IDAT210 - Social Networking Popularity

After looking at the history of the different social networking sites i thought i would try to find some figures and reviews on each of the websites.

The first article i found is something called "Social Networking Evaluation Chart"

http://www.digizen.org.uk/socialnetworking/snsComparison.aspx

This article goes through everything on each of the websites, apart from Twitter for some reason, and compares the different sites. It has 5 main sections of comparison, General Info, Groups, Design & Customisation, Security & Access, Viewing & Moving Content. These sections are then split again to look at specific subjects within the groups.

This next article is a little different to what i wanted to find however it is quite interesting.

http://mashable.com/2009/12/31/social-media-web-2/

This article examines how popular social networking is on the internet by looking at google search results.

Graph on search results of "Social Media" & "web 2.0"

This graph shows how the popularity of social media searches is really starting to rise. Maybe proving that is more than just a "fad"

The final link is a very useful article, it shows the most popular social networking websites ranked by a combination of Inbound Links, Alexa Rank, and US traffick data from Compete and Quantcast. Obviously most of this is only from the US though, it is not easy to track worldwide traffic im afraid.

http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/social-networking-websites

It is interesting to note the top three being Facebook, MySpace, Twitter. A lot of people may be surprised to see MySpace above Twitter still, but this data is very up to date, in fact it's less than a month old (from the date of this post).