means "seamless, anytime, anywhere business, entertainment and social networking over fast reliable and secure networks" and "the end of the divide between mobile and fixed [phone] lines," said Viviane Reding, EC Commissioner for Information Society & Media, in a September 26 speech in Luxembourg, according to VNUNET. Europe "must lead the next generation of the Internet," she said. The EC is encouraging SN industry self-regulation and has created a task force to that end, PublicTechnology.net reports. Participants include MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Bebo, Amsterdam-based Hyves, Berlin-based StudiVZ, and Paris-based Skyrock; "a number of researchers and child welfare organisations. The EC reportedly plans to unveil best-practice guidelines for social-network sites on Safer Internet Day next February 10. For context, 7thSpace.com reports, social networking has grown 35% in Europe in the past year. It added that 56% of Europe's online population visited social-network sites last year, and the number of regular users is projected to increase from 41.7 million now to 107.4 million in the next four years.

Polish police ordered off social site

At work, that is. "This little item in Reuters Africa is interesting partly because it's about Polish police being ordered not to use a social networking site at work, partly because it was picked up in Africa, and partly because of this sign of the Poland-born site's popularity. Reuters Africa reports that Poland's national police headquarters has banned the social site Nasza-klasa.pl (which means "Our Class" in Polish) from police offices except "for officers trying to track down offenders over the Internet." Reuters picked this news up from the Polish daily paper Dziennik. The report said "an internal investigation had shown police officers were often using Nasza Klasa ... for idle chit-chat instead of working." YouTube reportedly has been blocked by "other Polish state agencies" to keep workers focused on work.

MySpace, Facebook: Basic differences

MySpace is a lot about self-expression and Facebook more about exchanging personal news and information among friends, according to a thoughtful analysis in VentureBeat.com, though somewhat biased toward Facebook. The distinction goes back to the two sites' origins. Back in 2005, MySpace was likened to a mashup of an alternate-reality game, online nightclub, music community, and teenager's bedroom that could be redecorated whenever the spirit moved (see "MySpace the new MTV"). VentureBeat blogger Eric Eldon says that, unlike Facebook, MySpace is "a place for people to live out their fantasy lives online," which he acknowledges is quite a generalization but works where it concerns teens using the site to explore identity, as well as online media-producing and graphic design (see "Teens rule the Web" and "Social media gender gap"). Facebook's origins are well known and quite different: It was a college social utility defined by students' need to know more about a roommate, potential date, etc., where people were quickly busted if they fictionalized info about themselves. "If they provided fake information, their friends from across the hall would simply leave comments saying so on their profile pages," Eldon writes. Both can certainly be useful in many countries - one can see the value of a social utility in other countries, within local circles of friends and to keep in touch with friends who've emigrated or to stay in touch with people they've met from other countries. Eldon's analysis describes this well (and my own experience overseas in recent months bore this out). Here, for example, is the view of social networking from Kenya.

Latin America's social Web

Hi5.com is No. 1 in Latin America's social-networking scene, according to fresh figures from comScore, and social Web use as a whole is growing fast there. The number of unique visitors for the region has grown "from 53.6 million unique visitors last June, to 61.6 million this past April" (the latest figure available), VentureBeat.com cites comScore research as showing. Hi5 had 12.8 million visitors in April, "about a quarter of its 45 million monthly visitors around the world." Facebook (whose worldwide user figure for April was 116.4 million compared to MySpace's 115.7 million) was the fastest-growing SNS in the region and had 7.7 million Latin American visitors in April. One possible explanation for Hi5's popularity might be its linguistic tailoring for individual markets - e.g., "two new Spanish versions, for the Argentinian and Castilian dialects, with more dialect translations to come." It also launched a Brazilian Portuguese version in March to compete against [Google's] Orkut." Other growth sites to watch are Sonico, Batanga, and Vostu (for people to create their own social sites), VentureBeat reports. Having said all that, VentureBeat adds that blogging is still more popular than social networking in Latin America, with blogging services such as WordPress, Blogger, and local platforms "larger than Hi5 or any of its competitors," and mobile social networking is exploding (66% of Latin Americans own mobile phones, compared to the worldwide average of 46%).

Europe to legislate social networking?

The EU's Internet security agency is calling for legislation "to police social-networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace," InfoWorld reports. The director of the European Network and Information Security Agency said that social sites are "useful social tools," but suggested that EU law needs to cover photo-sharing online because "currently there is no need to get a person's consent in order to post a photo of them." He also said more public education is needed about how social networking works, pointing to the problem that "many people don't realize that it's almost impossible to erase material once it has appeared on the internet."

Global SN growth: New study

The Philippines has been dubbed "the social networking capital of the world" by a CNET blogger citing a new 29-country survey by Universal McCann called "Wave 3." The country only has 15% Internet penetration, but 83% of those Net users have social-networking accounts, adds Inquirer.net in the Philippines. The vast majority of those social-networking accounts are at Friendster.com. Following the Philippines are Hungary (where 80% of Net users use social sites), Poland (77%), and Mexico (76%). In other key findings, "the Philippines also has the highest percentage of users (86%) who have uploaded photos in these social networks, ahead of China (73%), Mexico (72%) and Brazil (70%); and 98% of Filipino Net users have watched videos on YouTube, tops in this category too, ahead of Mexico and Brazil. The world's top 5 social sites, according to the Universal McCann survey, are MySpace (with 32.3%), Facebook (22.5%), Blogger (15.7%), Baidu (15%), and QQ (14.6%). [There is no direct link to the Wave 3 survey in the Universal McCann site, so click on the study in the upper-right-hand corner.]

