Note: Even though this article is only four months old (not including writing a prep time) the Mr. Middleton notes that Facebook has over 350 million active users. As we know, that number passed 500 million last week.
This article is loaded with stats and projections.
So what happens when social networks go mobile? Some very big numbers indeed, according to industry analyst Informa Telecoms & Media. The research house is bullish on the subject, believing that the importance of mobile social networking will escalate exponentially over the next five years, creating a much larger industry. Informa says there is sufficient diversity within the social network arena that, in a high growth scenario, nearly 25 per cent of total mobile subscribers worldwide will be attracted to and participating in mobile social networking by 2013.
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Mobile social networking encompasses a diverse portfolio of technologies and services, ranging from simple chat applications to multimedia-rich environments and content generating and sharing communities which persist after the user logs off. It is, more so than anything that has gone before, a reflection of the breadth of both ecosystem participants and users.
But at the same time, the boundaries of this industry are getting more difficult to define systematically and accurately. Social networking is creeping into and changing the nature of many other non-community based services, making precise service category definitions much more difficult to reach. Just as the differences between PC-centric and mobile-centric are eroding, it is also getting more difficult to cleanly distinguish a mobile social networking service with value added content from a service that has social networking features added in order to increase the stickiness to end users.
by Scott Counts (Microsoft), Karen Fisher (U. of Washington)
in Proceedings of the 41st Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2008), 2008
From the Abstract:
Information grounds are places where people exchange information. Here we examine use of a mobile device-based social networking service as an information ground. The service allows users to form groups and send text and photo messages to those groups. We present usage and questionnaire data from 19 people who shared a primary group in this system and who used the system for 16 months on average. Results highlight the types and usefulness of information shared, the role of information shared in everyday life, the way the system fits into participants' communication and social "ecosystem", and the ways in which the system functions as an information ground. Usage analyses describe message sending frequency and system participation levels in relation to other factors, such as length of time in the system. Findings are discussed in the context of the seven propositions of the information grounds framework.
NOTE: Do not confuse the 2008 paper linked above with a 2010 published in the April, 2010 issue of Library and Information Science Research by the same authors. The titles are similar.
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
