| |
 |
| Photo credit: © AFP/POST TODAY |
Historically, it used to be enough to have an online
presence on the Internet for the one-way broadcasting
and dissemination of information. Today, social
networks such as Facebook and Twitter are driving
new forms of social interaction, dialogue, exchange
and collaboration. Social networking sites (referred
to more broadly as social media) enable users to
swap ideas, to post updates and comments, or
to participate in activities and events, while sharing
their wider interests. From general chit-chat to
propagating breaking news, from scheduling a date
to following election results or coordinating disaster
response, from gentle humour to serious research,
social networks are now used for a host of different
reasons by various user communities.
Social networking services are not just bringing
Internet users into fast-flowing online conversations
— social media are helping people to follow breaking
news, keep up with friends or colleagues, contribute
to online debates or learn from others. They are
transforming online user behaviour in terms of users’
initial entry point, search, browsing and purchasing
behaviour. Some experts suggest that social media
will become the Internet’s new search function — predicting that people will spend less time navigating
the Internet independently and instead search for
information or make decisions based on “word-of-mouth”
recommendations from their friends, the so-called
“friend-casting”. In the process, social media
are changing users’ expectations of privacy, acceptable
online behaviour and etiquette — fast.
Morgan Stanley estimates that there were about
830 million “unique” users of social networks worldwide
at the end of 2009. Based on a total Internet
user population of 1.7 billion at the end of 2009,
according to ITU’s World Telecommunication/ICT
Development Report 2010, this suggests that around
half of all Internet users could currently be using social
media applications. Current estimates of the number
of social media users vary significantly, partly due to
difficulties defining and categorizing sites and applications
as “social networks”, but also due to margins
of error in estimating the number of “unique” users
(since users of one social network are more likely to
use several other social networking services as well).
Many social network users access these services
over their mobile phones. According to ITU’s report
Measuring the Information Society 2010, mobile
broadband subscriptions reached an estimated
640 million at the end of 2009, driven by growing
demand for smartphones, new applications and social
networking services, and are set to exceed 1 billion
this year. The market research firm eMarketer
projects that just over 600 million people will use
their phones to tap into social networks by 2013,
compared with 140 million in 2009. Facebook passed
the historic milestone of 500 million users on 21 July
2010 — if Facebook were a country, it would be the
third most populous nation in the world after China
and India.
Figure 1 shows how many users are drawn to
some popular social networks in early 2010. Twitter
enables its members to post or send short (140-character)
messages called “tweets”, whereby users can
broadcast what they are doing or thinking to the
world, to closed “list” groups or to other individual
Twitterers. Its original question (“What are you doing?”)
has been reinterpreted as: “What do you
find interesting or funny?”, “What do you think?”
or “Please help spread the word!” (or sometimes all
three together). MySpace concentrates on music and
entertainment, while LinkedIn targets career-minded
professionals. Orkut, a service owned by Google, is
used mainly in India and Brazil, while in China, Qzone
is reportedly one of the largest social networking
sites with over 380 million registered accounts now.
Other community sites include Skyrock in France,
VKontakte in the Russian Federation, and Cyworld
in the Republic of Korea. There are also numerous
smaller social networks that appeal to specific interests,
such as ResearchGATE, which connects scientists
and researchers, or to languages or nationalities
(for example, the Polish Nasza-klasa.pl service with
11 million users or Tuenti in Spain, with 4.5 million
users).
Given that online content and traffic volumes are
increasingly interlinked with the pipes over which
they are carried, it is vital to understand the demands
that the evolution of social networks will make on
underlying information and communication technology
(ICT) infrastructure. First and foremost, social
media are resulting in a huge explosion in demand
for capacity in both fixed and wireless infrastructure.
Real-time connectivity is required, to ensure that status
updates can be accessed and distributed instantly
across networks. Geolocalization raises important
technical challenges in pinpointing, publishing and
disseminating users’ location in space as well as time,
as well as questions over personal security.
At the WSIS Forum in May 2010 in Geneva, co-organized
by ITU, the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
and the United Nations Conference on Trade and
Development (UNCTAD), a high-level debate on
“Social Networking” was held, which triggered lively
discussions on political and social implications of social
networking for knowledge societies. The debate, organized
jointly by UNESCO and ITU, brought together representatives
of government, legislators, policy-makers,
industry, civil society and users to exchange views on
the opportunities and threats of these tools for the
future (see Pioneering the use of social networks at WSIS Forum 2010).
