Last week, at its usual September iPod product refresh, Apple rolled out Ping, and critics simultaneously questioned whether or not Apple could build a social network to challenge the likes of Facebook and Twitter. As I discuss in my weekly column at GigaOM Pro, the real question isn't if Apple can, but rather, if the folks in Cupertino even want to pursue such a move.

As it stands now, Ping is explicitly about selling music on the iTunes store. Om thinks it foreshadows the future of social commerce, but where else could Apple take Ping, and how far?

Some analysts describe social networking as air, but perhaps the more relevant metaphor is electricity. In this view, companies and sites tap into social networking to create applications or experiences. Right now, Apple is treating social media as electricity to fuel its own shopping and communications applications.

Apple makes its money by selling products and renting its distribution channel. It likely won't hire an advertising sales force, and Apple's Me.com is a weak collection of fee-based services. I suspect Apple's more comfortable creating social networking features that enhance its products and marketplaces, rather than building out a free-standing social network.

Standalone social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, then, probably won't face Apple as a head-to-head competitor for their audiences, advertisers or what they deliver as their core user experience. Apple doesn't appear to be interested in building a general-purpose social network, a short message broadcasting service, or a professional connections network. MySpace is way ahead of Apple in gathering artists' pages and a social music audience, but Apple's ability to drive sales makes it a fierce competitor for label attention.

Those companies, and others like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, who aspire to provide social media APIs, services and even infrastructure, should cultivate, rather than compete with Apple, especially if they want to reach Apple's customers. That means they should license or, if Apple's in its usual DIY mode, integrate their own social networking technologies with Apple's. By the time you read this, Ping users may be able to find their friends via Facebook Connect.

Read the full post here.

I realise this might sound like politician calling for a new taskforce, or a businessman calling for a new tax break, but: we need a new social network.

By this, I don't mean that we need a new standalone service for sharing a kind of media, be it short messages, photos, videos, sound, shopping lists or anything else. Rather, what's needed is a framework to pull all the existing Web 2.0 services together in a way that's fluid, attractive and easy to use.

Social networking versus social publishing

In the beginning of the internet, much time and energy was spent discussing its potential to enable people to reach outside the boundaries of their everyday lives and connect in communities of shared interest. The internet enabled us to explore areas of interest our real' lives didn't allow us to investigate: people who lived in small towns with no galleries could learn about art; fans of obscure bands or niche cuisines or unusual hobbies could connect all around the world.

Equally importantly, the web allowed us to adopt a second identity. People could embrace interests that might not be socially acceptable from kinky sex to stamp-collecting to simple silliness without risking their real-world reputations.

With the advent of Web 2.0' and the development of ever more methods for people to create and share content online from Flickr for photos to YouTube and Vimeo for vidoes to Blogger, WordPress and Twitter for written thoughts this potential of the web was enhanced. Secret identities are no longer the preserve of superheroes: now each of us can have a second persona under which we publish all manner of content and connect with strangers all over the world.

But just as these services were developing, a funny thing happened: real life started to intrude. Facebook, launched in 2004, grew like topsy to become the website many people spend most time on, and the most vital to people's lives outside email. In the process, it became the default method of sharing photos, videos and writing for millions of people.

Facebook's success stems largely from one thing: its grounding in real life. You join under your real name, with a real photo, and connect with your real-life friends. From its origins as a tool to grease the wheels of the stratified social scene at Harvard University, it's become the online complement to people's real lives, used to share holiday snaps and plan birthday parties with existing friends far more than it is to meet new people. It's a true social network' the only true social networking site because it exists almost exclusively as an extension of, and facilitator of, people's real-life social lives.

There's nothing wrong with this. Facebook demonstrates that many people probably the majority are happy interacting online under their real names, and have no great desire to adopt a second persona or make contact with strangers who share their interests.

But at the same time, the continued success of self-publishing services like Flickr and Twitter shows that there remains a substantial demand for services which let you broadcast to the whole world, rather than just your own social contacts, and which let you adopt a second identity to enable you to say things you daren't with your first. The success of Twitter, in particular, shows the power of this freedom many people I know joined Twitter with a username based on their real name, before adopting a name that's less identifying to free them to be silly or profane.

Millions of people have a non-identifying username which unites their online publishing activity on a host of services: Tumblr, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, as well as endless comment forums. Each of these sites has its own flourishing communities.

But here's the thing. Facebook is so popular because it enables you to see what your friends are up to, across all different media, in one place. That's why Facebook, while technically inferior to Flickr as a photo-sharing site, is now the biggest photo-sharing site in the world it's convenient to share photos with the network you've already built.

But in the wider world of Web 2.0 services, there's no united network. My Flickr contacts can see my photos, but not my tweets; my blog subscribers can't see my YouTube uploads. Each service provides tools for finding your connections on other services, but it's laborious and you still have to visit each separate site to see what your contacts are up to. I check Facebook every morning, and frequently again later in the day. It takes a few minutes.

If I checked Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, Flickr and Vimeo every morning to see what all those I follow were up to, it'd take an hour or more.

What's needed is a portal which lets us conveniently and easily see what all those we follow are up to across the different web publishing services: to add social networking to social publishing. And it's needed for more than just convenience. As Facebook's power grows, there's an increasing danger that the convenience if offers will lead people to abandon other services and simply share through Facebook. Already I find myself clicking the Like' button where before I would have Dugg' a web page, or shared it on Twitter, because it's so damn easy. If young people joining the internet get in the habit of doing everything through Facebook, the whole idea of distributed Web 2.0 services and of the freedom to adopt a second persona online could wither on the vine.

More than the stream

The most successful attempt at this so far has been Friendfeed. The site, launched in 2007, does a pretty good job of aggregation' pulling in your contacts' activity on various web services into a single stream. Friendfeed was bought by you guessed it Facebook in 2009, and development of the site has basically ceased while its former owners are put to work on its parent's site. But even if it hadn't been effectively abandoned, Friendfeed has serious limitations. To follow a contact, they need to have signed up for the service themselves, rendering it useless for those whose contacts aren't signed up yet. It's ugly, better suited to sharing text-based items like tweets than photos and videos, and it displays links rather than whole entries for blog posts.

