content that Hearst puts onto Pinterest can resurface months later when people continue to discover it. In contrast, posts on Facebook and Twitter tweets produce “a lot of initial interaction” before fading… in December, Hearst got more online traffic through Pinterest than Facebook and Twitter combined. Overall, 3% to 5% of traffic to Hearst’s various brands was through Pinterest that month, with about 1.5% from Facebook and 1.5% from Twitter
PAGE 109: A significant number of users still reported creating a web page in 2011 and the leading six countries saw gains between 2007 and 2011. In the majority of countries however, the number of users reporting they had created a web page decreased (Figure 3.10). This fall in website creation activity is linked to the rise in use of weblogs (or “blogs”) and social media such as Twitter
PAGE 111: Nearly 50% of OECD Internet users are active social network users
“It’s Turkey’s major contribution to the Internet,” says professor Ozgür Uçkan of Istanbul Bigli University, of the site ironically called Ekşi Sözlük, the “Sour Dictionary.”
The site has 36,000 authors, and an equal number of users who hope to become authors. It contains more than 10 million entries, gathered into more than 2.5 million topics, and it attracts 7.5 million unique visitors a month, out of a total Turkish Internet population of a little over 30 million. It’s an enormous success that few outside Turkey have heard of.
This is even more surprising, when you consider that the site just celebrated its thirteenth anniversary February 15th.
over 400,000,000 people have upgraded to Google+… just crossed 100,000,000 monthly active users on Google+
Online Life in Pictures | Pew Internet & American Life Project
% US online adults using different social media:
66% Facebook
20% Linked In
16% Twitter
12% Instagram …. 27% among those aged 18-29
12% Pinterest …. 19% among women
5% Tumblr
It is wrong to say “IRL” to mean offline: Facebook is real life.
Facebook doesn’t curtail the offline but depends on it. … The photos posted, the opinions expressed, the check-ins that fill our streams are often anchored by what happens when disconnected and logged-off. The Web has everything to do with reality; it comprises real people with real bodies, histories, and politics.
our immense self-satisfaction in disconnection is new. How proud of ourselves we are for fighting against the long reach of mobile and social technologies! One of our new hobbies is patting ourselves on the back by demonstrating how much we don’t go on Facebook…
What a ridiculous state of affairs this is. To obsess over the offline and deny all the ways we routinely remain disconnected is to fetishize this disconnection. … For many, maintaining the fiction of the collective loss of the offline for everyone else is merely an attempt to construct their own personal time-outs as more special, as allowing them to rise above those social forces of distraction that have ensnared the masses. “I am real. I am the thoughtful human. You are the automaton.”
The IRL Fetish – The New Inquiry
The power of “social” is not just a matter of the time we’re spending checking apps, nor is it the data that for-profit media companies are gathering; it’s also that the logic of the sites has burrowed far into our consciousness. Smartphones and their symbiotic social media give us a surfeit of options to tell the truth about who we are and what we are doing, and an audience
Google quietly made a massively important announcement about a new feature called Google+ History, which gives apps an API to auto-share content to a private holding tank on your G+ profile, which you can then choose to share from
Alexis Madrigal, described Twitter as ‘a kind of human recommendation engine in which I am the algorithm’. It’s one of the most suggestive explanations I’ve found yet as to why social media have so drastically and rapidly reshaped the dynamics of the internet. They answer to a particular need that algorithms alone cannot serve: the opportunity to speak, and listen to others, from that unique position of authority each one of us occupies
Sixteen months ago we received the same number of monthly referrals from search as social. Now 40% of traffic comes from social media,” Scott Havens, senior vice president of finance and digital operations at The Atlantic Media Company, said… “Truly [our writers] are not really thinking about SEO anymore. Now it’s about how we can spin a story so that it goes viral.
(Real Simple magazine) gets twice as much referral traffic from Pinterest than from Facebook and Twitter combined, and only Google refers more
Participation is now the rule rather than the exception: 77% of the UK online population is now active in some way.
This has been driven by the rise of ‘easy participation’: activities which may have once required great effort but now are relatively easy, expected and every day. 60% of the UK online population now participates in this way, from sharing photos to starting a discussion.
Better Homes & Gardens has 25,000 followers on Pinterest, compared to 21,000 on Twitter
