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?

As each new technology pops up that promises to help me connect more efficiently with my friends, I have begun to wonder what I’m really seeking with each new product. Am I aiming to streamline my communication processes as much as possible so that I can increase the number of people I’m having it with? Am I’m simply an early adopter that wants to check out the newest shiny object?

Most likely all of these things apply to me, but what I’ve begun to notice is that I am really using all of these tools for the purpose of social discovery. Social discovery is simply one method of finding content in this limitless sea of content we call “the internet”. It is increasingly my preferred discovery method as I have found a vast network of individuals that share similar interests.

To understand social discovery I think it is more important to understand the activities that we are engaged in when using the internet. Ultimately, all internet usage is simply the transmission of media. Occasionally we transmit other information used for purchasing physical good but the discovery of those products and services involve the transmission of media.

New Media Lifecycle

Over the past few years I have become increasingly active in all phases of what I now define the “new media lifecycle”. All of these “tools” that new technology companies are creating are for the most part trying to make at least one phase of this cycle more efficient. I define the new media lifecycle as the stages through which new media typically flows. Not very complex!

To expect new media to flow in any continuous direction is ludicrous but I have found there to be three stages that new media flows through. I think determining a starting point of new media is the same as determining what came first, the chicken or the egg. As such, you could enter the new media life cycle at any point during one of the following three phases:

1. Content Creation - Audio, video, text and images are all types of content that is produced in new media. In contrast to days of old, media can now be produced by anybody, not just the large media companies.
2. Content Discovery - Discovery is probably the most important phase of the lifecycle for technology companies as they are the ones developing the tools for discovery.
3. Content Consumption - Content can be consumer in practically an infinite number of ways. The consumer is the one that chooses the medium they prefer. It can be mobile phones, computers, televisions, stereos or a number of other mediums.

One other important thing to note is that there is no requirement to be part of the content creation phase as a consumer. Soon enough content creation will be an activity that practically every consumer engages in whether they like it or not. Their activities will automatically dictate the creation of content. For now though, it is still possible to simply watch what is going on.

Social Discovery

I think social discovery is one of the most fascinating parts of the new media lifecycle because we are so early in determining the most efficient way of social discovery. Search has now been dominated by Google and while new companies attempt to attack what is increasingly becoming a monopoly, most companies have realized that the space of social discovery has yet to declare a winner.

What is social discovery exactly? Well social discovery is the usage of social tools to find relevant content. A social tool is a system which enables the sharing of content with other users. That content can be as simple as the activities users are engaged in such as “Nick just played MouseHunt on Facebook” to the modification of my social profile to the sharing of a video, image or song that I thought was good.

Some have suggested that the current battle on the social web is over the most efficient newsfeed. I think it should be framed instead as the battle over making the most efficient social discovery tool. Feeds are simply one way of displaying content. It may very well be that feeds are the most effective way of displaying that content but I think this is still up for debate.

Over the past few weeks as my digital social activity has become stretched across FriendFeed, Twitter, Plurk, Facebook and other places, I have begun to ask myself where the real value is in any of these things. The reality is that a valuable community that I feel connected to is most important. As we strive to build new technologies that help us connect more efficiently I think in the end all that matters is the community.

Email continues to be an extremely basic form of communication but what makes it so powerful is that I can access anybody via email. Even though it helps, it doesn’t really matter if your technology is the most efficient. What matters more is that your technology has a community backing it. As the early adopters chase after the latest shiny social object trying to dissect the pros and cons of each feature, I’d wait to see where the real communities form.

In my own opinion, while social discovery has yet to be monetized effectively, social discovery currently provides the greatest opportunity for breakthrough growth.

Giant Interactive Group Inc announced to that it would purchase a 25 percent stake in 51.com, the popular Chinese based social networking for $51 million dollars. How did they come up with a valuation? Not quite sure but the $51 million appears to be a symbolic number. This values 51.com at just over $200 million, a far cry from the $3-$4 billion that Facebook is estimated to be valued at currently.

Giant Interactive is a publicly based gaming company which has been struggling to acquire new users. This new acquisition will help boost their position and get them access to new online game users. Other investors in 51.com currently include Intel Capital, Sequoia Capital China, SIG and Redpoint Ventures. 51.com currently has over 120 million users compared to Facebook’s 70 million users.

This illustrates how large of an opportunity currently exists in China. The battle to become the dominant social network in China has been heating up. Less than two months ago, 51.com obtained another $50 million round of funding. Xianoei, a Facebook copycat raised a whopping $430 million back in May. 51.com’s low valuation may be based on their $44 million cash flow which Eric Eldon wrote about back in May.

With Facebook’s recent launch in China, it will be interesting to see how the social network landscape changes over the coming months. The large social networks are clearly stacking up their war chests positioning the market for an epic social networking battle abroad.

I just got off the phone with Patrick Chanezon, the OpenSocial evangelist over at Google. I will be providing a podcast of our conversation later this week. During our conversation Patrick mentioned that he thinks e-commerce will start playing a larger role in social applications. I’ve written about this before on AllFacebook but for some reason it struck a chord with me this time around.