Moreover, Friendfeed offers you your contacts' content in a single stream, with photos and blog posts jumbled up with tweets and bookmarks. To be easily useable, a new aggregation service needs to be smarter, automatically separating material of long-term interest like blog posts and new batches of Flickr photographs from short-term material like tweets and TwitPic photographs, and showing them differently.

What's more, Friendfeed offers only aggregation. It does have rudimentary social networking features like messaging and groups, but they're secondary the focus is on, as the name implies, the feed.'

Let me sketch out what's needed from this new social network.

1. Users should be able to sign up using any of the services they wish to include, if those services offer a system for signing up to other websites (like Twitter, for example).
2. When a user adds a service to the site, they should see the entries of all the people they follow on that site in their unified feed, whether or not those they follow have joined the site. (This will depend on the service in question's API, but should generally be possible). For example, I should see all my Twitter contacts regardless of whether they've joined the site themselves.
3. Where the same person is a contact on two services, but they're not a member of the site, the site should suggest joining them together into a single virtual contact' based on username (so for example, my friend Joethedough's Tumblr and Twitter, which share a username, would be suggested as a virtual contact for me to approve). If that user then joined the site and connected the different services themselves, the virtual contact would be upgraded' to a real one.
4. The service should smartly separate long-form content and display it in a different, less-frequently-changing area to the main feed. For example, if a contact uploaded a single Flickr photo, it'd go in the feed, but if they uploaded a set of 50, it'd go in the long-term section.
5. Users should be able to filter the feed in advanced ways, limiting it to a single service, type of service (photos/videos/blogs/etc), or by groups of contacts. Service-based contact groups like Twitter lists would be imported and you could add to them on the site. For example, I have a Twitter list of tech journalists; on our new social network, this would show me not just their tweets but their Flickr accounts and blog posts.
6. As well as sucking in information from various services, users should be able to write information to those services from the service. If you want to add a short message to your profile, for example, you'll be able to post to Twitter from the service, adding the message both to your Twitter profile and to your aggregated service profile. Not using a particular service yet? You can sign up, with one click, without leaving the social network site, with an account based on your existing username and password there.
7. Users should have a profile' showing their own feed, and long-term content area, for all the services they've added. They should have considerable control over the colours, fonts etc of the profile (but they should not be able to dump in random HTML, MySpace-style).
8. A user's profile should be able to function as their OpenID provider, giving people a common, effective hub' to use as their online identity across the web (and acting as a counterweight to the growth of Facebook login).
9. Users should be able to message each other, form groups, organise events, and do all the additional things which social networks enable. Ideally these too would be based on external services, with users able to (for example) email each other at their registered email addresses through the site, or organise events through a sevice such as EventBrite.

Ideally, this service wouldn't need to store or produce any information whatsoever on its own systems, besides the basic network of users and their connected services. Everything else would be done through external services that users had connected.

None of this, to the best of my limited technical knowledge, is beyond the current potential of services' APIs the systems by which they let different web services talk to each other (for example, Twitter apps like TweetDeck use Twitter's API to read and write information). But put it all together, and you have a recipe for a fast-growing, super-useful site that could provide the natural balance to Facebook. Each morning, you'd look at Facebook to see what your real-life friends are up to, and our new site to see what your virtual friends are up to. Just as your Facebook profile is becoming a hub for your real-name online activity, your profile on this site this would become a hub for your online identity, perfect for putting in email signatures or on address cards.

You'll notice I haven't said anything about privacy. Facebook's complex and often-changing privacy features have put privacy issues at the heart of the debate about social networking. But for this project, I don't see it as a top priority. Users should probably have the ability to show parts of their profile to only certain people, and information imported from external services should be subject to any privacy controls the user has applied on that external service.

But when you look at the services this network would be designed to aggregate, you find their privacy features are basic and rarely used. Only a very small proportion of Twitter users protect their tweets, and only a small proportion of Flickr users post private photographs. These services are really about publishing in the literal sense of making things public, submitting them to be found and enjoyed by the world. It's normal to follow strangers, and be followed by strangers, on Twitter. That's why it's so vital this new service allows people to mask their real identities frankly, that ought to be privacy protection enough, at least at the start.

Why existing services won't do

There are a range of sites currently vying to be people's online hub. But none of them will do:

1. Facebook.

Facebook actually does aggregation very well; its Platform API makes it easy for services to create applications to suck your tweets, photos and blog posts into your News Feed. Indeed, Facebook's attractive previews of links in messages, and embedding of videos and photos, makes it a better displayer of someone's tweets than Twitter itself. And, with its recent moves to encourage users to share more information publicly, it's making a wholesale bid to be the centre of people's online lives as it is the online centre of the offline lives.

But Facebook's networks are, and will always be, based around real-life connections. Most people with some notable exceptions don't want accumulate hundreds of random strangers as Facebook friends' the way they do Twitter followers. And there remains the problem of Facebook requiring people to use their real names.

The recent introduction of Facebook Pages, which are automatically public and well suited to aggregating information, provides a partial answer. But while actors, musicians and politicians and even some journalists might find it appropriate to complement their personal profile with a public Page, most people find the idea nonsensical. And Facebook has recently increased its restrictions on the names users can give to Pages, making them no more psuedonym-friendly than personal profiles.

What's more, part of the purpose of a new social network would precisely be to counterbalance Facebook, which is acquiring a degree of dominance many find disquieting.

2. Google.

Google's Buzz' was generally tagged as a Twitter rival when it was launched earlier this year, but it's fair to say it's also intended as an aggregator it can automatically import Blogger blog posts, YouTube videos, and Twitter posts. But its appearance is heavily text-based, and it doesn't feel like it's committed to aggregation there's no reason to believe that Google would want to enable users to import content from the video site Vimeo, for example, as it's a direct competitor to YouTube, and the same applies for WordPress in relation to Blogger. It doesn't even import RSS feeds, which is pretty much the baseline feature for a decent aggregator.

Google is gearing up to incorporate Buzz into a new, expanded social network, a full-on Facebook competitor, later this year. But the signs are that rather than complementing Facebook's focus on real-life relationships, Google will seek to beat them at their own game. A recent presentation by Google employee Paul Adams, who's believed to be working on Google's putative social network, focused on how online networking can be made to more closely mirror our offline day-to-day activity. It's well worth a look at, and it suggests Google Me' might be really useful. But it's not an answer to this problem, which is not about interacting with your offline social network, but precisely about building new communities and connecting new ones online.

