Globally Social: Interesting But Incomplete
An article on Computerworld talks about social networking, and although the number listed are interesting, the article itself is a little strange. The opening title talks about social networking quickly taking global hold. I’m not sure what would be described as quickly, but most of the sites mentioned are several years old. The sub-title on the article is MySpace, Facebook and Friendster all show substantial worldwide growth. When mentioning MySpace and Facebook, the article indicates that the sites both pull in about two thirds of their audiences from North America. That doesn’t really mention much about worldwide growth or taking global hold, however, earlier in the article, there are stats that MySpace had a 72% increase in traffic from June 2006 to June 2007 while Facebook had a 270% increase. The only mention of Friendster in the article is that the site, one of the original social networking sites, is that 89% of Friendster’s visitors come from the Asia-Pacific region.
The final complaint I’ll make is that the article didn’t actually give Facebook’s numbers for June 2007. It states MySpace had 114 million global visitors, Bebo had 18 million, Tagged had 13 million, but what about Facebook? The battle between these two sites is widely publicized, and yet the most important statistic to compare the two sites was absent from the article. Again, I read the article and was interested in the statistics that were presented (and I recommend people check them out), but the article seemed to miss on a lot of things. They gave me popcorn with no butter!