mi-space

Social Networking Ad Spending Update

eMarketer has revised its US social network ad spending projections, estimating that advertisers will spend $1.4 billion to place ads on online social networks this year, down from the previous projection of $1.6 billion.

Over half of web users view video clips every week

Interesting global stats from a study carried out by Universal McCann and published in NMA - including info in blogging.

Multilingual Social Network XIHA Life Creates Cross-Cultural Connections

XIHA Life (http://www.xihalife.com/), a new social network targeted at multilingual people living outside their home country, introduced new features at the Web 2.0 Expo. For the first time, social network users can select multiple languages to communicate and share content with, enabling multicultural communities to form across the globe. ....

Facebook vs. MySpace: The battle for global social network dominance

Article discussing the two key Social Networking players' popularity and statistics:

http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/04/16/facebook-vs-myspace-battle-global-social-network-dominance

The Industry Standard -   Melissa Chang 16th April 2008

MySpace launches India social networking website

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jtEgFdTxrChZ3NKKv-UorMRDDfbw

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP)  17th April 2008

MySpace on Thursday officially launched in India, as the world's most popular social networking website strives to fend off fast-growing rival Facebook in the international arena.

Immigration in Social networks aka "Da Estonia Code"

In recent days there has been quite a phenomenon in Orkut.com - the number of the Estonian users

has skyrocketed and not because baby boomers are entering to internet.

The reason was quite simple - Orkut is testing new apps with Estonian users. Orkut users (non-Estonians), who discovered this sent out chain letters saying: "change your county to Estonia and see magic!." It was named Da Estonia Code. Although, it was spam, many orkut users did it and got access to those new cool applications.

This clearly shows:

1. social network users love applications/widgets;
2. with buzz and interesting applications, users are willing to do whatever it takes to get it;
3. social network users love to share information;
4. we cannot trust statistics that sites give us.

That testing also created a lot of discussion around it, because non-Estonians feel themselves offended (or envy?!) as they don't have opportunity to test those applications.

Read more about it here

List of Social Network sites Worldwide

A list from Wikipedia of the main social networking sites, including countries where it is available, number of users and registration info.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites

Social networking preferences across the globe