3. MySpace.

Once upon a time, MySpace fulfilled just this function people's public-facing home on the web, a place where bands, celebrities, microcelebrities and regular folk mingled and connected. Had MySpace seized on its potential as people's public-facing alternative to their Facebook profile, and quickly wired in advanced, attractive aggregation, it might have had a chance. (Imagine for a minute if MySpace, not Facebook, had bought Friendfeed, and launched a radically overhauled service with aggregation at its core. Wouldn't that have been something?)

But services with 250 million users don't tend to carry out radical overhauls, especially when they're owned by irascible conservative media tycoons. And MySpace has now fallen so far, in user visits and above all in prestige, it's simply impossible how they could experience any sort of renaissance. Besides, the latest plan for reviving the site is pretty much the opposite of what I'm describing, focused not on social media but on centralised traditional media like TV shows and record-company-approved music.

4. Twitter.

By rights, Twitter should be considered one of the many services to be aggregated by a new social network, a self-publishing platform like Flickr or WordPress. But there are signs that Twitter is becoming, almost by default, the leading aggregator of people's content most services offer tools to automatically update Twitter when there's a new photo upload/blog post/video, and it's common to look at a friend's Twitter feed and see their actual messages outnumbered by auto-generated announcements of new content on other services.

The problem is that as an aggregator, Twitter is really, really bad. An entirely text-based service, it's useless at showing links, photos or videos. A whole industry link-shortening services has sprung up to deal with its inability to handle long links. And it's also not much of a social network: there's no capacity for groups, event management or messaging of more than 140 characters.

5. Diaspora.

The young developers behind a new social network project called Disapora got a lot of attention earlier this year, becoming the focus of attention of the growing mass of people seeking an alternative to Facebook and its (supposedly) cavalier attitude to privacy. The four young men are smart and idealistic, and Diaspora sounds like a great idea. But I strongly suspect it's doomed to fail.

Diaspora's founding principle is that no central hub should be required for people to communicate with each other. They're proposing that users have their own node,' installed on their own server, which can channel information from different web services to their contacts. It's a good idea. But it's impossible to think that a service that requires users to install software on their own server will ever reach beyond a narrow tech audience.

Of course, a central site could offer hosted nodes,' much as WordPress.com offers the experience of a self-hosted WordPress installation on a central site. But nothing I've heard from Diaspora so far suggests this service will allow for the kind of richly multimedia and easy-to-set-up profiles and feeds this service will need to take off.

To provide a really good experience, I think this has to be a centralised, hosted service from the off. That does make it reliant on one company, but because the information being shared isn't stored on the service just on whichever external service the user adds it to there's minimal risk of data being lost if the service disappeared overnight.

It's also not clear how focused Diaspora are on easy aggregation from other web services. Right now their focus seems to be on building an internal structure for sharing messages, links etc. And, Diaspora's system appears to be based on symmetrical' relationships that is, user A and user B have to agree to friend' each other to see each other's content. This new service should be based around asymmetrical' relationships, as used by Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr and most Web 2.0 services, where following' someone's content doesn't require them to follow' you back.

So far, Diaspora seems to be intended as an alternative to Facebook, a tool for messaging and content sharing, for the tech-savvy not unlike a decentralised Pownce. Good luck to them, but it's not what most users are looking for.

6. VIRB.

Possibly the most worrying precedent for this new social network would be VIRB. The little-known social network was launched in 2007, aimed at attracting web-savvy creative types the same types who were fleeing MySpace in droves, but weren't attracted to Facebook. It offered aggregation of external services, messaging, groups, attractive profiles with design tools, and many of the things this new social network all to have.

And it failed. Earlier this year, VIRB announced a total change of strategy, shifting from a social-network model to one of simple website provider. Users were invited to convert their profiles to standalone sites, and pay a monthly fee for them. The direction Virb was headed, just wasn't working for anyone especially our users, explained founder Brad Smith in a blog post. It was time we made an epic course correction, allowing our product to regain pertinence. Virb is not an answer to those seeking a Facebook alternative or a better-looking MySpace.

Pretty depressing stuff. But though VIRB got a lot right the importance of allowing users to style their profiles without letting them make them hideously ugly, for example it just didn't offer a rich enough experience to grow. Setting up a profile was pretty laborious, with profile information needing to be entered and decisions required about layout and theme. Aggregation was basic, with only a FriendFeed-style text-based list of aggregated material and no photo or video previews. And while you could aggregate all your services to your profile page, only certain services Flickr, blogs and Twitter, if I recall correctly could be properly integrated with the site so your contacts were aware when you'd imported new material.

Above all, what all these services have in common is that they require users to rebuild their contact lists on the site. The most crucial aspect of this new service should be that you don't have to do that each time you import a service, you import your contacts from that service, and the service helps with connecting the various profiles of a contact into a single presence in my network, even if that person hasn't signed up for the site themselves yet. This means people could begin using the site every day as their social media hub even before their contacts join, preventing the user-inertia problem that's killed so many aspiring social networks at birth.

If you build it, they will come

Tech is a business, and services aren't built simply because some blogger sees the need for them. But I'm convinced that a service such as this could be a viable concern. If getting started was easy enough, it could quickly become the chief place users go to check their contact's online activity outside Facebook giving decent potential for advertising without extravagant costs for servers, R&D, staff, etc.

Who'll build it? Well, in the industry of a thousand startups, it could be anyone. But here's an idea. Every major, independently-owned social publishing platform Twitter, Tumblr, Vimeo, FourSquare is threatened by the growing domination of Facebook and by the trend towards sharing with real-life contacts replacing social publishing. So why not work together? Each are small companies, but each could spare a little engineering time. Smaller companies still, who could stand to gain most from being plugged in to a service with built-in users, could contribute smaller amounts of time. These businesses could help the new startup get funding (and, of course, benefit from the ultimate advertising revenue). Users, eager to have a central home for their online identities and just one site to check in the morning after email and Facebook could make donations to help get things started, much as they did earlier this year for Diaspora.

Am I crazy? Probably. But you only need to look at the flurry of press surrounding the threat Facebook's new Places feature poses to Foursquare to see that the community of independent social services need to do something to combat the ever-growing Zuckerberg empire. By banding together maintaining their separate communities but adding a service that lets their users meet each other and subscribe to each other's additional services they can carve out a strong second network of social activity on the web to rival Facebook's. A user who thinks they need to check their Flickr, Twitter and Tumblr contacts' activity is likely to give up, not bother and just check Facebook.

