According to a study out today by comScore, social networking growth is beginning to level off. In comparison to the average worldwide growth in social networks of 25 percent, North America is growing at only 9 percent. This may also suggest that the huge shifts we saw of users from Friendster to MySpace and finally to Facebook may also begin to slow as users begin to settle into their favorite sites.

The largest source of growth abroad appears to be the Middle East and Africa which grew at a rate of 66 percent over the past year, growing from 18 to approximately 30 million users in June. Facebook also continued to expand its dominant position, growing 153 percent over the past year to attract over 132 million users in comparison to MySpace which attracted only 117 million users.

Another interesting statistic revealed by comScore’s release of June statistics is that Facebook has been growing phenomenally abroad. In Latin America the site has grown over 1,000 percent over the past year. The site has also grown more than 300, 400 and 458 percent in Europe, the Middle East and Asia respectively. Facebook is on the fast track to becoming the global social networking leader by a significant margin.

MySpace was only able to 3 percent worldwide growth over the past year. These statistics highlight the ongoing global competition for social network audiences. The discussion of monetization may still be premature for many as the battle for global leadership is ongoing.

According to a report out today, approximately 70 percent of employers “have banned social network sites, such as Facebook.” This is a substantial number. I once worked as the Chief Technology Officer at a company that restricted the websites employees could visit. I didn’t make it long at that organization. According to the research 79 percent of “employers have disciplined staff for using social networking sites.”

The ironic thing is that 12 percent of bosses check their Facebook status on a regular basis. We need to get those bosses on Twitter! During the Gartner Symposium ITxpo in Las Vegas yesterday, over 80 percent of people polled said don’t ban Facebook at work. I don’t think that was quite surprising given the conference that the poll was taken at.

I have been seeing people on Twitter though that say they are banned from Facebook. Honestly, anyone that needs to have more digital social interaction can just add Twitter to their phone and add a few hundred followers and they’ll be good to go. Have you been banned from social networks at your job? Do you have your computer use monitored by your boss?

On a conference call announcing the Open Social foundation a couple weeks ago, Joe Kraus of Google at one point mentioned that Orkut would be launching their platform the same week that Hi5 did. Since then Google has been quiet about Orkut. A post on the Orkut developer blog states that they’ve discovered and fixed new bugs and the launch will be soon. There is no date anymore on the launch but one week prior to launching the platform Google will announce it on the Orkut blog.

It has been challenging for Orkut to launch and based on the feedback from a number of developers that I’ve spoken with, rushing to launch on other platforms isn’t really a high priority anymore as they are realizing that the growth is not as viral as it was on Facebook. I’ve also heard mixed feedback about the Hi5 platform and other platforms but then again for the leaders on the platform they have a nice head start but that’s about it.

I’m not quite sure what’s holding Orkut back but considering it’s Google’s platform they should probably be first to launch since they invented the OpenSocial standard. Regardless, it appears as though Facebook is continuing to dominate the social platforms. It will be interesting to see if OpenSocial can gain momentum as other platforms launch and more viral channels are opened.  Do you use Orkut?  Are you a developer of an app that’s about to launch on Orkut?   What do you think the future holds for this platform?

The timing could not have been better. Yesterday morning my friend Rachelle Lacroix tweeted that the social web makes her head hurt. It makes a lot of sense! Honestly, my head hurts also spending all this time trying to figure out how all of these new tools works and determine where they are going. While none of us could tell you where things will be one year for now, all of us on the social web would love to tell you our opinion (which is exactly what I will proceed to do).

Over the past few months it feels like my digital identity has been tied to the car of a drunk driver and dragged across every possible terrain as I register for one site after the other. I end up placing my memory of each site somewhere in the deep recesses of my brain. Usually I’m able to at least recall my login even if I’m not quite sure why I registered in the first place. We hope that the new lifestreaming services will solve the problem but as Caroline McCarthy writes, they don’t.

Then there are the various standards and projects including but not limited to oAuth, OpenID, DiSo and countless others that are practically impossible to track. Every few weeks a new solution is launched promising us with yet another solution but as Marshall Kirkpatrick pointed out yesterday, we are going in the wrong direction.