Who are your friends?
In the information economy, Pete Cashmore, editor
of Mashable (a key information portal for social
media services), suggests that your friends may become
content curators for your consumption, filtering
information such as movies, books and television
shows and making recommendations for your leisure
time online. He cites Facebook’s Connect programme
as one early example of this. Facebook’s most recent
changes to personalize the web will see emoticons
and friends’ avatars popping up all over users’ browsing.
The content of sites can be tailored to readers’
preferences, as defined by the preferences of their
social networks.
There will be a move from current personalized
advertising (based on cookies and websites you have
browsed recently) to personalized web content, with
search results ranked according to your online profile,
preferred language, profession or interests, as well as
the preferences of your online social networks — the
web you see may be shaped by the web your friends
like. The risk? Far from being a leveller of content and
opening people’s eyes to the broader online world,
Internet users’ world-view may in fact be restricted
and constrained by “filter bubbles” whereby they link
with similar communities of like-minded individuals
sharing a similar outlook. Conversely, your activities
and preferences could in turn influence your friends’
surfing behaviour. Surfing online will no longer be a
question of browsing the same sites as everyone else
in a vast online library of resources — the sites you
see may be predetermined or preselected to suit your
tastes in advance.
The future social web may see users driving innovation
and development in new applications.
According to Forrester, a technology and market
research company, social networks could become
more powerful in building brands and relationships
than corporate websites and customer relationship
management systems. In what Forrester calls “the
era of social context”, sites will start to recognize
personal identities and social relationships to deliver
customized online experiences. One simple example
of such a customized online experience is Facebook
and LinkedIn’s ability to propose possible new friends
and contacts.
Internet traffic
The Internet transports roughly 10 billion gigabytes
of data a month — a figure that some observers
expect to quadruple by 2012. The market and
advertising research company Nielsen estimates that
the average time spent on social networks grew
from three hours in December 2008 to five and a half
hours in December 2009, based on a survey of social
media use in ten countries. Half of all mobile data use
in the United Kingdom is accounted for by Facebook,
so social media look set to continue driving future
growth in traffic, with video-streaming applications
(such as YouTube) expected to account for a large
proportion of that traffic.
Over the past seven years, Internet data traffic
has grown by a factor of 56, driven partly by people
uploading more data. On average, people uploaded
fifteen times more data in 2009 than they did just
three years previously. Cisco projects that global
mobile data traffic will grow by sixty-six times from
2008 to 2013, with video forecast to account for
around 64 per cent of all global mobile data traffic
by 2013 (Figure 2).
YouTube is a major contributor to the current explosion
in Internet traffic and demand for bandwidth.
Not only does it make available video and user-generated
content on demand, it also enables comments,
popularity ratings and easy sharing of sources
— all features of social networks. YouTube has also
introduced a system called Video ID, which checks
uploaded videos against a database of copyrighted
content to avoid copyright violations. Launched in
November 2005 and founded by three former PayPal
employees, YouTube is now owned by Google. In
May 2010, YouTube was serving more than two billion
videos a day. YouTube is one example of a social
networking service that could have major implications
for network infrastructure in terms of its
present and growing demand for bandwidth.
Facebook is estimated to account for as much as
25 per cent of all web traffic (taking into account
posted video). There are now over 60 million status
updates to Facebook daily and 260 billion page views
monthly. Some 100 million users access Facebook
over their mobile phones, accounting for a significant proportion of mobile web traffic. For example,
half of mobile web traffic in the United Kingdom is
for Facebook use.
In the United States, according to a survey conducted
in December 2009, Facebook usurped Google
as users’ favourite entry point to the Internet and
now directs a greater proportion of Internet traffic
(13 per cent) than eBay (at 7.6 per cent) and Google
(at 7 per cent). Also in the United States, Facebook
displaced Yahoo! as the leading publisher of display
advertisements in the first quarter of 2010 (Figure 3). Facebook traffic is expected to grow even
faster, with the planned release in October 2010 of
the movie entitled The Social Network, which tells
the story of the Facebook founders and how their
vision turned into a social networking phenomenon.
