Caresquare launched last year as a social site that connects child care professionals with parents. The site’s differentiating factor is it’s social approach to its system, connecting professionals and parents directly. Though Caresquare launched in the midst of several other established sites that offer similar services, Caresquare has made several changes to its site in order to become more competitive. Below is an interview with Caresquare’s Ariel Ford, who speaks on some of these changes:
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Online brand advertising measurement system Vizu has teamed up with three other ad companies that deal specifically with brand advertisement within social networks. AdNectar, Buddy Media and Lotame are all using Vizu’s Ad Catalyst brand ad measurement system to extend the feature set of their own products. Given the social media directives of these other ad companies, there’s a reason they’ve all chosen Vizu’s Ad Catalyst system.

The ads used in social networks are decidedly different from those found on other sites, and as ads continue to evolve within the social media realm, the way in which a brand marketing success is measured must change with time as well. That’s where Vizu comes in.
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A new pact for discouraging cyber-bullying and predatory behavior on social networks has been signed by seventeen social networking sites that have a presence in Europe, including MySpace, Bebo, Dailymotion, YouTube, and Habbo Hotel, reports Reuters. The European Commission is hoping such widespread adoption of the pact will make the Internet a safer place for children. The announcement comes on the heels of MySpace revealing its successful blocking of 90,000 registered sex offenders, some of which were later found on Facebook. And Facebook appears to be missing from this new EU pact as well, though both MySpace and Facebook have their own initiatives with state and federal authorities in the United States for the protection of their users.

Some of the concessions participating networks can make as part of the pact include auto private profiles for users under the age of 18, making them not searchable on the networks or the search engines, as well as more reporting options for users that feel others are acting maliciously in some way.
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Some web trends do eventually translate into mobile web usage.  According to a comScore report this week, the use of mobile social networking is driving mobile Internet usage in Western Europe (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, UK).  In November, 34% of mobile phone owners in Western Europe that visited social networking sites accessed social media, but not other mobile web content.  That means that a good portion of the 12.1 million mobile users in Western Europe are using their mobile web access just for social networking purposes.

Compared to other applications for accessing mobile web pages, social network mobile access grew at a much faster rate, clocking in at 152% increase between November 2007 and November 2008.  As far as the Western Europe countries go, the UK has the highest penetration of mobile social networking, at 9%.
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Social networking isn’t just for the youngsters anymore. It’s for the young at heart. According to a recent Pew Internet & American Life Project report, the share of adult Internet users on social networks has more than quadrupled in the past four years. From 8% to 35%, that’s a huge leap in terms of the adoption rate for using online social networks. And this number also means that adults represent a larger amount of users than the 65% of online teens who also use social networks, making the influence of adults on social networks significant and on the rise.
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Ah, the perils of social networking. The public nature of a social networking profile such as those seen on MySpace means that one must be careful what they post online. Stacy Snyder, a former student at Millersville University of Pennsylvania, learned that the hard way. As a student-teacher, Snyder was working at a high school where she ran into a bit of trouble, receiving poor reviews for unprofessionalism in the classroom.
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Oxyweb has posted a chart of the largest social networks throughout the world. The chart is a world map with the each country being colored based on the largest social network in that country. The most significant takeaway from this chart is that Facebook is rapidly obtaining global dominance. The largest competitor on a global level is hi5.

On an individual country basis, Facebook has fierce competition from StudiVZ in Germany, Xiaonei in China, V Kontakte (a Facebook copycat) in Russia, and a few other social networks each with a strong local presence. The chart doesn’t provide much insight outside of that but it definitely is a pretty picture with a basic level of insight for the global social network presence.

I am personally impressed with the reach of Facebook. According to the article, Facebook overtook hi5 in the Bahamas and Cuba. Currently, hi5 dominates Central America and part of South America. Between hi5 and Orkut, Facebook will have some fierce battles in the western hemisphere. Both hi5 and Facebook appear to be the primary competitors for global dominance.

