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."

Social networking ever more international

Its appeal is both local and international. USATODAY offers a snapshot of how social networking is doing around the world, and even though US-based services have been expanding internationally for some time, most are doing so in a "local" (or national and regional way) with a lot of local competition (such as Mixi.jp in Japan, Naseeb in Pakistan, StudiVZ in Germany, and SkyRock.com in France). "This year, MySpace is opening operations in Russia, Turkey, Poland and Portugal, among others" and is in 9 of the "top 10 Internet markets," USATODAY reports. Though Facebook says it's the exception in not launching separate sites for individual countries, look at its growth outside the US: "In September 2006, 7% of Facebook's 10 million active users were outside the USA; today, 60% of its 63 million active users are." There are good business reasons for this growth: "About 80% of the world's estimated 1.2 billion Internet users are outside the USA," USATODAY adds, and " half the $40 billion online advertising market is." The numbers are pretty amazing. According to comScore MediaMetrix figures USATODAY cites, this past November, there were 173.5 million social networkers in the Asia-Pacific region, the No. 1 in this category of Web use; that's a 50% increase over the figure for November 2006. But look at the increase for the Middle East/Africa, the 5th-biggest social-networking region in the article's chart: 23.8 social-networking users and a 69% increase over a year ago.

UK's top social sites

With Britons so keen on social networking (recent Ofcom research found 1 in 4 logged into a social site at least 23 times a month!), the UK's Computing Which? consumer magazine recently took the subject on. It tested the "10 most popular sites [in Britain] for ease of setting up and using the site, the range of features, and the way the sites protected privacy and security, including how easy it is to remove personal details," The Guardian reports. The highest mark - 79% - went to Bebo, "used predominantly by the 13-to-24-year-old age group ... for "working hard to encourage responsible networking." Next in line, respectively, were Facebook (74%), MySpace (67%), Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces (65%), and Friends Reunited (62%). "Saga Zone - aimed at the over-50s - and BBC Talk were both given a maximum five-star rating for their performance" and discussion groups, The Guardian adds, and "Flickr proved to be the best in the special-interest category, scoring five out of five for both performance and ease of use."

Socializing online, on phones in Japan

It's huge in Japan, where Mixi.jp is the No. 1 social-networking site and the No. 2 site in general (after Yahoo), Forbes reports. But even Mixi's computer-based social networking is facing growing competition not so much from other Web social sites as from mobile-based social networking. "This year, for the first time, the number of mobile users accessing Mixi's browser-based mobile system outweighed the number of visitors who have PCs." And the phone socializers are younger than the computer-based ones, Forbes adds: "58% are under 25, compared with 43% of Mixi's PC users." Mixi's mobile competition is "Mobage-town," (Japanese shorthand for "mobile gaming town"), which doesn't even have a presence on the Web. Mobage-town users "send their avatars through a series of games, linking up with friends and competing for bragging rights. The free service has its own currency and pages where users can buy various gewgaws for their avatars." Forbes says the service claims "50% penetration among Japanese teens" and 8 million users.

Politician's profile deleted

It was Liberal Democrat Steve Webb, a British member of Parliament, whose Facebook page was deleted after someone sent in an abuse report calling it an imposter profile. Soon there was a Facebook group called "Steve Webb is Real!", CNET reports. His profile was shortly reinstated, to the satisfaction of his 2,500 Facebook friends and constitutents. But what's interesting about all this is that on the social Web it's sometimes as hard to prove there's a real person behind a profile as it is to prove there isn't. [See also "Extreme cyberbullying: US case comes to light."]

Oz union's Facebook profile

The Australian Workers Union is marketing itself to youth by establishing a presence in Facebook, Australian IT reports. Though union leaders say its profile will get more sophisticated, for now "users can add the ‘Proud AWU Supporter’ application to their profile pages to obtain the organisation's latest news feeds." Version 2.0 will let users "interact directly" with the union, which says it wants to differentiate itself from most unions, which "generally ignore new forms of communication."

