by Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
When it comes to social-networking sites, women are more plugged in than men, according to data analysis by Brian Solis, president of Silicon Valley public-relations firm Future Works.
Mr. Solis used Google Ad Planner to determine the gender breakdown of users signed up for the most popular social-networking sites and found that in most cases, women outnumbered men. “The point of interest that’s worth review and discussion is that in social media, women rule,” he wrote.
by Luca Sofri, Italian Journalist, Blogger, Huffington Post
One week ago I met Kara Swisher in Rome. She asked me about Twitter in Italy and I told her we were about Twitter in 2007 but now we’ve moved on….Mainstream Web users are all on Facebook (Facebook has been huge here since last summer) while Web-savvy people interested in microblogging now prefer FriendFeed with its richer features.
Like is the new favorite, which was, at one time, the new bookmark. This small, but important feature will reinforce relationships between friends and followers and those who produce, interact with, and share content.
Here we go again. Over the course of the last several months, we’ve heard that FriendFeed was going to kill Twitter. Then Twitter was going to kill FriendFeed. Then Facebook was going to kill FriendFeed. Now Facebook is going to kill Twitter. But something odd is happening. Instead of any of them dying, they’re all thriving, each gaining traffic and users–and they’ll continue to.
by Marc Canter, CEO and Founder, Broadband Mechanics
I’m imagining a world where each of us, and all groups, networks, enterprises, institutions, agencies and NGOs, have dashboards which are associated with our online presence. Some of these dashboards exist today in the guise of “NetVibes” start-up pages or as iGoogle and My Yahoo pages.
I recently discussed the viability of Twitter evolving beyond a micro community into a standardized platform for macro conversations. It’s certainly the path Facebook is traversing. And, both are making significant progress in the race to syndicate and aggregate the discussions that are important to us within our respective social networks.
For some reason, this weekend has seen a lot of talk about what FriendFeed is/isn’t/should be doing (see Louis Gray and others). One person even predicted that we will fail. I considered writing my own list of complaints about FriendFeed. I think and care about it a lot more than most people, so my list of FriendFeed issues would be a lot longer. I may still do that, but there’s something else also worth discussing…
Early every morning, I open my Web browser and load up a half-dozen “aggregator” sites: Techmeme, Memeorandum, Real Clear Politics, Google News, the Drudge Report, and the Huffington Post. This is my first sortie into the day’s news, the way I orient myself to what’s going on in the world now that I no longer subscribe to a print newspaper.
In yet another powerful showcase of Twitter’s potential power as a disseminator of information, today several people received the first information via the service that NASA has confirmed that its Phoenix Mars Lander has in fact found water on Mars.
Lately the echo chamber of the blogosphere inhabited by the Gillmor Gang (of which I am a member) has been caught in a loop of Twitter-FriendFeed convulsions.
Steve Gillmor believes that Twitter is the communications medium of the future. Send out a message to your followers and track (when the feature is enabled) the loosely coupled conversation as it wafts deeper into the cloud. FriendFeed, on the other hand, aggregates feeds from Twitter and many other sources, creating an index of the content (gestures in Gillmorspeak) an individual chooses to share with followers.
Another weekend means another bitchmeme, and this weekend it was all about FriendFeed. Scoble has a good summary of the debate so I won’t rehash it all, but I did want to throw something into the mix:
Over the last six months, it seems like every Web site is adopting the notion of a “newsfeed.” These feeds keep me informed about the status/actions of all my friends and relationships. I have a Facebook newsfeed. I have a Twitter feed. I have a LinkedIn feed. And even more recently, a new category of products called feed aggregators have arrived. These aggregators, such as FriendFeed and SocialThing, allow you to track your feeds across multiple sites. There has even been a spoof site that aggregates the aggregators.
We’ve seen a lot of new aggregation services and lifestreaming applications come into play recently, and we’ve questioned whether they’re adding to the conversation or just adding to our information overload. (See our coverage on FriendFeed, for example). And today, MyBlogLog even added even more lifestreams to subscribe to.
The truth of the matter is, like it or not, the conversations that once existed solely in the blogosphere have now moved on. People still comment, but in a lot of cases, those comments aren’t found on the blog itself. So the question is, has the conversation become diluted among all the different services and applications? Or is it just adding layers to the original topic? And most importantly, how can you keep up?
So now, in addition to this blog, my tumblog, and twitter, I have to pay attention to what’s going on in FriendFeed. So it’s gone from being an aggregator of attention to a demander of attention. Good for them. That’s the way to play the game on the Web.
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