Above all, users need this. What Facebook has done in helping people use the web to enhance their offline lives is admirable and valuable. But, if the social web is to fulfil its true potential as a place for people to connect and grow, to share interests and experiences, and to be creative, there must be a strong network of places where users can publish and network without using their real names.

Eric Schmidt of Google made headlines earlier this week when he predicted that, in the future, it would be routine for young adults to change their names to disassociate themselves from all the embarrassing youthful indiscretions recorded online in photos, videos and status updates. But you don't have these problems if people are free to use a pseudonym. And as well as reducing privacy problems, you get more interesting content put online. There's ample evidence that when forced to use their real name online, people are far more circumspect about how they interact and what they publish.

The web helps us do many important, everyday things shopping, organising events, sharing memories. These are great, and important. But much of the most exciting potential of the web lies in exploring interests and communities and building identities outside the boundaries of our real' lives. For that area of the web to survive and thrive, we need a new, public social network where people aren't restricted. I don't know what the name should be, but I can think of a slogan Be yourself.

With with the latest release of iTunes, Apple has forayed into social networking. iTunes 10 includes Ping, a built-in social network for music.

With Apple's recent launch of iAds, a platform that taps into iTunes' existing user data to let advertisers target users through existing iPhone apps, Ping is an important move to grow iTunes' social graph. Basically, Ping can end up making iTunes a lot stickier, giving both Apple and iAds advertisers more insight into how to sell to iTunes users.

All that being said, Ping can also fall flat on its face. Let's take a look at 5 reasons why Ping can both succeed and fail.

1. Ping Launches with a Strong User Base

Will Work: With over 160 million iTunes users, Ping has a considerable head start. Indeed, a lot of social networking start-ups hit the Deadpool before they hit 1 millions (trust me, I know: I've worked for one).

Won't Work: Offering an existing user-base something cool doesn't always mean it's going to work. Consider the number of Google users. Now, consider the number of Google's failures and then add Google Wave to the list. Res ipsa loquitur

2. Ping is a Value Added Component

Will Work: While most social networks are just that, Ping is a social network that plugs into an existing ecommerce suite. Users already find value in iTunes, and Ping will help them get more value out of it. In other words, while most social networks are just useless fun, Ping takes useless features and makes them useful by plugging them into an already useful tool iTunes.

Won't Work: Now just because you give it to them, doesn't mean that they're going to use it. Consider this: iTunes is like a giant online mall. But with the exception of teenagers, people don't go to the mall to socialize, they go to the mall to shop. Basically, most users might turn out to be decidedly uninterested in socializing via iTunes.

Take Zune Social, for instance. Zune has had social features since its launch in 2006, and it still remains irrelevant. Granted, iTunes Ping boasts a user-base from the get-go, but it still goes to show that just because you offer social features beyond your core functionality, there's no guarantee users will pick it up.

3. User Choice / Control

Will Work: Ping gives users just the kind of control that Facebook has always struggled with, and if Facebook can get it wrong and be such a success, things are looking up for Ping. As TechCrunch reports, Ping lets:

[...] you decide if you want to use the friend model, the follow model, or the lurk model.

To be more clear, Apple asks you to decide between two things: do you want to allow people to follow you, or do you want no one to be able to follow you? The latter is a nice option because you can still use Ping, you simply use it as a lurker. You can see what other people with public profiles are doing, but they can't see what you are doing. The other option is to let people follow you but there's a sub option to this. You can either let anyone follow you (think: Twitter) or you can get notifications to approve everyone who wants to follow you (think: Facebook).

The kind of choice of choice and flexibility can be exactly what iTunes users need to share their social graph with Apple.

Won't Work: Too much choice can also be a bad thing. With 3 different levels of functionality, there's considerable room for users to misunderstand the service. Just imagine if the majority of users decided to lurk. Basically, a bunch of users will set-up their Ping profiles, surf around, and not find enough to make it worth their time, and Ping can end up going stagnant.

4. Ping Has Revenue Models on Toast

Will Work: Ping has one thing that many social networking start-ups lack: a revenue model. First, through Ping, Apple will be able to cross-sell and upsell iTunes users based on their social graph i.e. your friends like this, so you might, too.

Second, the Ping social graph can expand on the data already available to iAds advertisers (such as purchasing habits and history). This will make iAds that much more appealing to advertisers and, potentially, that much more profitable.

Won't Work: Okay, I can't see any way a revenue model can work against Ping. In essence, the value added component it offers users pertains to iTunes sales, and iAds advertisers. From a revenue model stand point, Ping just makes sense.

5. The Ping Model Works

Will Work: Just like Facebook usurped LBS social networks, Ping capitalizes on a set of features that have already succeeded. Social music networks such as Last.fm and Pandora have already proven popular with users. But where Last.fm and Pandora have had to refer their users to third-party music stores, Ping is part and parcel of a music store that's already popular. In fact, if I were Last.fm and Pandora, I'd be worried.

Won't Work: The fact that other music social networks have been so successful also poses a bit of a barrier to iTunes' Ping. Consider how Twitter has continued to grow and flourish despite Facebook patenting and integrating the news feed.

For instance, Last.fm and/or Pandora users have invested years in their favorites, friend lists, and preferences. Although this won't prevent them from trying out Ping, it does make it less likely that they abandon their other accounts altogether. That means they'll be less likely to move their music socializing away from their existing services over to Ping.

Anyone's Guess

The fact of the matter is that we can look at Ping any which way. And in the end, it can be a huge success, a mild success, or a complete flop. I guess the best we can do is look at all the variables, place our bets, and hope for the best.

But if you were going to give Ping 1 point for a will work point above and -1 point for a won't work point, how would you score Ping's potential?

Nielsen applies a wide variety of methodologies to derive insights from our data for clients and the marketplace on what consumers watch. Our recently published What Americans Do Online article produced a fantastic level of interest, including questions and suggestions about other ways to look at the data. Since this is how we typically work with clients, collaborating on how to get to the best analysis, we acknowledge that data alone doesn't always provide the complete picture.

The following alternative analysis, comparing category- and site-level data, for example, shows the different insights made possible by alternate approaches and interpretations. We have long taken pride in our leadership in measurement science and our participation in rich debate around methodology to arrive at the best insight possible. We're looking forward to continuing the conversation to develop new ways to look at measurement both online and in the mobile arena.