Euro social networking

Lots of news this week about European social networking, with headlines about Bebo, Piczo, Facebook, and Bahu. Piczo, reportedly the UK's 4th-largest social-networking site, is going mobile, The Guardian reports. The site will allow users "to post photos, videos and messages from their phones to their profile pages." [The Times of London reported that "British adults are more frequent users of social networking sites than any of their European counterparts," with 40% of Britons using them compared with 17% of adults in France, 12% in Germany, and 22% in Italy.] France-based Bahu.com Bahu.com, a social site started by students for high school students across Europe, just received its first round of funding, it announced. "Bahu now counts over 300,000 members, and counted 2 million unique visitors in November." San Francisco-based Bebo, meanwhile, just announced its plans to "join forces with Poland’s leading media company Agora to deliver a content-rich social-networking experience to the Polish online audience. It's particularly appropriate to mention European developments this week because of the signing Thursday of the Treaty of Lisbon, the European Union's reform treaty, at Lisbon's Jerónimos Monastery (see this in the Associated Press and this commentary in The Guardian).

US sites, foreign social networking

When the user-driven social Web meets the fairly evolved consumer-privacy and free-speech laws of the US (where many social-networking sites are based) meets the laws and sensibilities of the country where the US company's customers are, things get complicated. And very messy, sometimes. Take Brazil, for example. There, Google's social-networking site Orkut.com "has become a major center of Brazilian social life, with two-thirds of all Internet surfers using the service, many of them children, the Wall Street Journal reports. And some of them criminals. While many Orkut "communities were built around such themes as soccer, love and overcoming injustice" (almost 400,000 people are members of a group called "My mother is the best on Earth"), "criminal elements also connected with each other and recruited sympathizers on the site, including neo-Nazis, organized gangs and pedophiles." So early on, in its zeal to protect its users' free speech and privacy, Google was much less responsive to Brazilian users' complaints and law-enforcement subpoenas than some prosecutors - and potential advertisers - in Brazil found satisfactory. Thus the story of how one country - and its watchdogs, in the business community and children's advocacy - is dealing with the social Web, an interesting case study for everyone interested in this intersection of law enforcement, civil liberties, and the social Web.

Social-networking sights on Asia

There's a "colossal scrum among the world's biggest social networks for the hearts and mouse clicks of millions of people in India, China, and elsewhere in Asia," Business Week reports. It adds that MySpace and Facebook are scrambling to replace "established homegrown networks and foreign sites, especially Orkut and Friendster" (Orkut has a well-established beachhead in India, which also has at least a dozen "homegrown" social sites, and Friendster in Southeast Asia). MSNBC reports that "MySpace began rolling out local language sites about a year and a half ago and now has 24 in 20 countries, in 12 languages, including French, German and Japanese," though France-based Skyrock has about 70% of that country's social-networking market. " In Poland, local site Grono.net has a strong following, with more than 1.3m registered users. In Russia, LiveJournal, a San Francisco-based blogging site, has a strong following, and Yandex, a local company that dominates the country's internet search market, far overshadowing Google, owns its own social networking site, MoiKrug.ru."

Int'l social-networking numbers

More than half (56%) of Europe's online population is social networking, and 78% of Britain's is, TechnologyNewsDaily reports, citing comScore figures. So Europe has 127.3 million social networkers and the UK 24.9 million. In addition to higher uptake, Britain's usage was heavier "in terms of hours spent, pages viewed, and the number of visits per month. The average visitor to social networking sites in the U.K. spent 5.8 hours per month on those sites in August and made 23.3 visits. This was a significantly heavier usage level than in France, which averaged 2 hours per month and 16.8 visits per visitor, or Germany, with 3.1 hours per month and 13.8 visits per visitor." Then again, compare Briton's 5.8 hours to Brazilians' 11.7 hours and Canadians' 6.5 hours, as reported by The Telegraph. It adds that the UK's top three sites are Bebo, MySpace, and Facebook, in that order.

Sex offenders on MySpace: Some context

Last week Larry Magid and I co-wrote a commentary that ran in the San Jose Mercury News Sunday. Hundreds of news outlets worldwide had picked up the story that MySpace has deleted the profiles of 29,000 registered sex offenders. The news may have been shocking to a lot of parents of teen social networkers, so we felt parents deserved some perspective on this. Here's a slightly condensed version of what we wrote….

