Today's Most popular News

September 16th, 2008 at 5:43 pm

The latest numbers are in, and Twitter is apparently growing at a torrid pace. According to stats just released from Nielsen Online, Twitter recorded 2.3 million unique visitors in August (US-only), an increase of 422% from the same period last year.

Moreover, visitors to Twitter spent 55% more time on the site on average – a total of more than 7 minutes per user. Those numbers point to rather robust growth for the site, especially considering many of its most rabid users access it through a third-party client like Twhirl or Tweetdeck.

Elsewhere in the social networking space, Facebook continued to narrow the gap on MySpace, a trend we also noticed last month. Unique visitors to the site grew to 38.2 million, representing a more than 10% month-over-month increase and a 100% jump year-over-year. MySpace saw 61.3 million unique visitors – up slightly from last month, but still essentially flat compared to the same period last year.

Some other trends worth noting:

- LinkedIn grew 146% year-over-year to 10.8 million unique visitors

- Imeem fell from 3.9 million unique visitors in July to 3.4 million in August. They could be one of the more impacted companies from this month’s expected launch of MySpace Music.

- Buzznet traffic fell 54% year-over-year to 1.8 million unique visitors. The company has recently made a number of acquisitions including Idolator and Qloud to bolster its audience.

The full chart is embedded below:

Source:Mashable!

App-vertisements are one of the stranger things to come out of the social media scene, as is the concept of social ads. These two unique advertising concepts are teaming up in the form of a partnership between SocialMedia and Buddy Media to create an even more social ad experience, whether we like it or not.

Ads are a necessary evil, it’s true, With the recent introduction of Buddy Media’s Buddybrain, app-vertisements got a bit more intrusive. Buddybrain allows brands to track their social media-based ad campaigns in great detail, giving brands greater insight into how the customers use and view their traditional ads and app-vertisements.

By joining forces, SocialMedia and Buddy Media effectively become the one go-to spot for social advertisement of all types. They have created an effective little monopoly on online ads for the social media and new media markets simply by being first in their respective fields and then first to join.

“Advertising in social media is about getting users to engage with a brand’s messaging in a way that scales and is measurable,” says Seth Goldstein, CEO of Socialmedia.com. “Our partnership with Buddy Media simplifies the buying and execution of campaigns that get users to interact with brands.”

What the partnership also does is allow SocialMedia to see the detailed information compiled in Buddy Media’s Buddybrain. With Buddybrain combining with SocialMedia’s Premier Partner Program and Buddy Media’s App-vertising Reseller Program, app-vertisements may soon become the preferred way to reach customers in the social media space. I’m not sure the social media user is ready for this onslaught of applications that are also ads, but like mobile ads, they are fast on the rise.

What is the point of the social ad market? To make your favorite brands into your friends. By engaging the customer or potential customer, brands hope to become more accessible and likable, which they hope will lead to trust and increased sales. As obnoxious as this new ad space is, it seems to work. And as long as these mildly deceptive application-based social ad campaigns work, they’ll stick around.

Source:Mashable!

Word that T-Mobile would be launching the first Android-based device sometime in autumn has been floating around for a number of weeks now. Today the Wall Street Journal narrowed down the estimation of a release date to late October.

And in addition to the confirmation of a device called “Dream,” of HTC origin, being the introductory piece, T-Mobile will unveil the G-1 September 23. This not only means that Android will have the final months of the year in the public’s hands, right alongside its similarly well-hyped competitor, the Apple iPhone. Android Market, a wireless application storefront which will arrive in tandem with the Dream, will too have its day against Apple’s own App Store.

The last few months have brought both announcements and intimations about a three-player application store shootout: between first-comer Apple, the imminent Android, and a suspected venue from Microsoft’s Windows Mobile division called Skymarket. Yet, while it it unclear when, or even if the hazy project that is Skymarket will debut anytime soon, iPhone and Android will spend the holiday season sparring for sales and critical praise.

The first of two objectives will likely bring Apple top honors, as both its device output and that of its applications is superb, if not stellar. Android-equipped HTC Dream handsets, meanwhile, are expected to number 600,000 to 700,000 total by year’s end, a figure far short of Apple’s own proven performance this half of 2008. The momentum held by the iPhone will most certainly carry well into the the next quarter, if not increase nearer January 1.

As for media-driven hype and ground-level interest, Android is only so far guaranteed to be supplied with the Android Market service with access to free downloads. Google is said to be planning an upgrade post-launch to provide for financial transactions, but it’s unclear what sort of time period that amounts to. Therefore, the traffic Android Market receives presumably will not match or rate as highly, proportionally speaking or otherwise. Which in turn makes critical reviews bound to carry some measure of reservation, as if Android will simply play the eager but rough-cut underdog to the App Store’s sure-thing status, and do so for several quarters to come. People will want Android to shine brightly, but the App Store is hardly a staid old player.

Of course, this is said barring any unforeseen phenomena to grace Android in exclusive fashion. For instance, whether Google’s integration with its own cloud-based services will convince early adopters to spend with Google rather than with Apple (an interesting situation, given their rather close affiliation on the iPhone itself), is one major unknown, and something that will reap ample analysis once the Dream arrives in consumer hands. But if one is to prematurely gauge Google’s effort next to Apple’s movement, Android will be a technologist’s fascination to Apple’s sexy, curvy, gotta-have-me gold standard, so anticipators and observers of the debut to come should expect a healthy intro, if not spectacular. And that goes as much for the Dream itself as the software and cloudware that inhabits its world.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 at 5:43 pm and is filed under News, google, web, iphone, new york, Mobile 2.0, t mobile, Opinion, San Francisco-San Jose, Android Market, Google Android. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Today's Most popular News

Google Android Debut Set for September 23. No Surprises.

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