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.
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