The Facebook application platform took the social networking scene by storm for the past few months. But with MySpace (the largest social network in the US by a magnitude of 3) now on board with OpenSocial, it’s essentially everyone against Facebook. How will this impact the social networking sector overall? We took a look at the heavy users of Facebook, Myspace, and the top 5 OpenSocial partners (as of last night), to see how each site’s core users compare, and what sort of applications may have the most success in the context open social.

Across all social networking domains, heavy users tend to use the web as an extension of their profile. However, where and how they use the web outside of their network varies greatly. The chart below shows what heavy social network users do outside of their respective network, based on affinity*.

Heavy Facebook users have a strong affinity for sites at the edge of Web 2.0, as well as those that power its more popular applications.

• This group has a very strong affinity for Twitter.com, which is both a new platform for communication and a Facebook application.
• Heavy Facebook users tend to shop at trendy online retailers, and are seven times more likely than the average internet user to visit apparel sites like AmericanApparel.net and “social” t-shirt site threadless.com
• These users also tend to keep tabs on the Silicon Valley scene and geeky humor, visiting xkcd.com, and valleywag.com at more than 8 times the average internet user.
• Unlike their Open Social peers, Facebook users tend to use applications (and their respective sites) to do everything from image editing to dating.
• Outside of Facebook, power users have an extremely high affinity for the Greek9.com social network, but relatively little interest in others.

While Heavy MySpace users perform many of the same actions as Facebook users, they do so in dramatically different ways.

• Beyond the use of AOL instant messenger (assumed by the high affinity for AIM pages) MySpace users prefer Meebo.com for instant communication.
• This group tends to shop at Youth oriented retailers, being more than 4 times as likely to visit Journeys.com and Hottopic.com as the average internet user.
• The lack of applications forces MySpace users to look outside for some things that Facebook provides within it’s application platform. Projectplaylist projects music, imageshack hosts their images, flirty youth sites allows them to date, and imikimi.com gets their photos to sparkle.
• MySpace users also rely heavily on third party layouts sites to customize their profile pages. There are literally hundreds of layout resources, many of which receive visitor counts in the hundreds of thousands.

There is an obvious international skew among the other OpenSocial partners, a function of Orkut and Hi5’s large international presence.

• US members of these sites seem to have a strong connection to India and Latin America (showing strong affinity to sites like Shaadi.com). Interestingly, this group is also 9 times more likely to visit USCIS.gov, which deals with the immigration process (not shown).
• In general, heavy users of smaller OpenSocial partners behave much more like MySpace users than Facebook Users. In fact, the users of these smaller networks often show strong affinity for some of the same layout template sites that appeal to Myspace users.

New App Opportunities?

So given OpenSocial partner’s (including MySpace’s) user preferences, what should application developers tackle first? There are plenty of way’s to build on the successful Facebook applications, but deeper in the affinity data, there are some needs that earlier developers have failed to meet.

• GOOD quote generation: Across all social networks, members can help define their persona through favorite sayings…usually (and ironically) created by someone else. As a result, across all three groups of users, there is a strong affinity to sites that provide large quote databases such as thinkexist.com.
• Lyrics search / lyrics integrated music players / lyric tagging: Similar to Quotations, members across all networks use lyric related sites heavily. The ability to search (or simply see) lyrics within a standard format, and then tag lyrics that help define one’s online self would be – according to affinity data – a very valuable tool for the social web.
• Social shopping: Kaboodle (sort of) already does this, but most users won’t join another network specifically to shop. Given diverse personal preferences, ease of communication, an affinity for ecommerce among social networks, and the ability to “crowd buy” due to a massive number of users, this sort of application could be a hit.

Facebook may be in the clear regardless of whether they join the OpenSocial party or not, at least for the short term. The site attracts a very different group of core users than its competitors, and a large part of this group is now heavily entrenched in Facebook. It will be difficult for this group to leave, and questionable as to whether they would even want to. Either way, the Facebook staff has a tough decision (and possibly road) ahead.

For this post, “Smaller OpenSocial Partners” included Orkut.com, Friendster.com, Hi5.com, Plaxo.com, and and Ning.

“Heavy Users” were defined as a user visiting the social network more than 15 days in the month of September

The first time I wrote about YouTube, it had just crossed 20 million visitors in the U.S. Just 4 days after my post, YouTube was scooped up by Google for $1.65B in Google stock. At today’s stock price, the deal is worth over $2B.

There is certainly something magical about reaching 20 million. Web 2.0 darlings, also prime acquisition targets – Digg and Facebook both crossed this milestone last month.

