eModeration's Social Media Round-Up - The Fab Four #7

Welcome to our round-up of all that's new, controversial or just plain weird on the social media scene in the last few days. Such a lot of news this week that we've split it into three - look out for the Headlines in post #6 and more on Social Brands & Legal in #8 to follow. And please feed back below on what you find interesting, or how we could best deliver it to you.

ON FACEBOOK...

Threadsy, a site which aggregates users Facebook, Twitter and email, is developing an app which would allows its users to ‘abhor’ an item in their Facebook feed. Harrumph. As my dear grandmama used to say, if you ain't got nothing nice to say, go browse another webpage.

Other than that, it’s all about the numbers this week for Facebook.

In the UK, The ‘Book is cookin’ - it claims one in every seven page views, up 86.1%. And although Google grabbed the official ‘most visited’ title, Facebook was the clear moral victor, with each of their users racking up a higher number of pages per visit.

US stats are also looking good for the social giant. According to Experian, Facebook and MySpace are making like elevators, with the former’s share of social traffic zooming from 19.9% to 58.6% over the last year, while the latter’s plummets from 66.8 to 30.3 – a stomach-lurching 55% plunge towards oblivion.

The same stats expose Facebook rival Twitter’s vitals to be a somewhat undersized 1.84% of traffic. However, there’s no denying the microblogging service’s extended annual growth – up 1170% from 0.15% a year ago.

But both Twitter, and Facebook saw growth droop in June - to be expected during the summer months. But now the nights are drawing in, and the anticipated bump in traffic hasn’t materialized, with monthly unique visitors growing only marginally.

ON TWITTER…

The People’s Medium? Twice this week, Twitter users have wielded national influence. First against Trafigura, who had attempted to place a watertight legal gag around the Guardian newspaper, banning them from reporting details of the oil company‘s alleged waste-dumping in the Ivory Coast - or from reporting that they were banned from doing so... But with #trafigura topping trending topics, the company’s legal reps Carter-Ruck retreated, leaving the Guardian (and indeed anyone else) free to publish.

Then, following expressions of outrage from Tweetmeisters Derren Brown and Stephen Fry, Twitter users jammed the Press Complaints Commission’s website with a flood of protests at the Daily Mail’s Jan Moir. In her daily column she’d written that gay singer Stephen Gately’s death was “not, by any yardstick, a natural one” - before mass accusations of homophobia forced the Mail to edit the piece, while several top brands, including Nestle and M&S, asked for their ads to be withdrawn.

And there’s more…

Amid wide speculation that they were planning to allow short video clips to be uploaded from mobiles, Biz Stone growled his rebuttal to Mashable: “No video hosting. 140 characters of text including spaces. You know the drill.”

Having recently launched its translation programme, Twitter closed a deal with India’s largest mobile operator, potentially adding 110m users – many of whom will only ever experience a web connection via their phones - to its stats.

The microblogging service began a rollout of Lists, causing some to wonder whether they are moving towards an authority system.

And Twitter finally added limited reporting features last week: now users can designate certain accounts as Spam, alerting a “Trust and Safety” team to investigate further. The site also launched its own Twitter Wine – causing one of those momentary cognitive disjuncts that increasingly plague me. Then I twigged that it was all for a jolly good cause.

Finally, if you’re very keen to boost your own stats, you’ll agree these sassy nylons are jolly smart. But curses! They don’t tell potential followers what my Twitter handle is! And ‘@emodkate’, scrawled in black marker down my left thigh, will surely diminish their style quotient?

IT’S A GOOGLE WORLD…

Google UK is in the doghouse, having slid to a measly 13% share of the search giant’s global revenue.

But overall, it’s hard to imagine how things could go better for Google, who now account for 6% of all internet traffic, according to ReadWriteWeb.

The company hoisted a hefty £1bn profit in Q3, in their biggest Q-on-Q revenue growth in over a year. The news caused a spike in share price, and the NY Times hailed it as "the latest sign that the global economy may be on the mend."

And, following our speculation that the company is plotting to spread a thin layer of Google over the entire world, the search giant took further steps towards the title Planet’s Biggest Info-Provider. It announced the upcoming launch of Google Editions, its scheme to sell e-books online at last week’s Frankfurt Book Fair.

ON YOUTUBE…

Video consumption is still moving northwards, with a healthy 25% increase in total streams and time per viewer, according to Nielsen’s September figures.

Naturally, YouTube leads the way; hot on the heels of its expansion of video ads to the UK, the network announced that it had passed 1bn views per day last week, to general applause.

Some commentators, however, hinted that YouTube might do well to keep their heads down, following Google’s admission that they overpaid for YouTube by an eye-watering $1 billion; not to mention Credit Suisse’s prediction that the network is on track for a $470 million loss in 2009.

That's all folks!

eModeration's social media round-ups are compiled by our research consultant Kate Williams. If you want to follow Kate on Twitter, you don't have to check out her hosiery - she's @emodkate.