A couple of weeks ago, my good old friend Sadath sent me an invite to join Spock, a new people search engine which collects information about individuals in a similar way as Google collects information about websites by indexing their pages in its central database. It is one of the many social networking requests which each one of us get every week. Just yesterday, I was sent an invite from another website called WAYN, an acronym for Where are you now?
The Web 2.0 has certainly taken over our lives. We seem to be connecting well now. I have discovered long last friends like the one in the picture who I never thought I would meet again. I have also discovered some new virtual friends, who I have never met or probably never will. It is this aspect of virtual communication that adds a bit of excitement to my life.
People generally grow up with different sections of the society in different phases of life. And each section of our phased lives adapts a new approach to network. Everyday, I spend at least one hour browsing through various Social networking sites and responding to people’s messages. But is there an end to the growing number of sites? Although, I am not compelled to join every networking site in the Cyber Space, I feel left out if I am missing from one where some of my friends network.
True, these social networking sites, apart from uniting friends and lovers, have also grown tremendously to be a universally accepted phenomena. I have seen people proudly announcing their activities on Facebook and Orkut. In literal sense, it has become a part of our everyday lives. Globalisation has definitely had an impact on this. Four years ago, I remember relying only on emails to correspond with my friends in India and elsewhere. Now I log on to Facebook or Orkut and I have an instant connection with my friends around the world.
Apart from the enormous networking benefits these internet mediums offer, they also offer plenty of opportunities for businesses to augment their reach. That is one of the many reasons for my keen interest on Social Networking. For the last two months, we have been exploring the potential benefits of Web 2.0 at Arena. For obvious reasons, we set up accounts with every prominent social networking site including Squidoo, MySpace, Bebo, YouTube, Flikr, etc, etc, etc (We have a list of over 30 and another 80 waiting to be added).
Nevertheless, one of the recent successes we have had, has been from Facebook, which Sam recounts here. At the moment, Facebook is driving 20 % of our web traffic. However, there are plenty of lessons to be learnt from our smart little application on Facebook. Despite the huge popularity of Social Networking, there seems to be a bit of regionalism in terms of which networking platform users around the world use. For example, about 80 % of the users who have installed our programmes are based in the US, which means the conversion rates of our web traffic is far too low. Predominantly, we are UK based online florists, although we do relay-services around the World. But we need more UK based customers!!
This brings the issue of Social Networking spread into perspective. While MySpace and Facebook are heavily skewed towards the US, Orkut seems to be a clear favourite among the Asians and South Americans, particularly Indians and Brazilians, while Bebo is a extremely popular among the Europeans.
On a more individualistic note, people network among friends, relatives and acquaintances, who reside mostly locally, which explains the regionalism demonstrated among these sites. Unless there is a radical transformation through the emergence of one clear winner in a much similar way as Google is to Search Engines, networking audiences will largely be divided with regional favorites rather than a global choice. But considering the number of social networking adapters in the developing countries of Asia and South America, MySpace and Facebook are clear winners of the Web 2.0 revolution!
