Lost in Tech

Here’s a little reality check for the people going gaga over facebook reaching 200 million accounts. The Chinese site http://qq.com still currently boasts the largest social network in the world, they hit 200 million way back in January, of course there are many people on facebook with more than one identity, Facebook doesn’t let users do it officially, but QQ does – as such there’s over 860 million separate user ID’s on QQ. How’s that for real stats! http://tech.qq.com/a/20090219/000343.htm Considering Facebook consists of users from all over the world and QQ is basically China, it offers a small glimpse of the eastern network power and its masssive potential.

A Sign Of Huge Success

In just over 2 years Twitter, the webchild of Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone has hit mainstream in a huge way. For those of us that were in on the beta its a testament to the power of a great idea, the benefits of being open, and the desire that people have to voice their opinions. I’m not going to go into a huge post about why people twit, how they’re going to make money from it, or who’s using twitter and for what reasons, there’s already an insane amount of material out there.

What’s really interesting now though is that the growth in twitter use is now so rapid they’re just running to catch up with demand, You’re starting to see more and more ‘Twitter is over capacity’ messages – and the Fail Whale image. To give you some of the latest stats though, a few weeks ago year Nielsen tracked twitter grown at an annual 1,382% but data in Feb-March alone showed a 76.8% increase showing that growth acceleration is increasing. According to Mashable that data is just its website traffic, and not even traffic from mobile devices where most of the tweets would be coming from.

Twitter is working on a Discovery Engine that will let you search tweets without leaving your webpage, Google haven’t yet missed the boat, they can still unlock that safe and get those truck fulls of cash ready. Take a look at the recent TED talk below by Evan Williams.

Skittles have made the incredibly brave move of making a twitter search their custom home page.

Any tweet that uses the word ’skittles’ now appears on the skittles home page. Brave because no bigger brand has done it before, dangerous because that includes negative skittles comments, wonderful because it’s generating a massive amount of comments that involve the word skittles, people are tweeting posts with the word skittles in them just to get their post appearing on the skittles home page.
They haven’t just stopped with twitter though, their media section has now become their youtube channel, their pictures section is now their flickr channel, Social is their facebook section, and about is wikipedia in fact just about the only non social part of their site is the actual product range page. It must have been a fairly low-cost experiment – but it’s almost a total embrace of the social web. It’s an exercise in not re-inventing the wheel, and a totally honest opening of the brand for the world to rip it apart or build it up (even if they can’t buy skittles in the country that they’re looking at twitter in). The buzz that’s being generated right now is totally off the scale. Genuis.