Following several clunky forays into social media, today Google has unveiled Google Buzz.

From the Official Google Blog:

Our belief is that organizing the social information on the web — finding relevance in the noise — has become a large-scale challenge, one that Google’s experience in organizing information can help solve. We’ve recently launched innovations like real-time search and Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step with the introduction of a new product, Google Buzz.

So what’s your take?  Will Google Buzz make it in the mainstream, or have the front-runners Facebook and Twitter built up too much momentum?

[poll id="2"]

Back it up with comments!

I recently had the opportunity to sit on a Facebook Deep Dive panel which allowed me to think about Facebook looking forward into 2010. Here’s a few of my Facebook predictions for 2010 that I shared:

Facebook will go far beyond Facebook.com

Facebook interaction isn’t always on Facebook.com, and that trend will accelerate in 2010. While Facebook would love for you to spend all of your time on their site, they know that they can’t force that agenda, nor do they need to. Content and interactions between real individuals and brands are the bedrock of their value, and while page impressions help with advertising, capturing interaction data and building ubiquity is far more important.

Adding “Share” and “Become a Fan” links are a first step, but they are rudimentary. And, of the hundreds of thousands of sites leveraging Facebook Connect, most are merely scratching the surface. Expect to see progressive brands performing much deeper integrations in 2010 that better take advantage of Connect/Open Graph API, and in turn Facebook itself.

Facebook’s on-site search will evolve

Facebook has dabbled with their on-site search, but they haven’t done anything all that impressive. The promise of a true ‘social search’ where results are catered to the individual user is something that Facebook is uniquely qualified to provide. Facebook’s latest redesign (still not ‘live’ at the time of this posting) is a clear indication that search is something they will be giving heightened importance to.

How Facebook handles on-site search results of its own content as well as content from the greater web will evolve throughout 2010, creating both challenges and opportunities for marketers.  What Facebook delivers with search on their own site may very well be something completely abstract to how we understand search at present.

Facebook will do far more for local businesses

Businesses are flocking to Facebook – there are currently more than 700,000 local businesses with Pages. And, these local businesses are important to Facebook. Last year nearly 75% of Facebook’s TOTAL revenue came from local businesses and advertisers ($~229 Million). The rapid uptake in Facebook user mobile usage (currently 65M of their 350M active users) as well as the popularity of sites like Yelp present a further case for Facebook.

On search engines local continues to be a hot topic and area of rapid growth. Numbers vary, but depending on what data source you believe somewhere between 20% and 40% of all Internet searches today are local in nature. Expect Facebook to expand its offering and presentation of local businesses in ways that pay dividends to businesses that are active with Facebook’s various interaction points and have Fans that interact in-kind.

What predictions do you have for Facebook in 2010?

Both Venture Beat and Mashable had coverage last week of a Facebook feature currently being tested called “credits.”  I thought “credits” was a April Fool’s Day joke that just wasn’t all that amusing.  Apparently, it wasn’t.

Here’s an excerpt from the Venture Beat coverage that explains how it works:

When you leave a comment on an item, you’ll see a field where you can enter the number of credits you want to give the person who created the item. You’ll also see the number of credits you have available to give — you can choose to give up to the number of credits you possess. You can only get credits by buying them in Facebook’s virtual gifts store — $1 for 100 credits — or by receiving them (or by getting some free when you start using credits, although Facebook is testing how many to make available that way).

Once you’ve left a comment with credits, you’ll see the credits appear next to the comment, following the feature’s green plus symbol icon. There’s no other way to create credits at this time. This means people need to think twice before giving their credits away.

“No brainer” or “no brain”?
For Facebook, it’s a no-brainer.  Getting users to exchange real cash for virtual compliments doesn’t have a downside.  And, they’re the coolest social networking site on the block.  They’ve proven that they are adept at rolling out ideas then, if they tank (or worse, aggravate people), they can backpedal without too much damage.

For Facebook users?  My guess is that the average Facebook user’s response is “thanks, but no thanks.”  The idea is, well, clunky.  While there’s likely far more behind this than what’s being exposed at this point, in response to one’s status giving someone a quick text retort or clicking a ‘like’ link feels natural. Giving them ‘money’ they can spend on tchotchke or re-credit to someone else’s clever status does not.

What do you think?  How will Facebook users respond?

Photo by chrispulo

I recently participated in writing a research brief on marketing opportunities on social network sites (social network sites such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.).  Part of our research was to see what information we could find regarding popularity of social network sites worldwide as well as member population makeup, specifically social network population by age and gender.  The research data I needed went far beyond my high-level post on social networks in February.

Happily, we were able to find data that helped in our analysis without spending a dime.

Global popularity of social network sites

In research social networking site popularity, we came across a great blog post: “Modeling The Real Value of Social Networks“.  The post by Michael Arrington (that appeared on his site TechCrunch) was focused on assigning a valuation social network sites.  While I wasn’t interested in the valuation, the post leveraged data that was just what we were looking for to get a gauge on overall popularity: April 2008 comScore social network site data for their supported countries and regions.

Interested? TechCrunch made the data available as a Google Docs spreadsheet:

• TechCrunch – The True Value of Social Networks

Member population: age and gender

Another key piece of data we were trying to find was a breakdown of social network site members by age and gender.  I was fairly confident that this data would be hard to come by, but some persistent Google searches turned up this gem: Two Rapleaf studies focused on that exact topic.  The studies are biased towards the U.S. market, but the information is compelling and valuable nonetheless.  Rapleaf’s commentary on how males and females differ in their usage of the social network sites is also interesting.  Following links from these press releases will get you to data (some of it is provided right in the press releases also):

• Rapleaf Study of Social Network Users vs. Age
• Rapleaf Study Reveals Gender and Age Data of Social Network Users

I hope this data helps in your social network research!

In the past ten days I’ve been asked three times what social networking sites were in favor outside the United States.  I had an idea of what sites were popular for a few countries, but turned to the Internet to find out more over the weekend.  Some I’d heard of, some I hadn’t.

Below I’ve provided the top fifteen countries worldwide by the number of Internet users in that country.  Beside the country name is the top social networking site as reported by Alexa.com.

1. United States – MySpace
2. China – 51
3. Japan – Mixi
4. Germany – Studiverzeichnis
5. India – Orkut
6. Brazil – Orkut
7. United Kingdom – Facebook
8. South Korea – Cyworld
9. France – Skyrock
10. Italy – MySpace
11. Russia – LiveJournal
12. Mexico – Hi5
13. Canada – Facebook
14. Indonesia – Friendster
15. Spain – Fotolog