Myspace will be an app on Facebook by 2011

Rupert and Wendi Murdoch at a recent film premiere

MySpace, wow it’s a crazy social network that one. Ads galore I feel like I’ve stepped back in time each time I use it. I got a similar feeling last week when I tried out Skyrock, kind of an earlier social web.

Where was the clean, utilitarian, streamlined Facebook I’ve come to love. The platform that gets out of the way as soon as my friends start talking.
But where is MySpace going? If it’s no longer competing head to head with Facebook (recent FT news article) then that means it needs, long term, to integrate with it.
I give MySpace 6 months before they integrate Facebook Connect and maybe 18 months before you can access your MySpace account from within Facebook itself, whatever it looks like then.

Wouldn’t that be wonderful – single sign on, privacy and newsfeed, all handled by Facebook, yet with the liveliness and music activism of Myspace.  The only problem for MySpace is can they swallow their pride (and some of their ad revenue).

If they don’t then I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook based competitor Ilike matures (it already has 50m users) to break out new bands instead.

UPDATE 30/11– It’s worth mentioning that iLike is actually owned by Myspace

A new year for Facebook Developer Garage London

Facebook Developer Garage London continues to evolve.  I founded the group back in August 2007 (seems such a long time ago now) and handed over to a new chairman Josh March last October. Each month 60 to 80 developers and entrepreneurs gather to discuss the latest  on the social network platform.

The main trend for 2009 for the garage content is toward comparing application platforms – while Facebook remains the leader in terms of technology, number of developers (now a whopping 660,000 worldwide) and UK usage there is still  a need to provide space to discuss the other platforms – notably Myspace, iPhone, LinkedIn and Bebo.

Nudge continues to support the development community with expert advice from our technical director, Iskandar Najmuddin,- it’s always worth getting along to hear him on What’s new on the Platform and bring your technical queries to.

So, for 2009, I’m looking forward to an even more vibrant developer community in London this year and maybe as a target a million MAU app to catch up with the London community’s biggest star – Playfish. I’m certainly planning to create one for one of our  Nudge clients…

The next event is on 21st January and features speakers from Moshi monsters, iplatform, and Huddle are back to talk about the LinkedIn platform. See you there.

Latest UK social networking statistics

 

Brett Brewer, president of Adknowledge, explains the social network ad space

 

 

At yesterdays M&M briefing (supported by Adknowledge) on harnessing social applications for brands we got the latest stats from the guys at Nielsen. The highlights are pretty impressive, especially for Social Networks and in particular Facebook:

1. Social Networks are now mainstream in the UK reaching across all ages

21.8 million people in the UK are now on social networks (that’s over 60% of the total UK online population)

Distribution has lost its skew towards under 18s and is now 11% 2-17, 35% 18-34 year olds and a massive 54% in the 35’s and over. 

2. Facebook is king

 

Even my Dad is now getting tagged by staff and villagers in Aceh, Indonesia

 

 

The age skew disappearance across the top 50 social networks is partly accounted for by some growth at LinkedIn (who has an older demographic) but its predominantly a Facebook thing – older brits are arriving on the Facebook scene – 14.4m monthly uniques in September 08. (that’s nearly half the UK online population). Myspace managed 5m uniques and Bebo 4.4m over the same period. But these networks are looking even more niche every month (Bebo for youth self expression and MySpace for music).

In terms of stickiness we rack up on 4 hours 24 minutes on Facebook each month. compare this with a paltry 47 minutes on Myspace or 1 hour 23 on Bebo.

3. Facebook apps are being used more.

In July last year you might have spent 1 in 20 of your precious Facebook minutes on an app – that’s up to 1 in every 5 this year.

Of these the striking stat is not, as you might expect, that we all play Playfish at work, it’s that 20% of all Facebook online app time is spent on Mob Wars. Just how addictive is this one game!

4. Connect, enjoy and express

Universal Mccann added to the stats with a great survey on Social networking motivation:

We use social networks it seems to

• Connect – stay in touch with friends (90%), meet new people (45%)
• Enjoy – fun, and entertainment (58%)
• Express ourselves – upload photos (82%), blog (22%), upload videos(32%)

Do I need to create my own social network?

You'll need a compelling reason to cut yourself from the crowd

Look at this recent quote from Techcrunch’s Mike Arrington “Creating a separate social network makes little sense in the age of MySpace and Facebook”.

He’s highlighted a key change in thinking on how to build your social network platform over the past year. The big social networks have effectively commoditised vast swathes of previously competitive functionality:

• authentication
• web user interface standards
• friend lists
• groups
• events
• email
• notifications
• photo sharing
• discussions

If you’re building a new social network on your own web site you’ll need to build all of the above. Not only that you’ll need to make sure the experience is as good as, if not better than these million dollar competitors. If you’ve got a complex sign up process – forget it – 80 million Facebook users really can’t be wrong.

There are very few decent reasons for implementing your own social network. These are as follows:

• you’re dealing with commercially sensitive information that you don’t want Facebook or Myspace to see (think about intranets for banks)
• your demographic aren’t on one of the big networks and probably never will be (this might legitimise the Saga zone business proposition but I doubt it – the crinklies are coming to Facebook I have no doubt, it’s just a matter of time)
• your content would be illegal on the platform (you can’t gamble on Facebook so gambling communities need their own poker network etc)

Any other reasons people can think of?

Social network hotness

If you’re thinking global you might want to know which Social Network is hot where.

I played with the new Google Insights tool today to uncover the truth and see which social network people are searching for in which country over the past 30 days. This gives an indication of which social networks are hottest where.

One thing I spotted is that Social Networks aren’t just language communities – Facebook is hot in Columbia but Hi5 rules in Peru despite being neighbours and spanish speaking. Similarly the Portuguese seem mad for Hi5 but the Portuguese speaking Brazilians are sticking to Orkut.

Here are the charts so you can discover things for yourselves – like how Turkey is getting on board with Facebook, that Bebo is really for the cool kids in UK and Ireland and that Mixi rules supreme in Japan…

Facebook Hotness

MySpace Hotness

Hi5 Hotness

Bebo Hotness

 

Orkut Hotness

Friendster hotness

Mixi hotness