For the mobile element of the research, our original share of time analysis used the average time spent at a category-level, the broad groupings of websites that offer similar types of content. This time we went to a more granular level, looking at share of time by basing it on the total time at the individual site-level.

This alternative way of slicing the data still shows Email to be, by far, the dominant sector in terms of mobile time, although this dominance shrinks by a few delta points to 38.5% from 41.6%. Search is another that nets out with a smaller share, although by less than a percentage point from 7.1% to 6.3%.

The share held by Social Networking remains very similar but News & Current Events comes out much stronger using the site-level analysis at a 7.2% share of time compared to 4.4% of time using the category-level analysis.

Share of time on Portals shows something more dramatic, with a change from 11.6% to 4.6% share of time, but this doesn't mean that people are spending any less time on Portal sites. Nielsen classifies both channels and brands into categories and so a category-level analysis includes both brands (e.g. Google) as well as channels under than brand (e.g. Google News). Using the initial methodology means that all Google time would be assigned to Portals (because Google is a portal) but using the site-level method means the Google News element would be assigned to the News & Current Events sector. Thus, the Portal element is limited to more general and entry pages rather than including content-specific sectors such as news.

There's a saying, technology changes, people don't. Yet, when we consider the impact of technology on our daily lives, some very interesting observations surface

A pen now feels awkward to hold and as such, our penmanship is deteriorating.

It's now common to sit at a dinner table with family and friends where some are actively communicating with others, listening to music or gaming via mobile devices.

We are redefining the perception, boundaries and thresholds for privacy as we once knew it.

The future of the art of long form writing is at risk of becoming shrtr and less formal #forrealz.

For some, technology encourages immersion and introverted experiences in public settings, reducing the natural human dynamics of engagement. To counter, coffee shops and cafes are becoming laptop and WIFI free.

For others, social networking online is converting introverts into digital extroverts, rewarding participation with confidence boosting actions such as responses, likes, friend requests, shares, etc.

To connect with other human beings now in the future is not only changing, it's evoking a sense of Digital Darwinism. The mantra of Engage or Die! was born to make the point that what was, what is, and what will be are no longer linked to all we know and instead, demand an expanded perspective.

Social networking is pervading led by the clicking, connecting, and sharing of hundreds of millions of Internet denizens around the world. While Facebook is the digital equivalent to your online residence, Twitter is reflective of the me in social media. Twitter is not a social network, it is a series of disparately connected personalities linked through friendship, admiration, education, and context. How we embrace and invest our persona in this paradigm says more about the future of digital culture and ourselves than we might imagine.

With the introduction of Apple's new pseudo social network Ping, conversations lit up Twitter ultimately sparking a trending topic, we don't need another social network. Indeed, there is a prevailing sense of social media fatigue (aka social network fatigue (SNF). But as good friend Sarah Lacy recently said, If You've Got Social Media Fatigue, UR DOIN IT WRONG.

At a recent Girls in Tech event hosted at KickLabs in San Francisco, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams inferred that Twitter is actually a cure for information overload. Williams likens Twitter to a recipient-driven medium where people who have something to say can now find and reach the right audience, That's a much better situation for both the publisher of the information and the consumer of it. So recipient-based media can scale better in a world of infinite information.

@Ev also discussed the future of relevance and how Tweets will adapt to your interests. He compared the experience to Google, Google is very good at I need to solve a problem, I need to buy something, I need an answer. Twitter is more I'm interested in many things, I don't know what I need to know.' What we need to get much better at is scaling that system so you don't have to pay attention to everything, but you don't miss the stuff you care about.

The State of the Evolving Egosystem

Over the years, measuring the impact of Twitter as a medium, proved difficult and elusive as details and numbers did not emanate from Twitter itself. Third-parties using APIs helped us paint the landscape to visualize the tremendous proliferation of what started as a microblog and later evolved into an intricate system for sharing, discovering, and voicing our inner monologue. To help, Williams posted details, stats, and direction to the Twitter blog. As a result, some very interesting usage patterns and adoption rates were revealed.

First, Twitter boasts over 145 million registered users. In April at its inaugural Chirp conference, Twitter announced 105 million users tweeting upwards of 65 million times a day. The number of active accounts however, remains unknown. As Twitter better explains its mission, purpose, and value system to everyday consumers, the number will only continue to grow.

Evan Williams also shared a glimpse of the Twitter ecosystem and how individuals connect to one another. If the Web is Dead Twitter users have yet to hear the news. Twitter.com and m.twitter.com account for 92% of all access and communication.

Social Science Will Reveal the Future of Social Networkings

I believe that in order to truly understand technology, the internet, social media and its impact on society, business, and culture, social science becomes paramount.

Social science is the study of human society and social relationships and its role in the evolution of Twitter, social networking and the future of online societies is paramount. While we focus on the future, we must also look at the past and the present to find meaning, purpose, and insight to steer progress. This rapid evolution requires study in order to navigate change and define a course of action and the passage ways to what lies ahead.

As technology and the internet affect human behavior and culture, understanding how we got here will help us affect where we are going. The future of communication, relationships, and education is in your handsand your status updates, tweets, likes and connections.

Connect with Brian Solis on Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Facebook
___
Please consider reading, Engage!: It will help you find answers to your questions

___
Get Putting the Public Back in Public Relations and The Conversation Prism:

___
Image Credit: Shutterstock

The problem with most web analytics is that they give you insight into numbers. You can see how many users are visiting your site, when they do so, and where they are coming from. But you don't understand anything about them as people.

That's where Frosmo, a Helsinki company originally founded as a tournament gaming company, could prove useful. Frosmo launched its Frosmo World casual game tournament business on Facebook last year. While doing that, it became intimately familiar with Facebook analytics. As Facebook expanded its reach to web sites this spring with its ubiquitous Like buttons, Frosmo saw an opportunity to deliver much better analytics.

Taking advantage of the fact that real people indicate whether they like a web site or not, Frosmo aggregates that information into useful analytics that companies can act upon. The company formally launched its Optimizer tool this month. It consists of a free analytics tool and a paid service that can be used to optimize the experience that return visitors have on your web site.

We are now measuring people, not numbers, said Mikael Gummerus, chief executive of Frosmo. It's like the social graph meets customer relationship management meets tactical selling tool.