Dave McClure acknowledges that the social web is a cluster fuck and concludes that in the short run there are only a few solutions. He would like a global identity system that enables a single login, single friend list, and a single friend feed. I couldn’t agree more with Dave and I think Facebook is best positioned to create the center of our digital identity.

The only problem is who will be first to open? Google has already offered their contacts API so why doesn’t Facebook do something similar? I could literally ramble on for hours about what I think the solution is but honestly that isn’t the point of this post. The main point of this is that the odds of a semantic web being created in the near future are extremely low (as Dave suggests).

If my head hurts, I can only imagine how people that aren’t thinking about this 24-hours a day feel. Do you think we’ll ever come to any solutions anytime soon? Does your head hurt as well?

As I mentioned last week, two platforms will be going live this week. This morning hi5 went live and with it the opportunity to gain rapid traction for your applications. There are absolutely no limits on application invites currently sparking yet another gold rush for application developers. The only difference this time is that OpenSocial is the standard for development making it a little more challenging to rapidly push out a new application.

I have yet to figure out how to install an application but I’ll be sure to let you know when I do! According to hi5 more than 7,700 developers have joined the platform so far and it’s growing rapidly. It has been a big few weeks for OpenSocial and it will continue to be as Orkut is expected to launch this week. This launch is important particularly because this is the first OpenSource-enabled platform to launch with viral distribution channels.

All applications will go through a review process which will be done on a first-come-first-serve basis. As I mentioned the other day, one of the largest challenges with these applications is that they are not as easy to develop as Facebook apps which have an extremely simple library making it easy to rapidly launch new applications. Once the application directory goes live I will be sure to provide a link as we begin tracking the growth of each app.

Update
Below is an image of the unreleased hi5 application directory that was forwarded to me. It will be launched in the coming weeks according to hi5. Applications can currently be installed though and are distributed strictly through existing viral channels.

If managing your applications on three platforms wasn’t already enough for you, two more platforms will be going live next week: Orkut and hi5. While there are few details as to viral distribution on Orkut, hi5 has provided details about their viral distribution channels. Of particular significance is that “there are no limits to how many friends a user can invite.” This sounds similar to the Facebook platform when it launched.

These launches will be more significant than the Bebo launch considering that hi5 and Orkut are the 8th and 10th (respectively) most visited sites on the web according to Alexa.com. With no limits on invitations for friends we may see a similar gold rush to those applications that launched on the Facebook platform. Both platforms will launch using the OpenSocial standard bringing the total number of potential users via OpenSocial far greater than Facebook.

Add together MySpace’s platform and Facebook’s viral distribution channels and hi5 is setting up to be a significant launch. Next week will surely be a big week as the reach of social platforms is set to almost double. For one person, attempting to monitor all the action on all the platforms is extremely challenging but extremely exciting. For development teams building on each of the platforms, being ready for launch on all sites is not only challenging but close to impossible.

This first quarter of this year has been transformational for the social platform space.

Today is mobile friday (I wanted it to be mobile monday but what can I do?). According to their press release, Verizon Wireless customers can now access MySpace Mobile on all Mobile Web 2.0-enabled phones. I’m not quite sure what Mobile Web 2.0-enabled phones are but apparently it is a Verizon service. The new service enables customers to access:

• Message Management - Just as it is called, users can read their messages as well as send in reply with all their friends as well as respond to friend requests. This is greater then the services currently provided by Facebook’s Blackberry application.
• View Photo Albums - You can browse through your albums on your phone. There was no comment on whether or not you can view your friends pictures.
• Viewing Friends - Just like on the standard version of MySpace, users can browse through all of their friends’ profiles from their verizon handled device.
• Friend Search - Not only can you browse through your friends’ profiles but you can also search for others. So if you want to spend time looking at random peoples’ profiles on your phone, now you can!
• Comments & Blog Postings - Just as you can do on your PC, you can post comments and update blogs. Also, “any new information entered will be posted to a member’s mobile and online MySpace profile simultaneously.”

