The way it’s overtaken the TV newsrooms and celebrity gossip pages, you’d think that Twitter was the be-all-and-end-all of social media.  But a new report from the Pew Research Center cited in this Washington Post article says otherwise: teens are pretty ambivalent about using Twitter, with only 8 percent of those online reporting regular use of the social networking tool.
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AT&T’s 3G network is being used for yet another socially savvy mobile device; the upcoming Moterolla Karma QA1 is curvy, compact and socially aware. The phone will have quick access to Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, JuiceCaster and more. From Motorola’s perspective, the idea of a mobile device is to support communication, no matter how it occurs.

That’s a good point of view to have, considering the dominance of Apple’s iPhone, and the multimedia support mobile devices need for creating, sharing and consuming content. With what appears to be a main tab for social networking, a menu of socially integrated applications are ready and able to connect you with your web world.
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Could the federal government be getting in the way of transparent communication between officials and the public? According to The National Journal, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy is caught between a rock and a hard place, battling with its desire to interact more with the public via online social networks and the federal regulations that require everything posted online to also be archived internally.

That’s a lot of records that need to be stored. And it’s quite difficult to store such records when you’re talking about activity across networks like MySpace and Facebook. Private messages sent between users, wall postings, status and mood updates…these are all things that change frequently on social networks, and they are things that quickly and easily convey attitudes amongst users. But they can’t be readily archived. Just think of your Facebook newsfeed, which can be completely renewed in less than a day’s time.
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We’ve seen so many social networks launch in the past four years, it makes even my head spin. But one key differentiating factor between many of the peripheral social networks and the major players like Facebook is the actual ability to network. Socially.

The benefits of social networking (with a purpose) began to come into focus when MySpace musicians found they could connect with each other and audiences on a professional level. And when it comes to social networking for the rest of the professionals out there, LinkedIn is the place to go. Even though Facebook hasn’t always had the best format for direct networking with the purpose of finding a job, it’s still very useful for this objective. So now that millions of people across the U.S. are in need of a job, no thanks to our current economic crisis, many are turning to Facebook and LinkedIn for recommendations and job leads.
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It’s been a while since we’ve seen the launch of a social network aggregator, but alas Power.com has emerged into a public beta today, hoping to offer enough features to outshine similar services we’ve seen in the past. 

With $8 million in funding from investors including Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and two years in stealth mode, Brazil-based Power.com has had enough foresight to do more than just update your status across Facebook and MySpace.  Rolling in Orkut and Hi5, along with a handful of multimedia sharing options for sites like YouTube and MetaCafe, Power.com looks at the whole of your social networking experience for its aggregation purposes.  That means that your messages are aggregated, along with groups’ activities, community updates, application changes, and more. 
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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.