The analytics are useful because the Facebook Like buttons have access to the information that people put on their Facebook pages. You can thus aggregate the demographics of the people who Like your web site. You can determine their age, their occupations, their job titles, and how often they visit your web site. You can see what they look at and gather statistics on a daily basis that show what kind of audience your web site reaches. In turn, you can take that aggregate data and share it with potential web site advertisers.

But the heart of Frosmo's Optimizer is the ability to engage with individual users. Now that you know who is visiting your web site, you can greet them by name every time they visit your page. Then you can steer them on a path that matches what their interests are, based on what you know about their past behavior. For instance, if someone has visited an e-commerce site 20 times and looked at the same car each time, the odds are good that user is getting ready to buy that car. The web site owner can then use that information to offer a discount on the car if they buy it right away. Each user can thus be individually optimized, Gummerus said.

It sounds pretty simple. But most companies are not doing this now. It's fairly new because the Facebook Like buttons only started spreading to other web sites in March. Now, more than 2 million web sites are using them. Those web sites are collecting considerable numbers of fans who are giving them real world, not anonymous, information. If you can better identify those people, you can provide them with more relevant and personalized service, Gummerus said. And that will generate much more revenue.

For instance, you can understand who shares your web site data with the most people. You can see where users are making use of your site and identify the bottlenecks that keep them from spending money. You can zero in on those people and offer them more rewards for sharing your information with their friends. You can identify people whose behavior patterns suggest certain marketing offers. You can also figure out who among your users is the most influential when it comes to promoting your site or products. You can do that with very little cost. Frosmo calls this process Social Networking Logics.

Of course, there are still a lot of people who don't use Facebook and who don't click on Like buttons. Their behavior can't be tracked so easily. But Gummerus thinks that the numbers of participants will grow over time. Customers already using Frosmo's Optimizer include China's RenRen social network, MTV Media, Kingnet, Yahoo, Sanook, Ekolay.net and a number of other companies. Frosmo still runs its game business, but Gummerus said the company may now make money from Optimizer.

Rivals include companies such as Google, Omniture and other analytics companies. Frosmo sees itself as offering a service that the others don't at the moment. The company tracks visitors on a daily basis now. But it may start providing actionable data in real time in the future.

We give companies information that they can use to take action, Gummerus said.

Web site owners can get the same data from Facebook Like buttons that Frosmo collects. But the data won't be packaged as neatly and the actions won't be as easy to take. Frosmo argues its dashboard-like tools are the easiest for web site owners to create a unique path into a web site for every user.

You know that companies like Amazon.com can do this, Gummerus said. Now, any site can do it. It's a very pragmatic way to increase your sales.

In games, Frosmo competes with the likes of Zynga, Playfish, Mindjolt and a host of casual game sites. Its investors include Riistos Silasmaa, a member of Nokia's board. It raised 1.4 million euros from the Finnish government and has also raised two rounds of angel money.

Before founding Frosmo, Gummerus was managing director of E-Sports Nordic. But he spun Frosmo out of that company once he saw its potential.

Tags: Analytics, Facebook Like, Frosmo World, Helsinki, Optimizer

Companies: Frosmo

People: Mikael Gummerus

Shared by Jesse Stay
Very interesting. Although a serious e-mail bug of theirs is keeping me from signing up for their service at work. Their servers are rejecting our servers, oddly.

Since Yammer launched as the Twitter for businesses at TechCrunch 50 in 2008, the startup has continued to improve on its already solid product, releasing mobile apps and new desktop clients, adding threaded conversations, and more. The fact is that in just under two years, Yammer, which we use at TechCrunch for internal communications, is being used by more than one million users and 80,000 companies worldwide (which includes 80% of the Fortune 500). That's impressive growth for the startup, which has raised $15 million in funding and is doubling revenue every quarter. But the social enterprise arena is competitive with Salesforce Chatter, Jive, Socialcast and many others vying for a piece of the pie. However, Yammer is going to be releasing a new version of its application at TechCrunch Disrupt this fall which could be a game-changer.

The new Yammer will essentially turn the microblogging application into a full fledged social network. Yammer plans to add a number of applications to its platform that will increase its functionality beyond just a communications platform. An events application will allow you to invite co-workers to company or group events and track responses. Attendees can also download the event into their calendar.

An ideas application will help employees and administrators create, find and categorize the best ideas within a company. Employees can rank ideas through voting, and ideas can be created separately or can be promoted from existing conversations on Yammer.

Yammer is also going to be upgrading content sharing by allowing users to preview information in shared links. The startup has also added a Q&A app that encourages workers to ask questions and find answers from a database, and includes a polling application. Additionally, the new version of Yammer will allow users to assign a task resulting from conversations and track its completion, and will include the ability to tag content with topics, making it easier to find conversations by subject.

Another integral part of Yammer's transformation into an open social platform is the ability to install third-party applications. Yammer will soon give third-party developers the ability to sell and create applications like those that Yammer will now offer. It's similar in theory to the Google Apps marketplace.

In terms of communications functionality, Yammer is adding the ability to send Direct Messages to multiple parties, and a chat feature, which will allow users to create chat rooms that can be archived or searchable. Missed chats will automatically become direct messages.

A new Activity Feed will aggregate stories about co-worker actions within all of their enterprise apps (both on and off Yammer) and will allow users to follow content. And a new notification feed will alert users in real time about co-worker actions that affect them.

Yammer CEO and founder David Sacks tells me the feed is one of the key components of social networking and existing enterprise platforms have been built before the concept of a realtime feed. Yammer's next-generation application, he says, will help enterprises create a social communications platform around data and communications.

In terms of the big picture view of the social enterprise, Sacks believes that the ability to create a go-to corporate social network is a Facebook sized opportunity. Half of the social web entails sites like Facebook and Twitter, explains Sacks, and the other half will be around enterprise social networking. And he makes it very clear that Yammer hopes to be the de-facto application for companies, both big and small, to use for their social networking efforts.

Of course, it's safe to assume that either an existing social enterprise player, such as Salesforce, or even Google may want to purchase Yammer to boost their own offerings. Sacks says he's received considerable interest in his company, but for now he wants to focus in creating the best product in the space. That, he says, is going to be the new version of Yammer.

