Archive for June, 2009

Both Google and Twitter were unable to cope with the high volume of traffic from Michael Jackson’s death. Indeed, search giant Google feared it was under attack, there were so many search queries. Google’s trends page showed that searches for Michael Jackson reached such a volume that in its ‘hotness’ gauge the topic was rated ‘volcanic.’ Twitter also crashed with the sheer volume of people using the microblogging service. According to Trendrr, the number of Twitter posts Thursday afternoon containing ‘Michael Jackson’ totalled more than 100,000 per hour.

Google has been told to ensure its Chinese users are unable to access foreign language websites by the Chinese government. It has also been ordered to remove the feature on its homepage that recommends what a user might be interested in once they’ve begun entering a search term. Although Google’s share of the Chinese market has increased by 30% this year, Baidu, its local competitor has a 60% share of the search market.

Despite the fact that social networking is on the rise, it is not influencing consumer purchase decisions, according to a new study by Harris Interactive. The research suggests that traditional forms of communications tend to be more influential. Indeed, the most common way for shoppers collecting information before purchase was via a company website (35% of respondents). Meanwhile, 22% cited face-to-face interaction with a salesperson, 21% spoke to someone unrelated to the company and just 4% of the poll turned to social networks like Facebook. However, the results did vary by age group - 16% of 18–24 year olds employed social media to conduct product research.

Nearly half (43%) of the American online community use social networking sites; a total that has grown from 27% a year ago, according to TNS. And over half of these Americans visit sites like Facebook and MySpace at least once a day. Over three-quarters of respondents said they were members of Facebook, followed by MySpave (42%), LinkedIn (17%) and Twitter (10%.) While 48% of women said they belonged to at least one social networking service, this figure fell to 38% among men.

Facebook has overtaken Yahoo as the third most visited site in the UK with 23.4m users in April, according to ComScore. This represents a 63% rise in Facebook users compared to April last year. Yahoo was knocked from the top three despite reporting 8% growth in users over the last year. Google remains the most visited site with 33.5m UK users in April, followed by Microsoft with 29.4m.

European privacy regulators are closely watching one of Facebook’s applications, ‘We’re Related’, which identifies and links family members on the social network and has over 15m users. New users are asked to give blanket approval to let the application, “pull your profile information, photos, your friends’ info and other content that it requires to work,” regardless of stricter privacy settings the user may have set on Facebook overall. Facebook gave tentative support to the European move as “an important step in providing the industry with practical guidance”.

Facebook is testing an update to its search service that includes ‘up-to-the-minute’ results from status updates, notes and links. The results are split into two groups: those from the accounts of friends and those from users whose profiles are available to anyone. Facebook has said it’s testing the new service with a tiny number of people on Facebook to “see if new features benefit people in the way we think they will.”

Twitter has been playing a crucial communications role in spreading the story from inside Iran to the outside world. Perhaps the dizzying ascent of this microblogging social media company is overhyped in the US and UK, but over the last week it has proved to be a powerful political tool in the Iranian crisis. Even the Obama administration asked Twitter to postpone a temporary shutdown to aid anti-government protesters. Clay Shirky, New York University professor has called Iran, “the first revolution that has been catapulted on to a global stage and transformed by social media.” Iran is just the latest in a series of major events that have been given extra global witnesses thanks to Twitter.

As the business world observes the rise and rise of social networking through popular consumer applications like Facebook, some industries are trying to launch B2B social networks for themselves. Moblu.ca, enables American drivers to track what they and others are spending on fuel and help them save money. Meanwhile, Premier Farnell, which supplies electric componenets to the telecoms and consumer electronics industry, has launched element14, an online community for electronic design engineers.

Twitterfeed, which enables publishers to distribute their RSS feed over Twitter, has received funding from Betaworks and The Accelerator Group. The London-based company currently supports over 170,000 publishers running 300,000 feeds. The two companies are also investors in Tweetdeck.