More Than Friending: How Can the Social Web Go Beyond Facebook? – AllThingsD. When people talk about making the Web more “social,” what they really seem to mean is making it more tightly integrated with Facebook. But is that all there is? With only a smattering of deliberate exceptions, new sites and apps launch with Facebook Connect to get the network effects of tying into its powerful social graph and potent spamming tools. Instead of attempting to create their own social network, they piggyback on top of Facebook’s.
In fact, one former Google product manager told AllThingsD recently that one of the biggest reasons he left the company to work on a social start-up was so he could use Facebook Connect, something Google discourages. But while Facebook might be the hottest game in town, it’s still a pretty warped and inaccurate picture of what it means to have friends. And it all makes me wonder, what are other models of “social” besides Facebook’s current product? Could someone who does social better than Facebook mount a significant competitor to the site? Proximity. Available Data Shows Facebook User Numbers Growing Quickly, or Slowly, or Falling. Did Facebook have fewer monthly active users in the United States at the start of June than it did at the start of May?
What about user counts in other early-adopter countries like Canada and the United Kingdom? Is the company continuing to gain as many new users around the world now as it has in recent years? As we covered yesterday, Facebook appears to have had fewer monthly active users at the start of June than at the start of May in the US and a few other countries — at least according to one data source — even as it has grown bigger than ever worldwide. Although today a person close to the company tells us that the site is “still growing in the US.”
Our data source was Inside Facebook Gold, our tracking service that shows country-by-country monthly active user counts, based exactly on the data that Facebook provides in its advertising tool. Compete It also shows Facebook’s most direct social product rivals, Twitter and MySpace, also losing users in April. ComScore Google Ad Planner. The One Google Plus Feature Facebook Should Fear. While tech pundits are widely praising Google’s new Plus product, I’ve found the one feature that could take away from Facebook where it’s most dominant: Time on the site.Facebook users are known for staying on the site for over half an hour a day, something no other site could compete with… until now. To be honest, my gut reaction after using Google Plus was initially, “Why on earth would anybody switch to this from Facebook?” However, when I loaded up Google Finance as I do every morning, I suddenly realized that I was asking the wrong question.
The reality is that users won’t have the option of not using Google Plus. Google already has more users than Facebook, over one billion. They aren’t going to suddenly leave Facebook in droves, they’re just going to spend more time on all the sites in Google’s network. That big notifications box in the top right of all Google sites is the reason why. Is Google+ More Facebook or More Twitter? Yes. Quick, what existing social network is Google+ most likely to displace in terms of people’s time? Another Try by Google to Take On FacebookClaire Cain Miller, New York TimesThis isn’t a Facebook-killer, it’s a Twitter-killer.Yishan Wong, Google+ post A hearty congrats to Google for creating an offering that manages to be compared to both Facebook and Twitter.
The initial press focused on Google+ as a Facebook competitor. But as people have gotten to play with it, more and more they are realizing that it’s just as much a Twitter competitor. I wanted to understand how that’s possible. How is it Google+ competes with both of those services? To do so, I plotted Google+’s features against comparable features in both Facebook and Twitter.
Why are people thinking of Google+ as competitor to both existing social networks? The chart below is shows where Google+ is more like Facebook or Twitter. A few notes about the chart. Circles for tracking: Twitter has a very comparable feature with its Lists. Facebook Sees Big Traffic Drops in US and Canada as It Nears 700 Million Users Worldwide. Update, 6/14/11: Be sure to read our follow-up post on recent Facebook traffic according to third party measurement firms. As we note below, we’ll need to wait to see what the long-term trends really are before knowing if Facebook is continuing to grow in the US and other countries. Update, 6/15/11: More data is out from third party firms about May traffic. Our analysis here. Facebook is still growing towards 700 million users, having reached 687 million monthly actives by the start of June, according to our Inside Facebook Gold data service. Most of the new users continue to come from countries that are relatively late in adopting Facebook, as has been the trend for the past year.
But overall growth has been lower than normal for the second month straight, which is unusual. The company gained 11.8 million more people over May, following 13.9 million over April. Why the drop? Going forward, we’ll be watching closely to see what longer-term trends emerge.