by Paul Joseph
December 23, 2011
Featured
Google+, Google’s new social project is the center of a lot of speculation since it launched. Originally described as a Facebook killer but now Internet prophets are spelling its doom. The number of people that the network is attracting is being studied very carefully by Industry specialists. ComScore, a third-party analytics company, has released an estimation of what the traffic might be like. According to ComScore, Google+ has grown 65 million people in October to 67 million people in November. This data is totally based on the traffic that is hitting plus.google.com . That is not a big rise but this is just a month we are talking about and getting 3 million people in a month is not such a small deal. Some say that Google+ is a ghost town but that does not explain the increase in the number of people visiting the site. Here is a chart comparing Google+ data to other prominent social networks for the month of November. Worldwide Total Unique Visitor (Total Internet Users) ( 1, 438, 877) Facebook.com 792, 999 Twitter.com 167, 903 LinkedIn.com 94, 823 Google Plus 66, 756 Myspace 61, 037 The interesting thing about Google+ is that there are not many people out there but those who are on it are not leaving and increasing number of people are using it every month. No doubt, that the rise for November can be partly explained by the fact that Google has nicely integrated Google+ with Android . Integration with other Google services is slowly taking place in an incremental manner. So in essence, Google+ is not much of a social network but can be thought of as a unifying social layer. People are discovering the features that Google+ has introduced such as post editing, Mobile app synchronisation, Instant upload of photos and hangouts. The more people use Google services, the more it is easy for you to share something via Google+. We can compare Google+ with the big-shots like Facebook and Twitter all we want but we cannot pass a definitive judgement against the newest social network on the block. In fact, it is an unfair comparison. Facebook took seven years to become the behemoth that it is and Twitter also took almost the same time to build its numbers. Google+ has just been around for roughly 6 months and already has 65 million users. I think that slow and steady is the way to go and that is exactly what the social network requires so that users can gradually transition to it. The same happened in India with Orkut. Before Facebook, Orkut was the de facto social network for everyone and then Facebook came along and introduced us to new concepts like a news-feed, apps, sharing etc. This started the migration of people from Orkut to Facebook. In my opinion, a similar thing is happening right now. Facebook may have the numbers but it will have to fight hard against stagnation. Do you think Google+ will make it? Tell us. Looking For A Social Media Agency?? – Contact WATConsult – India’s Leading Social Media Agency Related Posts Team Anna Campaign Scores The Top Place On Twitter’s Trendlist Will Google+ Act As A Facebook Killer? Recap 2010 : Social Networking WATBlog Picks: International Websites to Watch Out For in 2008 Facebook, Twitter Overshadow Blogs: But Can Blogs Be Replaced Altogether?
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by Paul Joseph
December 21, 2011
Featured
India is the fastest growing market for mobile devices and poised to become the largest market. Internet penetration is also increasing rapidly and the number of people accessing internet on their phones is at an all time high. Smartphone prices are dropping and that promises to make mobile internet more lucrative in the days to come. We have earlier spoken a lot about mobile advertising and how a data usage on phone is fast outstripping the traditional usages, like calling and SMS . Now we will look at what ‘we the people’ actually do when we are connected to the internet through our phones. Opera Software , the company behind the popular Opera Mini mobile web browser, conducts an annual survey to determine the most visited and popular websites which people visit from the mobile web browser. As was expected search and social networking were two top verticals. User-generated content is another vertical which gained a lot of momentum in 2011. Wikipedia, Spaces and Blogger (the blogging platform owned by Google) experienced significant gains during the year. The top three sites, in terms of ‘number of unique users’, during 2011 were Google , Facebook and YouTube . As mentioned earlier, Blogger or blogspot.com gained the maximum number of position in the 2011 list to 12 th position, up seven places. Wikipedia gained four places and came up to 7 th position. Yahoo! and Twitter completed the top ten in the 9 th and 10 th positions respectively. More than 1 million Indians use the Opera Mini browser to access internet on their phones, which puts India among the top two countries in terms of user base. The report reveals that 144.6 million people used Opera Mini in November 2011 (worldwide), which is 3.3% higher than the October 2011 figure. Over 88.5 billion pages were viewed by users in November 2011, which is almost double that of November 2010. For the second year running Latin America has been the fastest growing region, in terms of number of Opera Mini users. There was a 247% increase in user base in Latin America over the past year. Africa was second with a 145% increase and South Asia third with a 138% growth. One thing to be kept in mind while reading this report is that the Opera Mini browser is not used by iPhone and Android users. So the overall picture might be a different. Russian social networks will not feature in the top ten, that much is for sure. Which sites do you access on your phone? Besides searching and social networking, what other functions does mobile internet serve for you? Looking For A Social Media Agency?? – Contact WATConsult – India’s Leading Social Media Agency Related Posts Yahoo and MSN talk about Mobiles and Social Networking! How India Searched In 2011! Mobile Internet, E-commerce To Lead The Race In The Country Says Google India Bidding War For Mobile Ads By AdIQuity Facebook Has The Biggest Slice Of The Online Display Ads Pie
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