Meanwhile, Twitter traffic continues to grow
exponentially, with users sending over 50 million
tweets a day by February 2010. However, many
sources note that estimates of the number of tweets
and page views over Twitter may be understated, as
they may omit users accessing it through third-party
clients from their desktop or mobile devices.
Can the new Internet players make money?
Despite the rapid growth of many social networking
services, the central challenge remains — how
can these new Internet players generate cash? Some
social media networks are just beginning to make
money. Facebook is estimated to have turned over
roughly USD 1 billion in revenues in 2009 (Figure 4).
Other than Google and Amazon, however, the new
Internet players are still by and large waiting for the
billions to arrive.
Recent analysis carried out by the Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for
some of its member countries suggests that Internet
players are the only group among the top 250 ICT
firms to have succeeded in significantly increasing
their revenues relative to the year 2000. However,
the cash flows of Internet players may have been
small in 2000, and Google’s growing revenue has a
disproportionate effect on the results — Google is
still ranked as the number one site on the web (according
to the page ranking service Alexa), although
Facebook is catching up fast.
One factor long-argued to work in favour of the
new Internet players is the current size and future
growth potential of some social networks. These networks
do not need to make large amounts of money
out of any individual user — just a small margin on
some — or better still, all users. This is the approach
that eBay has adopted in charging small commissions
on online transactions, and also Google’s approach
in deriving revenue from click-throughs.
Compelling content is vitally important. But the
overriding difficulty lies in predicting what consumers
are interested in at any time and channelling traffic
towards promising content. Here, Google is at an immense
advantage, with the vast stores of information
it possesses about people’s online surfing behaviour.
Google Analytics enables webmasters (and Google)
to identify how users arrive at sites, where they click
and what they are interested in. In contrast, Apple
has essentially outsourced the problem of knowing
what consumers want to its community of application
developers — who are also iPhone users.
Advertising is a tried and tested business model
which is already delivering commercial value. Virtual
goods have also been heralded as a new source of
revenue (such as greetings cards, virtual flowers,
e-books, music and ringtones), but the potential
market value of this segment is so far largely unproven.
Growing numbers of social media users (especially
children and youth) are buying virtual currencies
with real money to purchase avatars and other items
to decorate their social media page.
As one of the earliest and most commercially viable
social online communities to date, one of eBay’s
most valuable assets is its PayPal system (now almost
a de facto virtual currency), as well as its loyal customer
base, customer relations and sophisticated online
system for ranking users’ reputations. Although
eBay is perceived by some as an e-commerce site
rather than a “pure” social networking service, eBay
features many of the characteristics of social networks,
including user-generated content, real-time
status updates and messaging, and group interactions
between its online communities of buyers and
sellers. It is one of the few social media sites that has
delivered solid financial revenues and profits since
its inception. Total company revenues are expected
to reach USD 10–12 billion in 2011, up from USD
8.5 billion in 2008.
“A world of connections”, a special report on
social networking, published by The Economist at
the end of January 2010, looks closely at the rise of
Facebook, MySpace and other social networks as
businesses in their own right. It examines the economic
models on which these networks are built. It
also highlights the way in which industries from videogaming
to publishing are introducing elements of
social networking into their products and services. It
recognizes that social networks are a topic of global
importance for business leaders, governments, investors
and regulators alike.
Looking ahead
Social media are increasingly blurring the boundaries
between work and play. And the online tracking
and dissemination of news and views over social media
mean that people may now continue to live in a
media world long after the end of their working day.
In their recently published social media guidelines,
the Reuters news organization observed that “the
distinction between the private and the professional
has largely broken down online and you should assume
that your professional and personal social media
activity will be treated as one, no matter how
hard you try to keep them separate”. Identity and
intellectual property issues take on new dimensions
in a world where it is increasingly difficult to separate
our professional and personal lives, both online and
offline.
Many social media are fundamentally based on
the premise that people freely share information and
data. Social media users are now determining how —
and which — information is shared over the Internet
by posting news, views, presentations, pictures and
videos, which they share among friends, family, and
other communities and acquaintances.
The September 2010 issue of ITU News will examine
some of the key privacy and security issues raised
by social media services, especially the way in which
these services may (intentionally or unintentionally)
“liberate” personal data over the public Internet,
with limited user control or consent over its publication
and dissemination.
|