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Can social networks change the world? Yes, they can, in the words of Barack Obama’s election campaign. That campaign itself provided evidence that the tools of “Web 2.0″ - the community-driven web - can really make a difference, delegates at the Terra future conference in London heard this week.

Last September, tech guru Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media, challenged the Web 2.0 community to come up with something more productive than time-wasting Facebook applications - singling out “Superpoke”, which invites users to interact with their friends by throwing imaginary sheep at each other (among other things), for particular derision.

At this week’s conference, UK-based social media consultant Chris Thorpe pointed out that just a month after O’Reilly’s clarion call, the Obama election campaign launched the Obama ‘08 iPhone application. The application organised and prioritised contacts in key battleground states, “making it easy [for campaigners] to reach out and make an impact quickly”.

The application also showed how the user’s call statistics compared with the national average. As CNET said: “Those statistics are the kind that can motivate people - they can feel like they’re part of something bigger.”

Thorpe told the conference about a number of other networking sites that might satisfy O’Reilly’s challenge. Accesscity, for example, is a social networking site through which a community of Londoners is helping to identify the simplest routes across the city for those with mobility issues - be it pushing a baby buggy to carrying heavy bags.
‘Karma points’

At the other end of the spectrum, a social network called We20 will help people around the world to meet up in 20-strong groups to share thoughts on the leading economic issues of the day.

The site is supposed to provide a counterpoint to the G-20 in April, when finance ministers and central bank governors from the world’s leading economies will meet in London. We20 aims to draw solutions from the community discussion, rather than relying on politicians to lead the way - although it’s not clear what, if anything, it will achieve.

But Glen Lyons, professor of transport and society at the University of the West of England in Bristol, UK, told the conference about a more established social network that is already beginning to deliver on its aims. Zimride is a carpool scheme powered by Google maps, a social network and, according to the Zimride site, a “ride-matching algorithm”. Since its inception in 2007, Zimride claims to have enabled some 300,000 users worldwide to carpool who might otherwise never have met.

Thorpe thinks social media applications like this one might be the way of the future. Facebook users might one day compete to see who can gain the most “global karma points”, he says - working for the greater good, rather than for their own amusement.

More than half of teens who use the social networking site MySpace have posted information about sexual behavior, substance abuse or violence, new research shows. New sites like www.theadultworld.com even allow nude pictures for uses over 18.

The good news, according to a second study from the same research group, is that a simple intervention — in this case, an-e-mail from a physician — made some of the teens change their risky behaviors.

“I was surprised, at least to some extent, at how clearly teens were discussing behaviors that we struggle to get out of them,” said Dr. Megan Moreno, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Once we started getting the findings, we wondered, why are they doing this?” Moreno said. “Do they not get it? And, if they don’t understand that this is public, can we send them a cautionary message to let them know just how public their information really is?” Moreno was working at the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s Research Institute at the time the studies were done.

“We need to devise ways to teach teens and their parents to use the Internet responsibly,” study senior author Dr. Dimitri Christakis, director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at Seattle Children’s Research Institute, said in a statement.

Results from the two studies appear in the January issue of the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine.

More than 90 percent of teens in the United States have access to the Internet, according to background information from the studies. About half of all teens who use the Internet also use social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook. MySpace boasts more than 200 million profiles, according to the studies, and about one-quarter of those belong to teens under 18.

Moreno and her colleagues randomly selected 500 MySpace profiles from people who reported their age as 18. They collected the information during the summer of 2007.

They found that 54 percent of the profiles contained information on risky behaviors, with 24 percent referencing sexual behaviors, 41 percent referring to substance abuse and 14 percent posting violent information.

Factors associated with a decreased risk of posting risky behaviors included displaying religious involvement or involvement with sports or hobbies.

For the second study, the researchers randomly selected 190 profiles of people between 18 and 20 who displayed risky behaviors, such as sexual information. Half were sent an e-mail from a physician that pointed out that the physician had noticed risky behavior on their profile and suggested changing the displayed information. The e-mail message also provided information on where to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases.

Almost 14 percent of those who got the e-mail deleted references to sexual behavior, compared with 5 percent of the others.

“This was a creative and unique way to reach kids,” said Kimberly Mitchell, the author of an accompanying editorial in the same issue of the journal and a research professor at the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.

Mitchell advised parents not to try to forbid their children from using these sites altogether. “It’s important for parents to understand how important these social networking sites are to kids,” she said. “They’re here to stay, and they’re not all evil. There can be some really positive aspects to these sites. But adolescents aren’t necessarily thinking 10 years ahead, when employers or college administrators may look at these sites. Teens live in the here and now, so parents need to talk to kids about the longer-term impacts and help them think through some of the repercussions.”

Moreno suggested that parents ask teens to show them their MySpace or Facebook pages. “Teens will definitely balk, but they balk at lots of things, like curfews,” she said. “Some parents feel it’s a violation of privacy, like reading a diary, but it’s out there, it’s public.”

Parents should use this information as a conversation starter, Moreno suggested.

social media rank

What were the top social media sites of 2008? ComScore came out with its worldwide traffic stats for November a few days ago (so these don’t include December). They are a mix of social networks and blogging platforms. Blogger, the orange line in the chart above, still rules the roost with an estimated 222 million unique worldwide visitors in November (up 44 percent from November, 2007). Facebook, the blue line, is on pace to pass it soon with 200 million unique visitors (up 116 percent). (Note, though, that this is more than the 140 million active users Facebook itself reports—go figure). MySpace is pretty steady at 126 million uniques. Wordpress is a close fourth and gaining with 114 million (up 68 percent). And Windows Live Spaces is down 22 percent to 87 million uniques.