I keep wondering what incentive Google has to be involved with OpenSocial aside from preventing Facebook from being a dominant player. While developers can use the Adwords service to monetize their applications, this isn’t the best solution. I keep trying to figure out how these sites are going to generate substantially more revenue and the only thing that I can think of at this is point is e-commerce.

Facebook has already announced their intention to let app developers monetize through an e-commerce system but Google has yet to announce anything. While Patrick could not comment on it, it only seems logical for Google to expand Google Wallet to OpenSocial. This will hopefully provide the kick that they need to take on eBay owned PayPal.

While the social networking arms race continues, Google and Facebook will struggle to figure out more effective monetization strategies for these new channels. Google has the luxury of a multi-billion dollar war chest and a growing billion dollar advertising business, not to mention a thoroughly developed payment platform. Facebook has a massive amount of pressure from investors to increase monetization and an incomplete payment system.

As advertisers turn away from social advertising due to the inherent risks in lack of control over user-generated content, the only obvious remaining solution is e-commerce. I think it may be time to spend more time focusing on e-commerce and payment system integration instead of advertising solutions. What do you think? Is e-commerce (or “social commerce”) the future of the social web?

Matthaus Krzykowski has posted an article on Venturebeat about the current trends of mobile social networks and discussing who will end up being the leaders in the space. Currently Facebook and Myspace are the dominant mobile social networks but many are wondering if any of the mobile-only social networks will give the already dominant players a run for their money.

Matthaus points out the mobile only social network Mocospace who has over 1 billion views worldwide so far. This is in contrast to Myspace mobile who had 1.4 billion page views last month alone. Myspace is currently the most dominant mobile social network according to a report out by Nielsen yesterday. Facebook has also experienced explosive growth through the iPhone version of the site as well as the Blackberry application.

There is also a whole suite of existing social networks which are only for mobile and you probably haven’t heard of (I know I definitely haven’t). This includes AirG, Jumbuck, Buzzcity, MyGamma, Bluepulse and Zannel. This space has a ton of diversity and still a massive amount of growth left. I would argue that this space will be growing faster than the web based social networking sites over the next few years.

Currently there are physical limitations to how robust the social networks can get but as this space transforms it will be extremely exciting. Are there any mobile social networks that you use? What do you think are the best ones so far?

Pingdom has released their social network downtime report and Twitter ranks atop the list. On a month by month basis though Twitter has been improving their overall uptime. On average Twitter is up 98.72 percent of the time. So if you are noticing all of the downtime by Twitter you are using the service a little too much!

Bebo has also recovered from the substantial downtime they were experiencing when their platform first launched. The social network with the least downtime was MySpace. This is impressive for a site that was once defined by the substantial amount of downtime it experienced on an almost daily basis. While most websites suffer downtime, social networks typically get the most buzz about downtime because of the substantial amount of traffic.

Overall there wasn’t much surprising data in the report. 99.9 percent uptime has become an industry standard for hosting providers and internet users have come to expect maximum uptime from all the services they are subscribed to. One thing to note is the impressive showing from Facebook considering the continued exponential growth that the site has experienced over the past couple months.

Dunbar’s number, “is the supposed cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable social relationships: the kind of relationships that go with knowing who each person is and how each person relates socially to every other person.” While no precise number has been proposed, the average number cited is 150.

Rapleaf recently embarked on the largest social networking study ever and sampled over 30 million people across various social networks including Bebo, Facebook, Friendster, Hi5, LiveJournal, MySpace, Flickr and others. The results? Here are a few key statistics:

• 80 percent of members surveyed had between 1 and 100 friends
• Another 19 percent had between 100 and 1000 friends
• People with over 1,000 friends accounted for 0.68 percent of the sample set.

The data was definitely skewed as approximately 21.6 percent only had 1 friend. This isn’t a measure of human behavior in general but instead human behavior on social networks in general. This means 21.6 of users tend to create an account and never come back. Additionally, spammers could make up a large portion if Myspace in particular was weighted move heavily since every user on Mysace has Tom as a friend at a minimum.

So is this news? Not really but I’m sure that Rapleaf made a substantial investment in generating these statistics. What I found interesting about this report is that even in the online world, users tend to be constrained to the number of relationships that they are able to maintain. One thing that is not displayed is how these numbers differed between ages.

Many younger people that I know in college tend to collect friends on Facebook as though it’s nothing special. Maintaining those relationships is a whole other story. Personally, I have found that as you increase the number of contacts you have, you end up with the classic email overload problem. It would appear that this problem may be limited to simply those that are highly connected.

Unfortunately I don’t know the distribution among people between 100 and 1,000 friends so I can’t come up with an approximation of people that have more than 150 contacts. My guess is that this group is no more than 10 percent of the population. For that 10 percent though, email and other communication channels have become overwhelming and developing a solution to that is critical.

How many contacts do you have on your various social networks? Have any of the current technologies made it easier for you to maintain relationships with more people?