• Digg edged out Facebook, with 2.3 million additional unique visitors
• Facebook is growing 3x faster than MySpace (on a percentage basis)

To size up the quality of these visitors, let’s go beyond unique visitors. Let’s look at some key site engagement metrics:

• MySpace is #1 across all metrics
• Facebook is #2 for all metrics except UVs
• Average stay on MySpace is 2x more time than on Facebook

Now take a look at the chart below. After a relatively slow start, Digg is now outpacing everyone else. Facebook is beginning to look up again after spending most of 2006 in flat territory. Both Digg’s and Facebook’s growth and expansion strategies seem to be paying off in a big way.

Let’s see how things look in six months. My Facebook invites are up 2x over the last month. Something big is indeed happening. Microsoft and Yahoo should take a long deep look at this as well.

TicketMaster is the website you love to hate. It has nearly monopolized the event ticket industry and makes a nice chunk of change on every ticket it sells by charging a delivery fee, a convenience fee, a save the unicorns fee and a fee for charging the fees.

TicketMaster has enjoyed its market dominance, but has recently seen StubHub nipping at its heels. (To accurately represent the situation this is like a poodle nipping at the heals of a grizzly bear).

Continue reading “TicketMaster and StubHub” »

Yes, Technorati is still very much the most visited blog search engine.

Earlier this week Technorati self reported Q1 numbers – they grew page views by 150% and unique visitors 141%. The bigger question however — how does this growth compare to the #2 player in this space - Google Blog Search?

As you can see, according to Compete data, Technorati grew monthly unique visitors 91% and pageviews 138% in Q1. During the same time period, Google grew unique visitors by only 39% and pageviews by 47%. In both absolute and relative terms, Technorati is dominating Google.

Continue reading “Technorati breaking away, leaving Google behind in the dust” »

What can I say, I was curious. To satisfy my own curiosity, I set out to answer the big question — Are GigaOm readers any different from those of TechCrunch? You would think they would be similar, right? Not quite. Read on..

How we measured:

We took the Top-20 domains in Jan ‘07 ranked by Attention Share (Attention Share considers all the time we collectively spend online and then determines what percentage of that time was spent on a given site). We then separately calculated Attention Share for GigaOm and TechCrunch readers — which gave us a detailed map of where the two segments choose to spend their time online. We then looked at how GigaOm and TechCrunch readers indexed against the Top-20 domains that average U.S. internet consumers spend most time on.

About the sample data:

GigaOm analysis is based on clickstream data from 190 (anonymous) individuals in Compete’s panel that visited Gigaom.com in January. TechCrunch analysis is based on 431 individuals.

Key Observations:

• MySpace.com: Not a big hit with GigaOm and TechCrunch readers compared to the general U.S. craze.
• Yahoo.com: TechCrunch readers spend more time on Yahoo vs. Google.
• Google.com: GigaOm readers spend more time on Google vs. Yahoo.

• Facebook.com: TechCrunch readers love it!
• YouTube.com: TechCrunch readers spend 170% more time on YouTube than the average user. GigaOm readers also love YouTube, indexing 42% over the U.S. average.

• Wikipedia.org: This one was predicable, TechCrunch and GigaOm both love Wikipedia – TechCrunch loves it more.
• Live.com: GigaOm says…. Yawwwwwwn.

Om/Mike Photo credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

I am a devout Netflix user. My coworker, Andy, raves about the new Blockbuster service. For today’s post we were able to take a closer look at the habits of the users of the two online movie rental sites. Using Compete data we created a list of the top 10 most browsed movies on the two competing sites. Using these lists Andy and I will objectively debate which service is better and why. As always, please chime in by commenting. Let us know which service you prefer.

Opening Arguments:

Ryan Says: Netflix is the perfect example of the “long tail” theory in action (Chris Anderson even said so). While Netflix.com hosts over 2X the people of Blockbuster.com, the top ten browsed movies on Netflix attract a much smaller percentage of total site audience than those of Blockbuster. The reason is the breadth of films available on Netflix is so far superior that users spread themselves throughout the “long tail” which includes hard to find independent and foreign films. Most of these films are not even available at lesser services like….I don’t know…say, Blockbuster. Boom!

Andy Says: Confession: I used to be a Netflix member. But that was a few years ago and I like to think that I’ve grown up and become more knowledgeable since then, so I am now a Blockbuster online member. I have to admit that having a Blockbuster store within a few blocks of where I live biases me a little, but with a membership base rumored to be around 43 million households, it seems that at least one of the nearly 6000 Blockbuster stores in America is in a convenient location for a lot of people. The convenience of being able to return videos to the store and browse (a process I fully admit to enjoying) the selection in person has led me to many movies I may have missed, and to less time spent online searching them out. Digging further into the data we found that Blockbuster users average two sessions per month, compared to three sessions from Netflix users. It seems that I’m not the only one spending less time online looking for movies.

Parting Jabs: