Friending Mom or Dad?

I had a feeling that at least some of social networking's growth had to do with parents joining to learn about this huge presence in their kids' lives. Now the Pew Internet Project has some data at least on grownups, if not parents. "The share of adult internet users who have a profile on a social-networking site has more than quadrupled in the past four years - from 8% in 2005 to 35% now," Pew reports. A few interesting observations from Social Computing Magazine's coverage of the Pew study: Like teens, adults use social sites to communicate with people they already know (89%), and most have profiles in multiple sites (51%). Among US users 18+, MySpace is twice as popular as Facebook (50% compared to 22%). Here's the breakdown by age on who has social-network profiles: 75% of people 18-24; 57% 25-34; 30% 35-44; 19% 45-54; 10% 55-64; 7% 65+. Here, too, is Business Week's coverage, and the Washington Post talks about job-hunting with social sites.

58% clueless about social-networking

Well over half - 58% - of 13,000 people surveyed in 17 countries said they don't know what "social networking" is, Chicago-based research firm Synovate found. Respondants' ages were 16 to 65. More than a quarter of them, 26%, are actually members of social networking sites, MediaPost.com cited the study as showing. And the most socially connected country? The Netherlands at 49%, according to a ZDNET blog post about the study, followed by the United Arab Emirates (UAE - 46%), Canada (44%) and the US (40%). As for knowing what social networking is, the Dutch topped that list, too, at 89%, followed by the Japanese (71%), and Americans (70%). Where risks are concerned, "overall, just over half the respondents who are members of social networking sites (51%) agreed that online social networking has its dangers. Brazilians were the most nervous" at 79%, followed by Americans (69%) and Poles (62%). "Least concerned are Indians [19%]. Nervy networkers’ biggest concerns were lack of privacy (37%) closely followed by lack of security for children (32%)." ZDNET, which got the number wrong in its headline, nevertheless has a great chart showing the 1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-ranked social site in each of the 17 countries. I love the unpredictable diversity: Facebook is No. 1 in Canada, France, Serbia, and South Africa; MSN Spaces in Germany, Taiwan, and the UAE; and MySpace in Bulgaria and the US.

US's top 5 social network sites

The US's top 5 social network sites in terms of visitors in April (the latest figures available) are MySpace, Facebook, myYearbook, Bebo, and BlackPlanet, in that order, according to Web traffic research firm Hitwise. Interestingly, this was also the ranking order for the sites in terms of returning visitors and time spent on the sites. MySpace's April market share was 73.82%, Hitwise said, followed by Facebook (14.8%), myYearbook (1.33%), Bebo (1.09%), and BlackPlanet (0.98%).

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.]

SN profiles: Inaccurate impressions

A University of Texas researcher has found that social-networking profiles don't give very accurate pictures of their owners. "Psychology associate professor Samuel Gosling and collaborator David Evans created You Just Get Me, a Facebook application and Web site, to determine how well people understand each other by looking at a personality profile," reports The Daily Texan at UT. You Just Get Me users answer 40 questions about their personality and then compare their answers to how other users view them. Users rate each other based on first impressions, such as how lazy, ingenious, quiet or rude a person seems." Interestingly but not surprisingly, the researchers also found that the project teaches its subjects something about how well they understand themselves.

US social networking: Fresh numbers

Here's a fresh snapshot of where and how much Americans are social networking. Hitwise just announced its latest figures, finding that - out of Hitwise's group of 53 leading social sites - MySpace averaged 76.35% of all US visits last year. Next came Facebook.com, Bebo.com and BlackPlanet.com with 12.57%, 1.24%, and .87% respectively. As for the number of visits in a single month (December), MySpace received 72% of them, Facebook 12.57% (with a 50% increase in traffic over December '06), and Bebo 1.09%. There were huge traffic gains outside the Top 3 too, though: MyYearbook.com, popular among teens and founded by teens, had the biggest "gain in market share" last month, Tekrati.com reports, with a whopping 407% increase over December 2006. Facebook and Disney's popular kids' "social network" increased 51% and 48%, respectively.

The social Web Petri dish

Social-networking sites are important Petri dishes. By studying the social Web, researchers are learning a lot about how people interact - not just about how they do so now and online but about human interaction in general. In fact, research in social-networking sites "may be more accurate than personal information offered elsewhere online, such as chat room profiles, because [it's] based in real-world relationships that originate in confined communities like campuses," reports the New York Times, referring to a UCLA- and Harvard-based study of 1,700 Facebook users in the junior class of one northeastern US college. One of the things they're looking at: "weak ties," those between, say, two classmates or people who meet at a big party. "Weak ties are significant, scholars say, because they are likely to provide people with new perspectives and opportunities that they might not get from close friends and family." According to the Times, "social scientists at Indiana, Northwestern, Pennsylvania State, Tufts, the University of Texas and other institutions are mining Facebook to test traditional theories in their fields about relationships, identity, self-esteem, popularity, collective action, race and political engagement. The Washington Post recently ran a gossipy piece about the fledgling social-media research community which got some reaction in the academic blogosphere (e.g., ), but it does name a number of the individual researchers and projects working on the social Web right now. Back to the Harvard-UCLA project: An important concept they're exploring is "triadic closure," "first put forth by the pioneering German sociologist Georg Simmel … whether one’s friends are also friends of one another. If this seems trivial, consider that a study in 2004 in The American Journal of Public Health suggested that adolescent girls who are socially isolated and whose friends are not friends with one another experienced more suicidal thoughts."