Social Media Round-up #29

Welcome to eModeration's round-up of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams. For more social media snippets, follow her on @emodkate - or for general twittery, @KateVWilliams.

In this update: we're still Buzzing; those Bing Maps chaps; and Facebook's five billion bits.



THE HEADLINES ...

THE LOWDOWN ...

IN OTHER NEWS ...

ON FACEBOOK ...

ON TWITTER ...

ON GOOGLE ...

ON YOUTUBE ...

BRANDS GET SOCIAL ...

ON MOBILE ...

THINKING ...




ON GOOGLE ...

Less than a week since the launch of Google Buzz, and already it feels like forever (but in a good way).

There’ve been tears, and joy, and tears of joy; and massive privacy holes, and the lightening-speed tightening of same: truly, a rollercoaster of emotion for us all this week. But in case you didn’t make the height restriction, here’s a speedy up-sum of the vertiginous highs and lurching lows.

Tuesday: Buzz appears, causing mild bafflement in both analysts and public. Wednesday: Competitors get snarky. Thursday: Huge privacy issues are revealed. Friday: Huge privacy issues are fixed. Saturday: Stats show Buzz is a Facebook-and-Twitter-rivalling game-changer with over 160,000 Buzz posts and comments per hour.

If you require a little more detail, Mashable’s analysis of Google’s ‘nuclear bomb’ is well worth a look – they also usefully reprise Ari Milner’s tips on how to turn Buzz into your ‘social command centre’.

While the social media world was all a-Buzz this week, the launch was by no means Google’s only news:

Ay Caramba! At least six music blogs were deleted from Google’s Blogger and Blogspot services - entirely without warning - for copyright-releated TOS violations. Their owners received notification after Google had already removed the blogs – in some cases destroying ‘years’ of archives in the process – but many insist they operate with the permission of record labels and artists, reports the Guardian.

In a somewhat inscrutable update on Google’s ongoing Chinese conundrum, co-founder Sergey Brin said that the company wants uncensored search results "within the Chinese system”. Though he postulated that such a thing might come to pass “maybe in a year or two”, Brin acknowledged that “a lot of people might think I am naive - and that might be true.”

Sparking futurist visions of a technology which truly melts geo-cultural borders, the Times reports that Google is developing mobile software which would allow two people to converse in real-time, though neither spoke the other’s language. The software would combine Google Translate, and its voice-recognition system – but won’t be available for several years.

Meanwhile, Google announced the launch of Google Maps Lab, which will allow users to test new features as they’re developed. Commentators speculate that Google is feeling some Microsoft heat, following the recent stream of new features rolled out for the Silverlight-powered version of Bing Maps: this week saw the launch of their Streetside Photos app, which matches geo-tagged Flickr images with their real-world locations.


ON FACEBOOK ...

Though Buzz is doubtless giving Facebook HQ a tension headache, they needn’t panic quite yet: last week The ‘Book announced they’d zipped past the 400 million user post without a backwards glance, and this week new stats reveal that over 100 million of us are using the site via our mobile phones – a near 100% rise over six months, and a vindication of the simplified design of their mobile site.

Elsewhere in the Facebook compound, the chaps in the Dept for the Immediate and Continuing Expansion of Social Games must be jolly pleased: according to TBI Research, the head of an (un-named) social gaming companies says that Facebook’s new payment platform has seen sales of virtual goods jump by 25%. This is enough to absorb the considerably higher commissions which Facebook charges (30%, versus 10% by competing payment services).

And last month, five billion pieces of content were whistling through the cybersphere courtesy of Facebook users – a 500% leap on mid-2009. After launching its ‘Share’ buttons and – of course – Facebook Connect, the social giant is shapeshifting before our very eyes, and looks set to become as much of a content portal as a social networking space.

Unsurprisingly, brands are increasingly focusing on social networks as a means of ‘fishing where the fishes are’ (as Coca-Cola’s social-media team neatly puts it.) eModeration’s most recent white paper covers the notoriously tricksy topic of how to deal with user-generated content on these rapidly-evolving and markedly varied platforms – if your brand is keen to dive in, but perplexed by what’s required, it’s well worth a look.


ON TWITTER ...

There’s been a bit of a hoo-ha recently about whether or not Twitter stats have truly stalled. This, from Royal Pingdom, seems to come down firmly in the No camp: new figures reveal that a mind-boggling 1.2 billion tweets were sent last month.