Finding and expelling sexual predators from social Web sites - something MySpace says it now does routinely - is a good thing. Other social sites are similarly cooperating with law enforcement. But this announcement from North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper (see General Cooper's "Protecting Children from MySpace," a link under "What's New" on his page) was only possible because MySpace took the initiative to develop a law-enforcement tool the federal government called for in a recently passed law but failed to create: a national sex offender database that MySpace then donated to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children for broader use.

Beyond the Web. Sex offenders aren't just in social-networking sites online. They're in chatrooms and newsgroups, on discussion boards and file-sharing networks. They've been on the Internet since before there was a World Wide Web, long before social networking took off. Now social sites are helping to expose their online activities.

The numbers. Let's put the 29,000 profiles in context: More will probably be found, but there are more than 190 million profiles on MySpace at the moment. Now let's move from the Net to "real life." There are 602,000 registered sex offenders in the United States. That's just registered ones - those who've been caught and convicted. The vast majority of child molesters are not strangers whom children meet online. Very, very few are strangers in real life even: According to the California Department of Justice, “90% of child victims know their offender, with almost half of the offenders being a family member. Of sexual assaults against people age 12 and up, approximately 80% of the victims know the offender."

Actual cases. Last spring I was looking for a solid figure for sexual exploitation of minors in social-networking sites after hearing Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal's reference to "the towering danger of sexual predators" (see "Predators vs. cyberbullies"). General Cooper's office told me there were approximately 100 known cases in MySpace in 2005, but that number was based not on government statistics but a Lexis-Nexis search of news reports. That's 100 cases too many, but an extremely small proportion of the 12 million teens who use such sites, and it pales compared to the number of kids molested by acquaintances and family members.

No kidnappings. In all those cases, a teenager willingly got together with someone he or she met online and, contrary to what many people think, the kids often knew what they were getting into and, in every known case, went to meet the offenders themselves. This doesn't excuse these crimes in any way, but parents need to understand how this victimization works and what signs to look for….

Who's actually victimized. At a recent hearing on Capitol Hill, David Finkelhor, director of the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center, gave a profile of what he described as a fairly typical victim of online predation: "Jenna" was 13 and "from a divorced family, frequented sex-oriented chatrooms, had the screenname 'Evilgirl.' There she met a guy who, after a number of conversations admitted he was 45. He flattered her, sent her gifts, jewelry. They talked about intimate things. And eventually he drove across several states to meet her for sex on several occasions in motel rooms. When he was arrested, in her company, she was reluctant to cooperate with law enforcement authorities" (see the full story). "Jenna" is not a typical teen or social networker; she's a typical victim of online predation, a high-risk teen offline, representing somewhere between 2% and 5% of online teens, Dr. Finkelhor indicated in a recent briefing on Capitol Hill.

Social networking's very individual. Whether it's a positive or negative experience depends on who uses it. The vast majority of our online kids are for the most part using social sites to socialize with their friends at school. Some are decorating their pages and learning graphic design, writing software code, playing with digital photos, producing and editing video, and so on, all in a very collective way. Unfortunately, some teens are seeking the wrong kind of validation online for destructive behaviors such as eating disorders, cutting, and substance abuse. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline told us over a year ago that MySpace was its No. 1 source of referrals, so teens are also getting help in MySpace for depression, domestic violence, loneliness, and substance abuse, as well as suicidal thinking, through the work of 120 crisis centers nationwide whose work the Lifeline coordinates.

Cyberbullying affects a lot more teens. So far two nationwide surveys in the US have found that about one-third of online teens in this country have been victimized by cyberbullying (one in Canada put the figure at about two-thirds for Canadian kids!). That's at least 8 million young people in the US (this too in "Predators vs. cyberbullies"). This peer harassment needs to be addressed, which will certainly happen at home and in school, as we teach our kids to be good friends and "citizens" online as well as off.

So let's keep these scary predator announcements in perspective. We want parents to have the facts so they can remain calm. When parents (and officials) overreact and start banning things, kids just go underground - as they have since the beginning of time. Only now they can do so online too - on hundreds of social networking sites, in IM, on phones and all sorts of other devices and at proliferating connection points in parks, libraries, cafes, and at friends' houses.