The announcement of Google's Gmail Priority Inbox likely made more than a few enterprise knowledge workers stuck with Microsoft Outlook and drowning in e-mail quite envious of Gmail. That is, if they weren't envious already. Marshall also took a look at a few plugins and services that are turning e-mail into a platform, including the incredible Rapportive.

Lucky for Outlook users, there are actually several plugins to extend Outlook's functionality and ease that Gmail envy. E-mail addons have been heating up for a while now. Here are five plugins you should check out, whether you have Gmail envy or not.

Sponsor

ClearContext

If you're looking for something similar to Priority Inbox, give ClearContext a shot. ClearContext analyzes your e-mail and searches for patterns of behavior. It then prioritizes incoming e-mail and can offer suggestions on where to file particular e-mails. It's not perfect - I wouldn't rely on it to never miss important e-mails - but it can help cut through the clutter.

It's designed to work well with the Getting Things Done workflow and uses folders as "projects" and enables you to create tasks easily from any e-mail.

Xobni

If you're more focused on search instead of filing, Xobni, which we've covered several times offers a powerful search functionality.

And if you're suffering from Rapportive envy, Xobni also brings social network profiles right into your inbox.

And for those really interested in "e-mail as a platform" Xobni has a development platform for both Outlook and Gmail.

Outlook Social Connector

If you just want a plugin that brings social networking into Outlook, Microsoft has its own free plugin that does just that.

Lookeen

On the other hand, if you're only interested in search and don't want the social networking features, Xobni competitor Lookeen is worth a look.

Baydin

Baydin has its own quirky search ideas, which we've covered here. Its flagship "unsearch" product is still forthcoming. In the meantime, some might find its Boomberang tool useful: you can specify a time you want an e-mail to be sent to you. (Baydin also has a Gmail version is beta.)

How Do You Deal with E-Mail Overload in Outlook

Do you use any plugins to manage the e-mail firehose in Outlook? Or do you have any special strategies for coping with your mail? Let us know!

Since Yammer launched as the Twitter for businesses at TechCrunch 50 in 2008, the startup has continued to improve on its already solid product, releasing mobile apps and new desktop clients, adding threaded conversations, hosted versions and more. The fact is that in just under two years, Yammer, which we use at TechCrunch for internal communications, is being used by more than one million users and 80,000 companies worldwide (which includes 80% of the Fortune 500). That's impressive growth for the startup, which has raised $15 million in funding and is doubling revenue every quarter. But the social enterprise arena is competitive with Salesforce Chatter, Jive, Socialcast and many others vying for a piece of the pie. However, Yammer is going to be releasing a new version of its application at TechCrunch Disrupt this fall which could be a game-changer.

The new Yammer will essentially turn the microblogging application into a full fledged social network. Yammer plans to add a number of applications to its platform that will increase its functionality beyond just a communications platform. An events application will allow you to invite co-workers to company or group events and track responses. Attendees can also download the event into their calendar.

An ideas application will help employees and administrators create, find and categorize the best ideas within a company. Employees can rank ideas through voting, and ideas can be created separately or can be promoted from existing conversations on Yammer.

Yammer is also going to be upgrading content sharing by allowing users to preview information in shared links. The startup has also added a Q&A app that encourages workers to ask questions and find answers from a database, and includes a polling application. Additionally, the new version of Yammer will allow users to assign a task resulting from conversations and track its completion, and will include the ability to tag content with topics, making it easier to find conversations by subject.

Another integral part of Yammer's transformation into an open social platform is the ability to install third-party applications. Yammer will soon give third-party developers the ability to sell and create applications like those that Yammer will now offer. It's similar in theory to the Google Apps marketplace.

In terms of communications functionality, Yammer is adding the ability to send Direct Messages to multiple parties, and a chat feature, which will allow users to create chat rooms that can be archived or searchable. Missed chats will automatically become direct messages.

A new Activity Feed will aggregate stories about co-worker actions within all of their enterprise apps (both on and off Yammer) and will allow users to follow content. And a new notification feed will alert users in real time about co-worker actions that affect them.

Yammer CEO and founder David Sacks tells me the feed is one of the key components of social networking and existing enterprise platforms have been built before the concept of a realtime feed. Yammer's next-generation application, he says, will help enterprises create a social communications platform around data and communications.

In terms of the big picture view of the social enterprise, Sacks believes that the ability to create a go-to corporate social network is a Facebook sized opportunity. Half of the social web entails sites like Facebook and Twitter, explains Sacks, and the other half will be around enterprise social networking. And he makes it very clear that Yammer hopes to be the de-facto application for companies, both big and small, to use for their social networking efforts.

Of course, it's safe to assume that either an existing social enterprise player, such as Salesforce, or even Google may want to purchase Yammer to boost their own offerings. Sacks says he's received considerable interest in his company, but for now he wants to focus in creating the best product in the space. That, he says, is going to be the new version of Yammer.

The Social Media Strategy and Monitoring Survey was initiated in May of 2010. The intention of the study was to get a broad look at the emerging field of social media marketing, and specifically, to explore the key policies, guidelines and goals that are important within social media ecosystems. Additionally, the study identifies which social media sites are most commonly used and how success is measured. Forum One released a report based on the study last week.

We received approximately 59 responses. Participants represent a healthy swath of the types of organizations participating in online community building activities, including: large software companies, large community destination sites, niche community sites, platform providers, interactive marketing firms and independent consultants.

Several key issues pertaining to social media strategy and monitoring surfaced during this report, including:

• Two thirds of the respondents, 66% (39), indicated that their organization has either fully or partially written social media guidelines.
• The three most commonly reported policies that respondents said were important for staff participation in social media were:
  • Follow All Existing Employee Guidelines (23)
  • Be Transparent (20)
  • Respect Audience and Coworkers (20)
• Over three quarters of the respondents rated Facebook, 75% (44) and Twitter, 73% (43) as a 1st or 2nd highest priority social media site in which their organization participates.
• Almost a third of participants, 29% (17), indicated that their organization uses paid tools or services to monitor social media sites, with Radian6 (7) being the most commonly reported.

Size of Organization
Over a third of the respondents, 34% (20), have less than 50 people employed in their organization and only 12% (7) respondents reported having more than 5,000 employees.

