Report: Social Networking, Blogging Are More Popular than E-Mail

Social networks and blogs – known collectively as “member communities” – leap-frogged e-mail to become the fourth most popular online category, according to a new report from an international market research firm.

 

Officials at The Nielsen Company say that about two-thirds of the global online population use the sites, and that they’re growing twice as fast as the other four largest Web sectors – search, portals, PC software and e-mail.

 

According to John Burbank, chief executive officer of Nielsen Online (News - Alert), social networking is emerging as a fundamental part of the global online experience.

 

“While two-thirds of the global online population already accesses member community sites, their vigorous adoption and the migration of time show no signs of slowing,” Burbank said.

 

In its report, “Global Faces and Networked Places,” Neilsen reports that Facebook (News - Alert) – the world’s most popular social network, with about 175 million users – is visited monthly by three in every 10 people online across the nine markets in which Nielsen tracks social networking use.

 

Here’s a look at growth among member community Web sites across different nations (click to enlarge):

 

 

“Social networking will continue to alter not just the global online landscape, but the consumer experience at large,” Burbank said.

 

And Facebook officials have made it clear that they’re not resting on their laurels.

 

As TMCnet reported, eyeing the kind of real-time functionality that a far smaller social networking tool provides, Facebook is redesigning its homepage and making it easier and faster for “friends” to find out what their online mates are doing.

 

Last week, as Facebook notified users that it would remake its homepage “to make it easier to understand what’s going on with the people you care about,” company Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg reportedly said status updates through his site would come in real-time, instead of every 10 minutes or so.

 

“With the new homepage, that will reflect a much faster flow of information,” Zuckerberg said.

 

Behind the changes, industry insiders such as NewsFactor.com‘s Frederick Lane say, are concerns about Twitter’s surging popularity.

 

As Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch.com writes in an article published on The Washington Post’s Web site, Facebook is challenged with a task of blurring the difference between private profiles and public pages.

 

“The 5,000-friend limit will be dropped from the public pages,” Schonfeld reports. “Facebook doesn’t want Twitter to become the way large companies and public figures connect to fans. Up until now, Facebook Pages haven’t really been the place fans go to connect with their favorite celebrities or brands. For that, they’ve started going to Twitter, where they can get updates in real time.”

 

Given the new functionality, the timing couldn’t have been much better for companies such as TMCnet, which got into the Facebook game recently with new functionality on its Web site that will allow visitors to connect to their Facebook accounts.

 

“Connect TMCnet with Facebook to interact with friends and share stories on Facebook through your Wall and friends’ News Feeds,” the company says. “The TMCnet Facebook connection will enhance users’ experience and how they use and interact with news supplied by TMCnet.”

 

Benefits in development include: access to premium content; automated sign-in for TMCnet blog comments; automated Facebook photo included with blog comments; seamless connection to TMCnet applications for iPhone and MobileTMCnet; automated access to free resources including white papers, webinars, podcasts; simplified process means elimination of multiple log-in names and passwords; and automatically posting one-line stories back to Facebook.

 

The social networking market is fertile, according to Nielsen.

 

Here’s a look at the amount of time different nations are spending on the sites (click to enlarge):

 

 

According to the firm’s report, one in every 11 minutes online globally is accounted for by social network and blogging sites.

 

Also, the social network and blogging audience is becoming more diverse in terms of age. For example, the biggest increase in visitors during 2008 to “Member Community” Web sites globally came from the 35 to 49 year old age group (up 11.3 million).