It will be interesting to see how this chart changes 6 months from now. Facebook is on track to overtake MySpace domestically, but it won’t be anytime in the immediate future as MySpace has almost 20 million more monthly visitors domestically than Facebook. The site continues to gain ground though and as Mashable pointed out yesterday, Facebook hit 39 million monthly visitors last month according to Nielsen Online.

Click on the chart below to see the full-scale version.

According to a new report released to day by ABI Research today, location-based social networks will generate a whopping $3.3 billion in revenue by 2013. This comes from companies like GyPSii, Pelago and Loopt a few of the new location-based offerings that are now also available on the iPhone. While the report didn’t say it, the iPhone is a likely catalyst for the growth.

As Dan Frommer at Silicon Alley Insider points out, “It’s hard to put much weight in pie-in-the-sky predictions like this: It’s one thing to take an existing market and plot out a growth chart. But right now the industry is a goose egg, give or take a couple million.” I decided to have a little fun and plotted out what that growth chart would look like below.

As you can see much of the absolute growth comes in 2011, 2012 and 2013. We were able to generate this chart by looking into our crystal ball which has in the past been extremely efficient at generating accurate predictions. While this chart could change in the next 6 to 12 months we figured that this is good enough guidance to include in your upcoming business plan for a location-based social network.

In all honesty though, there is a lot of potential for location-based social networks. The theory is that users of the networks can get extremely targeted local ads. This idea has been around for years but thanks to new advances in mobile technologies (within the U.S.) the ability to create locally targeted advertisements is now a reality.

It still remains to be a test of time to see if these ideas will be put into practice. These “pie-in-the-sky” predictions resemble forecasts of socially relevant advertising technology generated over the past couple years. While the technology that increases conversions based on social relevance has yet to be developed (as far as we know), it’s still possible to make ridiculous predictions of the future.

Do you think location-based social networks will meet the breathtaking forecasts generated by this study?

Back in June I wrote about MyYearbook’s phenomenal yearly growth which outstripped Facebook as the fastest growing social network. Last night the company announced that they had raised an additional $13 million from Norwest Venture Partners. The company currently attracts high school student to their website and continues to grow at a furious pace.

As Eric Eldon at VentureBeat points out, the company continues to dominate other competing social networks domestically including hi5, Bebo, Tagged, Meebo and Friendster. This positions the company as a distant third to Facebook and MySapce. Domestically, MyYearbook attracts around 10 million visitors a month while Facebook attracts over 35 million and MySpace has close to 70 million.

As the company grows, the largest challenge will be expanding beyond their initial user base which is comprised of mostly teens. Given the name and the design of the popular social network, it will be hard for the company to grow to a more mature audience. For now, it appears that the company will use the funding to expand their product offering and expand their marketing efforts.

As Caroline McCarthy pointed out, the announcement was relatively ambiguous with releasing any of the company’s intentions. It will be interesting to see how the site changes over the coming year among continued growth.

According to USA Today, “Congress is considering a bill that would bar children who use computers in public libraries from accessing Facebook and other social networking websites without parental permission.” The law is a measure to protect children from sexual predators. Others are arguing that this interferes with “library users’ privacy and free speech”.

I have to agree with those that argue that this interferes with privacy and free speech. While children should be protected from sexual predators, banning them from having access to social networks is not the way to do it. The again, it should be up to the school to determine what technologies students have access to while on campus. For instance should students be able to bring their portable video game system with them into class?

There is no doubt that students are not involved in the most productive activities while browsing social networks whether at school or at home. Simply put, even without a plethora of game applications, social networks are about as productive as playing video games: there is really no productive value currently. This may be one of the fundamental issues preventing social networks from further monetizing their platforms.

Users of social networks are ultimately not gaining much productive value. The bill being discussed is banning students from social networks at school due to the risk of sexual predators. Ultimately, I don’t think this is the best way to approach the issue. Do you think students should be banned from social networks at school?