ComScore keeps a list of what it calls “social networking” sites, but these include blogging platforms and other social media sites as well. While the audience for blogs is still showing healthy growth overall, Facebook stands out as the social gorilla taking share from not only other social networks but blogs and other social media as well.

Below are the top 20 sites on comScore’s social networking list. It is really more of a social media site list, which is what I’m renaming it for this post. It is not definitive, but it gives a good lay of the land. (Here is a similar ranking from 2007). Note on this list the stubborn persistence of Yahoo’s Geocities at No. 6, the rise of Yahoo’s Flickr at No. 7, Six Apart at No. 10, and the presences of Chinese sites like Baidu Space and 56.com. The real surprise, though, is document-sharing site Scribd at No. 16, with nearly 24 million worldwide uniques.

Top Social Media Sites (ranked by unique worldwide visitors November, 2008; comScore)

1. Blogger (222 million)
2. Facebook (200 million)
3. MySpace (126 million)
4. Wordpress (114 million)
5. Windows Live Spaces (87 million)
6. Yahoo Geocities (69 million)
7. Flickr (64 million)
8. hi5 (58 million)
9. Orkut (46 million)
10. Six Apart (46 million)
11. Baidu Space (40 million)
12. Friendster (31 million)
13. 56.com (29 million)
14. Webs.com (24 million)
15. Bebo (24 million)
16. Scribd (23 million)
17. Lycos Tripod (23 million)
18. Tagged (22 million)
19. imeem (22 million)
20. Netlog (21 million)

Here’s a screenshot of the actual data (as you can see, I rounded above):

social networks bigger then porn

It’s an old joke among web geeks that “the internet is for porn”. OK, so it was invented by the department of defence for the sake of communications, but if there’s one industry that can commodify a resource faster than the oil industry can waste it, it’s porn. It makes sense, too, since sex is both a basic animal (and human) instinct and also something we frown on and obsess over to the extent that it’s frightening. When the internet was young and users were still basically anonymous, there was no better way to indulge in a guilty pleasure than from behind the veil of your monitor.

But the internet is maturing, or at least its users seem to be. Porn sites have now been overtaken in popularity by social networking sites like TheAdultWorld, MySpace, Friendster and Facebook. At first blush, this seems like a distinction without a difference. After all, the voyeuristic aspect of being able to peek into other people’s personal lives is part of the attraction of social networking sites. But the sites have evolved beyond poorly designed collections of profile pages where teenagers and college students trade photos and gossip. At times, these sites are little more than sophisticated time-wasting devices, but as communities of friends and professional contacts integrate these new resources, the sites become more functional.

It seems we’re finally starting to use the internet for its intended purpose: communication and information sharing. If you think of the internet as a model for the collective human brain, it’s encouraging to know that slightly more than half of it is occupied by subjects other than sex, and that we are, in fact, still quite interested in forming meaningful connections to one another. Yep, that was the point all along, but at least initially, it was much easier to simply put smutty pictures on a website than facilitate real human interaction.

That’s not to say we’ve reached the pinnacle of communication. We still fail to communicate with the people next to us every day. Devices like mobile phones, PDAs and do-it-all units like the iPhone have tethered us to our bosses, co-workers and friends, but emails and text messages are no substitute for face-to-face contact.

There’s something similarly antisocial about social networking sites. An internet connection does not a relationship make. Part of the attraction of sites like Facebok is that we can be on friendly terms with people we don’t particularly care to spend much time with. Even with good friends, though, being able to walk away from the keyboard can sometimes be a lifesaver. Maintaining close personal friendships can be exhausting. That long conversation about your friend’s breakup of the century is much less of an imposition when you can take a break, grab a cup of coffee and mutter to yourself about how she’s better off without that loser anyway.

Facebook and other networking sites may be popular, not because of their potential as avenues for oversharing, but because they have struck upon ways to allow us to stay in touch while minimising the awkwardness of those drawn-out phone calls. All too often, we don’t say what we mean, we don’t choose the right words and we don’t listen and make a sincere effort to understand each other. Unfortunately, the sincerity and compassion required for real communication isn’t part of the programming. That’s something we still have to develop ourselves.

social networking trends

There’s so much buzz about social networks of the online kind — MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn. But what about old fashioned human-to-human, face-to-face “social networks,” and how we use them in the physical world, especially in the workplace? I just read some stats in a new survey that reveals that employees of large companies (with 1,000+ on staff) rely on their self-generated social networks of co-workers for advice, rather than turn to their bosses and superiors.

The survey calls the web of employees’ self-made connections within a company the “informal organization,” but I’d argue that these are social networks, too. It would be great to discover how people are using internal or external social networking software to leverage these contacts and relationships within a corporation. Any anecdotes? Do write in. More on the Katzenbach survey after the jump.

The survey, released on July 31, polled 510 employees at large companies via telephone, was conducted by Katzenbach Partners, a management consulting firm founded by a former McKinsey director and the co-founders of the McKinsey Change Center. (Katzenbach’s client list includes Pfizer and Aetna). Some nuggets:

- 65% said they rely on co-workers rather than managers to solve problems

- 90% say they have someone in their informal network at the office whom they turn to for advice on completing a project or task. 52% of this majority say they turn to a co-worker rather than a boss (in comparison, 45% turn to a supervisor)

-Only 8% think the CEO or president has the best ideas. And even fewer — 7% — believe senior managers have them. But 10% believe middle managers’ ideas trump those of their superiors. And 15% of those polled think lower-level managers and employees have the top ideas. (Note: Of course it would be interesting to know if the majority of survey participants were, say, lower-level managers.)