Related links

As of this writing, there were more than 600 links in Google News to coverage in multiple countries of the North Carolina attorney general's announcement. That was just the start. The story has continued to unfold, so here's a sampler of coverage:

"Multi-front predator battle" - The Washington Post goes in-depth on the different aspects of this effort, including 10 states' new legislation requiring sex offenders to register their email addresses and what's involved at MySpace to catch offenders on the site.

Parental-permission piece dropped. North Carolina state legislators deleted from a proposed bill a requirement that the state's teens "get their parents' permission before signing up for social-networking sites like MySpace, saying it raised constitutional questions that couldn't be addressed," the Charlotte Observer reports.

Closer look at parental verification. Here's an audio discussion (podcast) on "The Pitfalls of Age Verification" by tech-public-policy experts Tim Lee, Braden Cox, and Adam Thierer. Cox and Thierer testified before the NC legislature on this subject. Here, too, is Advertising Age on this subject.

A twist in the UK. "Convicted sex offenders should not be prevented from using social networking sites such as MySpace, Scotland Yard said yesterday," The Times Online reported. The UK police agency's spokesperson said, “Just because you’re a convicted offender doesn’t mean you’re still offending,” a spokeswoman said. “Why would we pursue them in this way? These are people who have served their time.”

China's take. "MySpace weeds out 29,000 sex offender profiles," Chinese news agency Xinhua reported.

Canadian view. "MySpace kicks out sex offenders - but not in Canada" at Canada.com

MySpace's view. "MySpace defends efforts to vet sex offenders" in InformationWeek

AG looks at Facebook. An anonymous person who said he or she was "a concerned parent" contacted the New York Times about a fake teen profile he (we'll make it "he" to simplify) created apparently to check into the predator risk on Facebook, the Times reports. The Times put this account into an article that led with Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal's announcement that "investigators in his state were looking into three or more' cases of convicted sex offenders who had registered on Facebook." The Times added that "Mr. Blumenthal said he was taking a particular interest in Facebook because his children use the service."

Professional & personal lives online

It's all getting kind of muddy online for grownups. For the pioneers of social networking - teenagers and 20-something just starting out their careers - it wasn't such a big deal. They didn't make the distinctions we make between "lives." They, especially teens, experimented with different persona, but that's just it. The persona were experimental, not established. Now that we adults are getting into social networking, and social sites are proliferating and specializing (or settling into niches), fortunately we have some choices: We can have our professional social networking, our extended-family social networking, our music social-networking, but we are also having social networking dilemmas. Take Washington Post tech reporter Rob Pegoraro's experience with Facebook, for example. For him, Facebook started out to be "purely recreational" and kind of solidified in his head as such. Then co-workers started friending him. Okaaaaay, he could maybe get used to that. But then p.r. people in his business circles but not personally known to him wanted to be "friends." Hmmm. The problem is, Facebook has become what you might call the hip LinkedIn.com (a "social-networking" site that has always been about professional networking), so plenty of people 30+ are now doing professional networking on it. Facebook does have "at least 135" privacy options. "Yet not one of these options allows you to categorize Facebook contacts as close or distant friends." It' getting a little tricky. See p. 2 of Rob's article for his conclusion.

Social networkers worldwide

The social Web is completely global, and there's a map to illustrate at the ValleyWag blog. Some fascinating, sometimes surprising, patterns show up on this map:

Hi5.com is the most international, with a presence in 15 countries, especially Peru, Colombia, Central America, Tunisia, Romania, and Mongolia. A bit more on Hi5 from the Gigaom blog: It "started out as a social-network-plus matrimonial site targeting the Indian diaspora, but later morphed into a social network" that now has about 30 million members.

"Facebook," the map says, "is stronger, internationally, than Myspace, with surprising strongholds in the Middle East."

Bebo and Skyblog "follow colonial patterns," Bebo British and Skyblog French, with strongholds in France, Belgium, and Francophone Africa.

Friendster's huge in Southeast Asia

"Fotolog, a photo service defeated in the US by Friendster, has re-emerged as the dominant social network in Argentina and Chile."

Google's Orkut is big in India, Pakistan, Brazil, and Paraguay.

Studiverzeichnis is popular in Germany and Austria.

LiveJournal's hot in Belarus and Russia.