Facebook is the second most visited website in the UK, but Google.co.uk remains ahead of it. Last week Google.co.uk picked up 9.34% of UK Internet visits, whilst Facebook accounted for 6.01%.
Why aren’t we in the UK seeing the same trend as the US? Well, two reasons…firstly social networking is still more popular in the US and secondly Google has a larger share of the search market in the UK (90%), as opposed to the US where its share is 70%.
So it doesn’t look like we’ll see Facebook overtaking Google over this side of the Atlantic very soon.
Shortening service Snurl, for example, had the lowest uptime of any of the services. Only Goo.gl and Twt.tl had 100% uptime. Latency was an issue for many of the shorteners but none quite as bad as Facebook’s shortener Fb.me—nearly ten times as slow as the fastest shortener, Goo.gl.
Facebook is adopting the QR. QR is short for Quick Response (because they can be read quickly by a mobile phone through its camera). They are used to take a piece of information from a transitory media and put it in to your cell phone – this can be links, videos, text, photos and more.
Imagine wearing the link to your facebook profile on a t-shirt
Social networking website Facebook has capped a year of phenomenal growth by overtaking Google’s popularity among US internet users, with industry data showing it has scored more visits on its home page than the search engine.
In a sign that the web is becoming more sociable than searchable, research firm Hitwise said that the two sites accounted for 14 per cent of all US internet visits last week. Facebook’s home page recorded 7.07 per cent of traffic and Google’s 7.03 per cent.
It is the first time that Facebook.com has enjoyed a weekly lead over Google.com….
Is social now becoming bigger than search in the US? Read More
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The data has been segemented by industry, and covers the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Brazil, US and Australia.
To view this extremely useful and interesting graphic click here
In a bid to improve users social media experiances, Yahoo has followed Google lead by intergrating real-time twitter feeds into their search results.
The Brand Republic reported:
From today (24 February), users will be able to experience real-time Twitter feeds in Yahoo! search. Real-time public tweets will also be visible on Yahoo!’s media properties including news, finance and entertainment
Yahoo!’s integration of Twitter aims to run deeper than the deal Twitter struck with rivals Google and Microsoft at the end of last year, to launch real-time feeds on their search engines….”
Related Links: Brand Republic Article
Twitter has today hit the landmark of hitting over 50 million tweets sent per day. This is over 20 times the volume of traffic the site was generating only a year ago, and means that is now passes myspace that is estimated to be hitting around 33 million status updates below. The Brand Republic had this to say:
“The growth in tweets has put Twitter ahead of MySpace which is estimated to be hitting about 33 million status messages per day. In January 51.6 million unique users visited MySpace in the US, according to Nielsen, compared to 21.79 million unique users that visited Twitter. The data suggests that while Twitter has an overall lower number of users they are more communicative.
The leap to 50 million tweets per day, or 600 tweets per second, which does not include spam, shows the huge growth the service has notched up in the space of three years.
In 2007 Twitter users were racking up just 5,000 tweets a day. By 2008 that figure had grown to 300,000 and to 2.5 million per day in 2009. Last year proved to be the microblogging service’s breakthrough year growing to 35 million representing an annual growth rate of 1,400%.
However, Twitter is still a long way behind social networking leaders YouTube and Facebook. YouTube is estimated to be serving as many as 1 billion videos per day…”
Related Links: Brand Republic Article
How time flies. I can’t believe Facebook has now reached the ripe old age of 6 years old today, as according to its info page it was launched on this day in 2004. And it’s certainly not bad for a scheme hatched by a 20-year-old in his college dorm room!
Facebook was originally called ‘Thefacebook’ located at thefacebook.com and was set up by Mark Zuckerberg (and the lesser known Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes). Intended to be a network for Harvard students only, it became so popular it was adopted by other universities before being expanded out to the masses to become the biggest social network on the Internet.
Ask people about their views on social media for 2009 and it will inevitably come back as the year of Twitter, the current darling of the social sphere. Facebook hasn’t been hanging around though, as it managed to add a further 200 million new users last year, which raised a whooping $200 million. This is actually double the amount Twitter was reported to have raised in funds back September.
2009 also saw Facebook over take MySpace in US traffic levels, and at the same time MySpace actual lost 1 million users. Acquisition of new users has been key to Facebook’s success, and at the last count the number of users totalled 35o million (meaning approximately 45 million status updates each day – great if you want to know what your mate had for breakfast or that they have lost an umbrella).
Twitter, launched publicly in July 2006, has hit quadrupole-digit growth, thanks to the surge of celebrity tweeters and its open platform. Back came Facebook with its own open stream API and acquisition of FriendFeed (designed by the brains behind Gmail and Google Maps), which provides a real time search engine better than Twitters.
Facebook hasn’t been without its problems however, with scandal around privacy settings and the breach of Canadian Privacy Laws.
So what of Facebook in 2010? Well, it seems there is no slowing down as it continues to fire out new features, including talk about introducing virtual currency, and with a projected revenue figure of $700 million this year, who wouldn’t be confident. The Facebook Era is even a required textbook for the a marketing course at Stanford and social media course at Harvard!
Nice one Facebook and Happy Birthday!
Thanks to the new HTML5 Standards you can play videos directly through html with no plugins required. Naturally Youtube has taken advantage of this and has been running a few beta tests on the idea with full html video pages.
You can now sign up to a beta testing area which will run all your videos without the need for a flash plugin which should lead to a much better user experience, less crashes and hopefully all run a little faster.
This is currently only open to Chrome and Safari users but we can’t imagine firefox will be far off. The only limitations are it won’t play full screen and if they have ads, or aren’t available in h.264, you will get the usual Flash player.
Add yourself into the beta here http://youtube.com/html5
Related Links: Baby Twitter Article
