Twitter’s Traffic Climbs to Record Levels

Twitter is flirting with the top 10 sites in the world based on Alexa’s traffic ranking system. Perhaps most people don’t realize Twitter is still putting on record growth because the Fail Whale hasn’t been making many appearances lately.

The novelty of Twitter may have worn off quickly for the original generation of twitter users, but the masses are finally discovering how to use twitter and overall activity is higher than ever for every metric.

Twitter traffic rated by Quantcast over the past 12 months:

Simplified mobile applications, integration into popular sites, and real time search result placements in Google have dramatically boosted exposure for the millions of Tweets posted daily.

How I get down on Twitter:

TweetDeck – hopefully you’ve already tried this yourself. Easily manage multiple accounts on multiple social networks, auto-url shortening with stats integration from bit.ly, and tons of custom layout options.

Web based clients:

Hoot Suite – great aggregator options allow you to manage multiple accounts with ease. Follow only the topics that you’re interested in with ease. The best feature for me here is scheduled Tweets on multiple accounts.

TwitterFall – posts fall onto your screen for whatever topics you choose. Uses different color backgrounds for tweets from different searches you’ve setup . It’s very hand to follow breaking events or trends.

Find me on twitter @jaytoddmartin

The 80/20 Rule for Effective Social Networking

Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and other social networks that provide or feature status updates from users have taken the internet by storm over the past several years.

MySpace helped lead the Web 2.0 revolution before it crashed and burned. Now Facebook seems like it could be headed down the same path.

Originally, the first huge wave of Facebook users embraced the network mainly because of the value add factor. It was possible to be more aware of your competitors, get useful tips from people you trusted, and discover new and emerging trends by monitoring the socialsphere. In some ways, we were building Web 2.0 together.

Recently Facebook is a relaxing area where the last thing they think about is business or growing their personal network. I get the feeling most people aren’t measuring the ROI of status messages left by their friends, and basically you end up coming out of the whole situation knowing what everyone is drinking, eating, and watching on TV. This data is already available from a variety of sources so I don’t really need to get it from Facebook.

So what is the 80/20 Rule of Social Networking?
One of my associates that introduced me to Facebook in 2008 explained the value add factor – simply put, 80% of your posts need to add value to your readers, while at most 20% can be about your breakfast or your plans for the afternoon. If you violate the 80/20 rule you will not gain followers who value their time.

Rarely do people calculate the real cost required for others to read their updates. These are people I unfollow. There are many friends I have in the real world that I enjoy to hang out with during non work hours, but that I don’t necessary want to read updates from everyday of the week, all year long. This isn’t because I value their friendship less, I just don’t have the capacity to read what 45 people had for lunch, what they are planning to do that evening, or what type of wine they just opened.

With over 25,000 friends, subscriptions, and connections between Youtube, Tumblr, LinkedIN, Facebook, and Twitter, the value of the information I receive has been in a steep decline. Perhaps if I was spamming commercial products this would be a more ideal setup, but I’m simply there to consume and analyze information. This is 7 times more people than live in my hometown!

How to Unfriend your Grandma on Facebook
The recent South Park espisode featuring Facebook spelled out clearly what many of us have been thinking for the past 6 months about Facebook. For the past several weeks I’ve typically unfollowed/unfriended 25-30 people per day acrossed all networks I participate in to help keep the noise level down. Sometimes, these accounts I unfollow may be people I value relationships with in Real Life, and their feelings get hurt, or they get mad, or just don’t understand how I could unfriend them.

The problem is growing larger now that most people who primary used Facebook for business in the past are following their parents, siblings, mate’s friends, people from the bar, etc. The reason is simple – how the hell are you supposed to reject friend requests from blood relatives and people you really value without them feeling hurt in some way?

For the most part, I’ve been inactive on my personal Facebook account for the past 6 months because it just costs to much to use timewise. I’m not the only one. Professional networks such as LinkedIn are experiencing record traffic levels as Facebook’s traffic starts to level off after giant gains recently. Business people may seek more niche driven networks to increase ROI on time.

If you unfollow/unfriend me because this message cost $40.00 of your time to read and wasn’t helpful I understand. That’s how the world should work.

AOL Ready to Dump Bebo

Just 2 years after AOL paid an estimated $850 million for Bebo.com, the company says it’s ready to sell or shut the service down.

BEBO, largely known as a spamorama to anyone who ever used it, seems to have gone into a sharp downward spiral over the past 6 months.

Too many email notifications, lack of captcha protection for key features, and an overall complicated layout may have been a few of the largest coffin nails for the social network. Traffic has dropped more than 50% in the past 180 days.

The news of AOL’s desire to shed Bebo comes only 6 months after Yahoo closed down it’s free GeoCities Service (Yahoo paid $3.6 billion for Geocities in Jan 99)

YouTube Trades Star Ratings for Likes and Dislikes

YouTube has traded in the 5 star rating system for a Like/Dislike system. Off the bat, it seems to devalue search results (no longer can see the rating of each video) by only indicating which videos are most liked and not displaying any ratings information for the other 90% of videos on the page.

YouTube has been busy changing their site and user experience every week for the past month. Half the time i’m wondering if my browser is misfiring. Did they test all these layout changes with certain users before making them public so quickly?

They are changing the user experience so fast it seems like it would be impossible to measure the effects of each new variant to optimize and learn from each change.

Here is what the new Like/Dislike display looks like for a video AFTER you vote:

I’m not sure if it’s just the “Friend this user / Subscribe to user” mystery that still annoys me or if YouTube is continuing to do things that just don’t make much sense? I guess they are damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

With nearly a $1.5millon/day shortfall on revenue, a horrible social networking experience, and basically no evolution for 3 years; I think somehow I have to count these recent blunders as progress.

Maybe Google moved the old YouTube crew over to Google Buzz, always keeping the same people on projects that are years late to market and years behind.

Blogger.com Traffic Explodes, Media Looks Foolish

Blogger, a popular blogging network, is blowing up it’s overall reach. Look at the ramp they have seen in the start of 2010

Near the end of 2009, many mainstream media outlets were reporting blogging was becoming less popular..blah blah blah. I think they understand bloggers are putting them out of business and a propaganda campaign was their only weapon. Turns out they were way off base. A month later, most blogging networks are at or hitting new traffic peaks.

Is it a coincidence ABC News laid off 25% of it’s editorial staff a month after Blogger and other blogging networks posted these monster gains ?

You can just feel the momentum continuing to flow away from cable news and into the blogosphere.

Are bloggers cashing in? Mostly not. It’s rare to be a good blogger, CEO, advertising account rep, and billing staff all in one person. Bloggers don’t need cash coming in right now to keep up their work ethics, while ABC news does.

The illusive pot of gold jackpot at the end of Web 2.0 rainbow should keep bloggers going for at least a few more years. Expect more job cuts at ABC.