Social syndication - from the starship TweetDeck
Published : 24 June 2010
In June Hitwise reported to much industry and general newspaper comment that social networks now receive more UK Internet visits than search engines. During May, social networks accounted for 11.88% of UK Internet visits and search engines accounted for 11.33%. May was the first ever month that social networks have been more popular than search engines in the UK.
What Hitwise, who focussed on visits rather than duration, might have drawn attention to was what other commentators seized upon - the time spent per visit is already 5.7 times higher on social networks than on search, and nearly 25% of all online time is now spent on social networks, much higher than search.
Some months ago we were fond of quoting the statistic that 1 in 11 minutes spent online is spent on a social network. Now it is 1 in 4.4 minutes !
So will be forced to use Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to filter the vast web, by means of our contacts and "friends"? For how else can we prioritise and evaluate the vastness (this is one of 77 million planetary blogs published this week!) without some trusted filter?
One answer may be the rise of sophisticated social network aggregators who can relieve some of the knowledge overload being caused by subscribing to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc.
From my Tweetdeck dashboard this week, I have for the first time experienced a sense of order restored (temporary and illusory as no doubt it will be)to the minute by minute onrush of trivia, gossip, flagrant self advertisement and, occasionally knowledge, that characterises the social media.
And whilst we watch the consumer with genuine interest, our real curiosity is what will happen in the professional and B2B niches, now being left information rudderless by the retreat of B2B publishers and the chronic inertia of professional associations.
Spidered aggregation, artificial intelligence filtering tools, smart ontologies (or are they taxonomies...?), applied to niches: who will take up that challenge?
Meanwhile, Captain Kirk is returning to his dashboard....
Social syndication
Well, most of it was hype - but hype in terms of timing, not in terms of what would happen. Ten years on B2B publishers admit their business model is bankrupt and newspaper publishers are desparately hoping "Canute" Murdoch will succeed in his paywall strategy for The Times.
The morale - this is big: wwe just don't know how it will mutate our communications industries and paradigms. There are two strategies: hug on tight and micro manage your business; or embrace the unknown!