PostRanger.com

Social networks gain in race for growth

Richard McManus, founder and editor of Read/Write Web, has these interesting observations on the rise of social networks inspired by analysis at Compete.

The supposition? The social networks are gaining on the big web portals (Google, Yahoo)

Among the key findings, according to MacManus:

1. In June [2006], 2 out of every 3 people online visited a social networking site

2. Since January 2004, the number of people visiting or taking part in one of the top online social networks has grown by over 109%

3. Social networking sites are now close to eclipsing traffic to the giants - Google and Yahoo

Commenters rightly carp about the apples and oranges approach of comparing 10 top social networks, MySpace through TypePad, even to portal giants like Google and Yahoo!

They also rightly observed that the portals themselves were gaining or at least holding their own in traffic.

I’m not sure I’m ready to believe that all of the functions of the major portals can be replaced by emerging social networks of which PostRanger is only the latest.

Certainly, the search engines and related alerts are still valuable commodities. But even the mighty Google may be displaced in the face of link referrals passed person to person through the networks.

For example, in our own case traffic can be driven to websites based on guest blogger links either back to their own site or to others they admire.

Would you like to contribute an article of your own to this or another stream on PostRanger? Just e-mail us for a free guest author invitation.

Photo Credit: Michelle Kwajafa, MorgueFile

12 key benefits of social networks

As regular visitors are now aware, for two months we have been actively working to build PostRanger.com, what we hope will be the premier multi-topic social blogging community of the 21^st century.

But what makes social networks important beyond the obvious entertainment and self-expression outlet they provide to participants?

In an analysis largely confined to business and large organization models, Howard Rheingold and Lisa Kimball of Howard Rheingold Associates give us some answers which can easily be expanded by thinking beyond the limits of a large corporate structure:

On a global or business scale, effective social networks can:

1. Create an early warning system.
2. Make sure knowledge gets to people who can act on it in time.
3. Connect people and build relationships across boundaries of geography or discipline.
4. Provide an ongoing context for knowledge exchange that can be far more effective than memoranda.
5. Attune everyone in the organization to each other's needs – more people will know who knows who knows what, and will know it faster.
6. Multiply intellectual capital by the power of social capital, reducing social friction and encouraging social cohesion.
7. Create an ongoing, shared social space for people who are geographically dispersed.
8. Amplify innovation – when groups get turned on by what they can do online, they go beyond problem-solving and start inventing together.
9. Create a community memory for group deliberation and brainstorming that stimulates the capture of ideas and facilitates finding information when it is needed.
10. Improve the way individuals think collectively – moving from knowledge-sharing to collective knowing.
11. Turn training into a continuous process, not divorced from normal business processes.
12. Attract and retain the best employees by providing access to social capital that is only available within the organization.

For more on Rheingold and Kimball’s observations see this link.

Photo Credit: Daniel T. Yara, MorgueFile

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