• 34% (20) belong to an organization that has less than 50 employees
• 30% (18) belong to an organization that has between 50-499 employees
• 7% (4) belong to an organization that has between 500-999 employees
• 10% (6) belong to an organization that has between 1,000-4,999 employees
• 7% (4) belong to an organization that has between 5,000-9,999 employees
• 12% (7) belong to an organization that has more than 10,000 employees

Key Policies for Staff Participation
The three most commonly reported policies that respondents said were important for staff participation in social media was to Follow All Existing Employee Guidelines (23), Transparency (20) and to Respect Audience and Coworkers (20).

A third of the respondents also indicated that Adding Value (19), Being Polite and Courteous (18), Protecting Confidential Company Information (18) and Using Your Best Judgment (18) were considered key policies for staff participation in Social Media within their organization.

Social Media Business Goals
Most respondents rated all of the business goals as having some importance within their organization's social media ecosystem.

The most important business goal reported was Driving traffic to the main organization web site, with almost three quarters of the participants, 73% (43), indicating that this was considered a very important goal for their organization.

The second highest rated social media business goal was Branding, 71% (42). Only 10% (6) participants said that Branding had no significance to their organization.

The next four most important business goals according to the respondent's ratings were Retaining customers / loyalty, peer-to-peer evangelism, Educations, and Evangelism. These had similar ratings with at least half of the respondents rating them as very important business goals for their organization's social media ecosystem.

Even though Peer-to-peer customer service and Recruiting had the lowest ratings, more than two thirds of those that rated the importance of these business goals said that they had some importance to their organization.

Measuring Success
We received a wide variety of responses to this question. The most common metrics measured on social media sites is the Traffic Generated (25) including: General Traffic Generated (10), Number of Clicks (7), Number of Page Views (4), Number of Returns (2) and Number of Site Visits (2). One participant commented, We use Google Analytics to measure clicks to the company website, clicks to other social networking sites, duration of time spent, and direction of traffic.

The second most common metric that respondents said they used to measure success on social media sites was related to user participation in the site content, such as, comments, posts and discussions (22), The amount and quality of content posted was said to be important for many participants. One participant said that, they track the percentage of positive comments versus the percentage of negative comments. Several other participants said that they monitored the Amount of Engagement (5) that was happening on social media sites.

Several participants indicated that they measure the Number of Brand Mentions (8) within user content posted on their company site and also in mainstream media content, with one response comment as follows: We measure the percentage of participation within discussion related specifically to our company and market, the number of Brand Mentions versus Competitors and topic and sentiment tracking related to our company and competitors.

Other commonly reported metrics that participants said they measure are the Number of Fans / Followers (16) on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as website follower friends and fans. Tracking the Number of Members / Registrations (8) such as website registrations and other social media membership sites such as LinkedIn group membership was also said by some to be used to measure success within their organization.

Tracking the Number of Leads / Referrals (14) was also mentioned by many participants to be useful in measuring success on social media sites, with participants commenting that they monitor referrals from social networking sites, as well as goal specific metrics such as revenue, sales and leads.

Number of Retweets (7), Number of likes' (5), Ratings (2), Number of Video Plays (2) and Number of Unique Users (2) were among the other metrics that participants said their organization used to measure social media success.

The Complete Social Media Strategy & Monitoring Report

The full 31 page report may be purchased here: http://store.onlinecommunityresearch.com/somestmo.html and includes detailed information, analysis and charts on:

• Job title and industry
• Online community destination
• Social media guidelines
• Social media sites
• Paid services and tools
• Comments and advice from survey respondents

Share/Bookmark

Apple announced on Wednesday a cornucopia of new hardware and software: sleek iPods, a brand new Internet-enabled video streaming device and new versions of its iOS software and iTunes 10. However, the most impressive to me by far was Ping, the music-only social network that Apple is opening up its 160 million existing iTunes users.

No, I'm not blown away by the 160 million number. What I'm impressed by is the thinking behind Ping.

Ping may function like a cross between Facebook and Twitter for iTunes by allowing you to follow celebrities, create social cliques and get artist updates via an activity stream. I think it could have tremendous impact on social sharing and commerce.

From a content perspective, there are three different types of media we love to talk about: movies we see, music we listen to and books we are reading. These are accepted social norms. In fact, many relationships are made on the basis of collective love of a movie and many friendships have started with mixed tapes.

It makes perfect sense for a music service to be social. I'm not alone: The popularity YouTube, the fast-growing MOG and the sadly defunct iLike and Imeem show that people gravitate towards music as a common, collective experience. A recommendation from friends on Last.fm often resulted in me buying many-a-few music tracks. My friends who listened to Thievery Corporation turned me on to The Broadway Project and Chris Joss, which I ended up buying on the iTunes store or via Amazon's MP3 store.

This click-and-go-somewhere-to-download model of affiliate links can never match a unified experience. Amazon, for example, encourages bloggers and others to link to things they like and then get a piece of the action. This separates social from commerce and treats them as two discrete activities. On the post-Facebook Internet, I don't think anyone can afford to keep these two actions distinct.

Ping, from what little I saw during Steve Jobs' demo, allows a similar level of social interaction. It can tell me who my friends think are cool and the top 10 favorites of people in my social graph. Some of my friends are famous deejays. Others just have eclectic musical tastes. They can collectively sift through over 10 million songs and help with the discovery of music. This social-powered discovery is part of the biggest theme of our times: serendipity. About two years ago, when I wrote about serendipity, I said:

The problem is that there's too much data coming online too quickly, and the traditional method of search that involves first finding and then consuming the information is not going to work for much longer. There just won't be enough time for us to do that and still have a life. It's a problem, and therefore solving it is an opportunity a very big opportunity.

My belief has only been affirmed by growth in the amount of data available. With 12 million songs and 250,000 apps, the best way for Apple to enhance the iTunes store aka its shopping experience is through the use of social. Back in 2007, I argued that social networking was merely a feature that had to be embedded into applications to enhance their value. Apple has done a great job of that, but it's also gone one step further, not only by adding a social networking layer to iTunes, but by meshing it with its commerce engine, the iTunes Store. And it's made this experience available on both the desktop and its devices.

Apple received much of this social capability with the acquisition of Lala, an online music service, which as a standalone company used sharing of social objects to drive folks towards paid music downloads. Now Apple is only closing the loop by further sharing what users bought. I wouldn't be least bit surprised if sales of music on the iTunes store rocket upwards, thanks to social discovery.

Amazon, which