From my recollection, this service is a premium service and users need to pay a monthly fee to access MySpace. It is most likely combined with their “Mobile Web 2.0″ service which, has a pretty horrible name. This news highlights the rapid growth of the mobile space for social networking. 2008 is going to most definitely see continued growth in the mobile space. Are you a “Mobile Web 2.0″ subscriber?

I’m about to drive downtown to speak at the Boomer Business Summit on a panel about social networks and blogs for boomers. This is definitely foreign territory for me. The main boomers I know are my parents and their friends. So how are boomers using social networks? I know that both my parents are on Facebook and use the site regularly. I don’t think they are the average boomer though.

I’m curious to find out what type of social networks the boomers are involved in and what their thoughts on transparency are. As I posted about this morning, Gary Vaynerchuk suggests that the world is going to become increasingly transparent and we won’t be able to hide from ourselves. Ultimately the truth about everyone will be public information. I think that the boomers may be one of the last generations that aren’t totally transparent.

Then again I have friends that avoid putting all their information online. They are not going to become Twitter users anytime soon. They use the web for email, instant messaging, news and stalking their friends on Facebook. Are you a boomer? What types of social networks are you active on? Do you think boomers are more hesitant to become more transparent? What suggestions do you think I should make for the boomers while at the conference?

According to Andrew Einhorn, Indiana has now banned sex offenders from all social networks, chat rooms and instant message applications. While the ban will be put in place it doesn’t ensure that they won’t still use the services. As such parents should still be actively involved in monitoring their children’s online activity.

As children become socially engaged online at a younger age, the security of children is becoming increasingly important. As such various measures are being taken across the country but these actions take time as they work their way through our government’s bureaucratic systems. My guess is that we will soon see the active monitoring of computer use by registered sex offenders.

It’s a similar concept to house arrest. If you are a threat to society online, you probably should be monitored. We are going to see a huge wave of legal issues arise over the next decade all related to online issues. As citizens spend more time online, it is increasingly important to protect individuals’ privacy. Additionally as more time is spent online I have a feeling that we will begin to see the policing of digital activity. What do you think?

Social networking sites are increasingly becoming a center of activity on the web. MySpace and Facebook have become the modern day portals. Last week, Sarah Perez suggested that social networks will soon become the next iTunes in that they will become the center of media distribution. Back in November I suggested that social networks will become the new T.V.

Ultimately Sarah and I are both saying the same thing. The real question I have though is will these sites continue to exist 5 years from now? If these sites fail to exist 5 years from now, how can they be the new television? Ultimately there are only a few components that are used heavily on social networks: user profiles, friend lists and search. More recently there is the addition of newsfeeds as well.

When I began to write this article, my initial argument was that all of these features can be theoretically abstracted and don’t need to exist within a the traditional sense of a “social network site.” Charlene Li has been saying the same thing for the past few months and while listening to a podcast last night on the future of social networks, pre-recorded at last year’s AlwaysOn Stanford Summit, many of the panelists seemed to agree. Last week I stopped writing this post halfway through though because I began to wonder if this argument is accurate.

Could social networks really be totally abstracted? Would Facebook, which is this generation’s phonebook, really be abstracted to the point where other people create other directories based on their social graph? Twitter already provides complete open access and with the addition of friend grouping features you have a completely open social graph. Somebody is bound to do it, but then again the site that decides to open will need to already have a significant portion of the worldwide social graph.

While this could happen, it will require the average joe to understand the implications of entering all their personal data into this massive (and open) database. Otherwise, I don’t see a reason for the average Facebook user or MySpace user to go recreate their highly complex networks on another site. While I believe openness should and will win, I’m not quite sure how this will take place. Many will point to Friendster and say that users then were willing to easily leave the site.

My argument for those individuals is that the users had not completely entered their entire network. For highly connected individuals, it is extremely difficult to move all of that information to another site. Then again, I use Salesforce.com to manage all my contacts and they provide an export feature. With a little bit of effort my social graph could become portable.

Every time I think about it though, I come back to the same question: would the average Joe understand and do this? Do you think this is destined to happen? Will social networks become just like air and totally transparent? Perhaps there will be two classes of people, those with completely portable social graphs and those that stay locked-in to one site. What do you think?