UK leads Europe in social networking

This does not surprise, given Ofcom's recent finding that 49% of the UK's 8-to-17-year-olds have an online profile (see a related link with this feature). But it's further confirmation that, as The Guardian put it, Britons are "addicted to social networking." Social-networking sites "reached 9.6 million users in the UK in 2007, according to a new report from Datamonitor," according to this Guardian blog post. "This puts it ahead of bigger countries, including France with 8.9 million and Germany with 8.6 million. Spain is in fourth place with just 2.9 million." WebProNews led with the Datamonitor finding that "close to half of all people in the UK will be members of a social-networking site within four years."

French legislation against pro-thin promotion

A bill that has passed the French legislature's lower house and goes to the Senate soon is going after all media promoting eating disorders, including pro-anorexia Web sites, the Los Angeles Times reports. Forbes reports that "France has several laws in place to regulate modeling agencies, including requiring underage models to have regular health check-ups." Regulating the domestic fashion industry, advertising, and conventional media is one thing, but Web sites are more problematic, not just because they're based all over the world. Another significant problem is, it would be awfully hard for courts and law enforcement to know what to do about Web sites in which both anorexics and those trying to help them have blogs and profiles. . ">Adam Thierer of the TechLiberation blog has another interesting argument against the regulation of Web sites: "Wouldn't we better off engaging these pro-ana people and websites directly? That is, don’t ban them or drive them underground, but instead go directly to those sites ourselves and engage in a discussion about what most of us would regard as unhealthy lifestyles." See also "Eating disorders & the social Web" and "Online eating disorder communities."

AOL to buy Bebo

Though Bebo users probably won't notice much of a difference at first, AOL recently announced it would acquire the social-networking site very popular among teens, particularly British ones. The $850 million acquisition "reflects the high hopes that big media companies like Time Warner [AOL's parent] have for social networking, which they see as a potentially lucrative way to bring together online consumers, media owners and advertisers," the International Herald Tribune reports. This may be a sign of coming consolidation in the part of the social Web dominated by companies (there's plenty of grassroots Web too - see my item this week about mini-MySpaces and all that individuals can do on their own on the participatory Web). Speaking of which, here's Le Monde's social-networking world map, putting Bebo in the No. 1 spot in the UK and Europe, but with some qualification from Jupiter Research.

Thai monks warned not to use social site

Buddhist monks in Thailand "have been warned not to use social networking sites to flirt with girls," InformationWeek reports, citing coverage in the Bangkok Post. The warning was associated with reports that Thai police were "investigating a rape claim against a monk" in which he was accused of using the Internet to lure and abuse a teenage girl. The prime minister reportedly asked Thailand's Information, Communications and Technology Ministry to monitor Hi5.com for Thai monks' use and "kick them off the site." [For disclosure, Hi5.com is a supporter of ConnectSafely.org, a sister project of NetFamilyNews.org.] Hi5 claims to be the world's third-largest social-networking site with 70 million members in 250 countries and several languages, including Russian and Chinese, and it claims 800,000 active members in Thailand. InformationWeek adds that Hi5's online-safety pages "reminds users not to meet with strangers and, if they must meet an online contact in the real world, to do so in a public place and bring a parent. It urges people to think before posting and imagine that their posts could be read by parents and potential employers."

India: Support, advice from social sites

In India, a "small but growing number" of the millions of users of Orkut and Facebook are using the social sites for advice and support, Sify.com reports. "Social-networking sites are increasingly taking the shape of the new age online 'agony aunt'," kind of the British term for a "Dear Abby." Sify sites the experience of Sarath, who is looking out for a kidney donor for himself and turned to a social site for advice about the process. "The popularity of such networking sites turning out to be the agony aunt can be gauged from the hundreds of help communities that have been set up, be it from complex issues like kidney transplants, blood cancer to much smaller issues like teenage heart breaks," Sify adds. What I hope Indian and all other young people do is think critically about the responses they get and seek out second and third opinions online as much as they would offline (see, too, and interesting blog post, "How will rural India deal with social networking?" - especially the bold comments at the bottom about the place of mobility and diversity of personal relationships in social networking). The negative side of seeking advice online, of course, is when at-risk youth get reinforcement for destructive behaviors such as cutting, eating disorders, substance abuse, and suicidal thoughts. One credible, immediate source of help might be the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, which coordinates the work of hotlines nationwide for people with questions about depression, relationships, loneliness, substance abuse, and how to help friends and loved ones, as well as suicide (see also "The social Web's 'Lifeline'").

Cellphone planet!

Literally cellphone planet: "The human race is crossing a line. There is now one cellphone for every two humans on Earth. From essentially zero, we've passed a watershed of more than 3.3 billion active cellphones on a planet of some 6.6 billion humans in about 26 years," the Washington Post reports. "This is the fastest global diffusion of any technology in human history," and the projection is 4 billion cellphones by 2010, moving on to 5 billion afte just a few years beyond that. Why? It's very flexible portable sociability (texting, talking, social networking) - even more portable than IM-ing and Web-based social networking, and look how those two technologies have taken off! The Post cites the view of Arthur Molella, director of the Smithsonian's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, that sociability is "the essence of the human species."