What’s more, January 12th was Twitter’s biggest day yet “across all metrics that matter” according to an understandably smug-sounding CEO Evan Williams. The figures neatly coincide with the news that Twitter is hiring Ali Rowghani – till now, Pixar’s financial capitane – as chief financial officer: a wake-up call to those who think that Twitter has anything but profitability in its sights.


ON YOUTUBE ...

Crikey, those birthdays just keep on coming, don’t they? No sooner have we surreptitiously pricked the balloons left over from Facebook’s sixth, than YouTube announces its fifth birthday. To celebrate, new Nielsen research reveals that, while overall US online video growth has slowed to 5.2% year on year (down from 16% the previous year), Youtube is far and away the biggest online video property with 113.6 million unique viewers last month - up 6.7% on December.

Coincidentally, the Wall Street Journal reports that Veoh, one of YouTube’s initial competitors way back in 2005, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy this week. YouTube done good (or at least, done clever).


BRANDS GET SOCIAL ...

Nokia has given fans the chance to shoot and cut their own video for Noisettes' new single 'Saturday Night': 80 of them have used their Nokia N95 and 5800 handsets to film the band performing, and have uploaded their footage to a dedicated microsite where other fans can view and edit it.

Pizza Hut took advantage of Valentine’s Day to pull Twitter users in – they asked them to tweet their smoothest pick-up lines, followed by the hashtag #iluvPH. Free “chocolate-topped dessert sticks” (good lord!) went to the most creative entries.

To coincide with Fairtrade Fortnight, Tate & Lyle have launched a website to promote their Fairtrade products, which include Divine chocolate, Café Direct coffee and Traidcraft raisins. The website allows users to make their own virtual cakes, and share cake-based content across social networks: the creator of the most delicious-sounding recipe will have their cake whisked up for them for real - by The Ritz, no less.

Mars has partnered with the Daily Mirror to challenge four Snickers fans to a series of tasks, each of which will be shown as webisodes on the Mirror’s website. The campaign – titled ‘More Nuts’ and featuring tasks like the not-very-gruelling-sounding ‘kicking and catching footballs’ - will also be aired on Facebook and YouTube.

Aids project (Red) has launched a campaign called ‘Get Pucke(Red) Up’, which allows Facebook users to send lip-smackingly audible kisses to their friends. The initiative offers six different kissing styles, from the ‘Platonic Peck’ to the more emphatic ‘Can’t Get Enough’, and highlights the various real-world gifts which (Red) hopes users will buy to support their work in the developing world.

Dennis Publishing, which numbers techie titles Mac User, Computer Shopper and online-mag Gizmo amongst its publications, has launched a new consumer technology review site. Expertreviews.co.uk offers – well, expert reviews, as well as user-generated ones aggregated from previous buyers by Reevoo.


ON MOBILE ...

54.5 million smartphones were sold in the US in Q4 of 2009 - a giant leap of 39% on the previous year’s figures. According to comScore, much of this continuing growth is Apple-shaped: the iPhone increased its market share from 24.1% to 25.3% on the previous quarter. Google’s Android doubled its share from 2.5% to 5.2%, but the leading operating system by some considerable way is still Blackberry’s RIM, with a whopping 41.6% of the market.

On both iPhone and Android phones, social networking is by far the most popular activity. Socnet apps were used at double the rate of news applications, and four times the rate of mobile games, according to Flurry – though users tend to consume news in longer chunks than they devote to social media, at an average of ten minutes per session.

Meanwhile, UK firm Synchronica has developed an affordable smartphone which could be life-changing for users in the developing world, where monthly incomes would barely scratch the price of a regular smartphone. One of Synchronica’s models offers a basic push-email and messaging service, the other a full HTML Web browser, and access to social networking sites.

Finally, when US teens aren’t in school or asleep, they send a thumb-numbing average of 10 texts an hour, according to new Nielsen figures – that’s 3,146 texts a month, compared to less than 500 for all mobile users combined.


THINKING ...

If you have any time left over from the giddy social whirl this week, may we recommend the following?

Two books, one detailing the rise and rise of Facebook, the other the rise and – well, who knows? - of MySpace, are reviewed in fascinating detail in the New York Review of Books this month.

And here, Brian Solis charts the process by which brands are becoming their media, and explains why success depends on the quality of the content they provide.


That’s all folks!