Lost in Tech

As predicted facebook has utterly crushed facebook in the battle of the social networking sites. The change started to happen just after November 2007 when facebook stated peaking above 20 million unique visitors. Myspace fought back in March this year, but the surge of traffic never quite caught facebook. In April myspace seem to have given up the fight, and traffic levelled off while facebook continued to increase. Facebook is now pushing 30 Million daily Unique visitors according to Google Trends, with myspace at around 20 Million.

What’s interesting to note is that myspace traffic hasn’t declined in proportion to the increase of facebook traffic. We’re seeing a levelling off towards the end of this year but no big decline. In the meantime facebook traffic is still increasing.

The country stats also show an interesting picture, showing the myspace beatdown in every country except for the US – this isn’t really reclecting a decline in the US social networking market, but rather an increase in the rest of the world and Europe.

As these two Giants of the social networking scene continue to evolve their sites we’re beginning to see the tactics they’re planning on for future world domination, opening up their APi’s is a huge step – allowing other sites to incorporate each networks existing functionality within their own sites. So imagine looking at a housing property site, as I browse the site it shows me the location of my facebook friends and the estimated value of their homes. How about logging into Amazon and seeing what your Myspace friends are reading and recommending. It’s all about making the data on any site personal to you, and pulling in any information within your social networks.
Ultimately this will have the effect of reducing your web footprint, instead of browsing 10, or 20 websites in the evenings, you’ll be looking at 3 or 4, you’ll also be spending more time looking at them, because there will  be even less reason for you to surf off to other sites. This will no doubt do interesting things to ad revenue for those sites, although the question remains as to how a site can be all things to all people – personalization can only take it so far.
compare more of your favourite sites at (http://trends.google.com)

Here’s a little diversion from the clamor over the Firefox 3 launch that happened today. It’s been over a year since it’s been posted, and had over 1 million views, but if you haven’t seen this incredibly cool video produced by Joe Sekiya, it’s 8 minutes well worth watching. What if god was a DJ?

So before WWDC rumors abounded that a front facing camera would allow ichatAV interaction with desktop and mobile users, it would have been a massive coup, with no other provider able to offer that kind of integration between the live mobile app and the millions of ichatAV users.

It was strangely absent from the Keynote speech given by Steve Jobs on Monday – but a front facing camera is only something that other mobile phone companies have been putting into their kit for years – so where is it? Is it because the US doesn’t yet get the mobile market? Is it because of other more serious infrastructure problems within the US mobile network?

Either way this points to another serious oversight by Apple, and an underestimation of the literacy of mobile users, and their networks in the rest of the world. Either way it’s no wonder we’re feeling insulted by being offered features that should have been included with the first iteration of the iPhone. What a let down.