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?

Mike Arrington has just posted some new information released by Morgan Stanley regarding internet trends. The report, which is embedded below, states that the current trends online are the widgetization of content, social networking and monetization. One of the most impressive charts is of an Alexa page view comparison among Google.com, Yahoo.com, Facebook.com and YouTube.com. According to the chart Yahoo is losing substantial ground to YouTube and Facebook.

In comparing the top ranked sites between 2005 and 2008, there has been a substantial shift and now social websites make up the majority of the top 10, accounting for a whopping 7 out of 10 websites. YouTube.com, Live.com, Myspace.com and Facebook.com are the leaders and I would argue that Facebook.com may soon rank up there with YouTube.com given their dominance in social photos and social videos.

Another interesting statistic was that for users aged 17 and up the internet and personal sources ranked higher than television, radio and newspaper as for sources of information. Morgan Stanley suggests that this trend toward source of information accounts for the massive growth in social networks. The presentation also dives into how Facebook is experiencing insane growth and how the top application developers are faring.

One thing that the Morgan Stanley report attempts to explain is why Facebook is growing faster than MySpace. Their conclusion? Facebook has:

• Less intrusive ads
• A personalized newsfeed (which Myspace has recently added as well)
• A cleaner User Interface
• A more prominent friends section - I never thought about this but having a prominent friends section definitely makes a substantial difference. It’s one of the first places I look when viewing a user’s profile.
• A personalized ad platform - The Morgan Stanley report suggests that the Facebook pages are the “personalized ad platform” … I’m not so sure about this one
• Presence on mobile phones

Facebook accounted to almost 10 percent of the report, emphasizing the significance of the rapidly growing social network site. The report also points to major media integration with social sites including Facebook and YouTube. Rather than having the internet, television and mobile being competitive platforms, the report suggests that they are actually complimentary. This is definitely an interesting finding.

Overall, the report was amazingly optimistic on online advertising growth. Some of the numbers are surprising and makes me realize how hard it is to comprehend the significance of such rapid growth. Case and point: there are over 791 million internet users and close to 60 billion hours being spent online globally. Check out the presentation below for more information.

I just got back from a great lunch with a local executive who helps run a mobile application company. One of the primary things they are specializing in is building mobile social networks and helping other companies plug into those networks. We had a great conversation about the future of mobile and social networks and the challenges that social networks currently face in entering the mobile arena.

It is also common knowledge that social networking sites already face a challenge within their businesses to effectively monetize their sites. So far, nobody has been extremely effective at it. Facebook has been pulling in new executives to try and make an attempt at new monetization strategies but ultimately working to monetize a site which I argue will not be a central destination point a few years from now is relatively worthless.

Instead, the social network sites are going to turn to mobile as one of the central locations for monetization. Text messages and subscriptions are the norm on mobile carriers. This leads me to believe that perhaps social networks will potentially become a subscription service. The only counter argument to this is that Twitter is not currently monetizing their site aside from one ad that’s displayed on the Japanese version of their site.

While there are no answers as to what will happen in the future, I think a lot of potential for social networks exist on mobile. The real question is if the mobile applications will be monetized or if Twitter is destroying the opportunity for future players. How do you think social networks and mobile will work together?

Current TV posted a pretty entertaining video about social networking wars:

One of the biggest problems with MySpace applications has been the lack of viral distribution. Facebook launched with no restrictions and the only platform to come close to Facebook in regards to application growth is hi5. Unfortunately MySpace did not build in many viral channels as to avoid a backlash by users to due spammy applications.

According to one MySpace developer (who I found thanks to Justin Smith), the first viral channels will be opening later this week or early next week. Max Newbould announced that MySpace would be adding notifications by April 30th. This may be the first step toward MySpace becoming a viable platform competitor to Facebook.

As of now, no other platforms have had as transformative an impact as Facebook. Many have predicted that MySpace would be the social platform to change that trend. Following a substantially less buzzed about platform launch (in comparison to Facebook), many have been disappointed. A number of developers I have spoken with suggested that MySpace and the other platforms were not a huge priority because no viral channels had been implemented that would distance the leaders from the rest.

The new updates are likely to change all that. While this will be the first viral channel that MySpace adds, it won’t be the last. Over the coming months we will see the platform adjust to user and developer feedback. As such we are still very early in the social networking site platform wars. The upcoming notification by MySpace is just one step along the way but it could be a game changing addition.

Yesterday evening, Rafat Ali broke the news about Radio One, “the radio network focused on African-American and urban listeners”, acquiring CommunityConnect for $38 million. While nowhere near the massive sum that Bebo was recently acquired for, this is still substantial for a network of sites which are far from their peak.

CommunityConnect owns BlackPlanet.com, MiGente.com and AsianAve.com. While they have over 20 million members, it doesn’t appear that those users are continuing to return. While far from dead, a look at the CommunityConnect portfolio traffic over the past 5 years (see chart below) shows a clear downward trend. This acquisition highlights the importance of social networks for traditional media companies.

As viewership continues its downward cycle for traditional media outlets, companies are realizing that social networks are increasingly a center of media distribution online. This is why News Corp acquired MySpace years ago. While MySpace hasn’t been monetizing as effectively as hoped more recently, the website has still sustained massive growth since their acquisition. My guess is that we will see these acquisitions take place more frequently until all the traditional media outlets have at least one social network in their portfolio.

Social networks have been racing to get their new languages launched. Today, Friendster announced that they are now available in Indonesian. Friendster has over 8 million registered users and 4 million monthly unique visitors in Indonesia alone. While Friendster is popular for dominating southeast Asia, the other social networks each have their own location and Facebook is also expanding rapidly into new territories.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Facebook opened their translations application to the general public and earlier this week MySpace’s latino portal exited beta. Social networks (or social platforms if you prefer) have realized that the largest players will most likely remain as large players for the long term. While there will be slight adjustments, the odds of a Facebook or MySpace crumbling overnight is highly unlikely as there are now dedicated user bases that have put in substantial time to build up their profiles.

Just as the internet has global appeal, so do social networks. They are currently the most effective tool for connecting the masses and are also transforming the way that society interacts with one another. Just as in the offline world, languages will continue to be a barrier to communications but photos and videos will continue to help cultures merge together. I continue to believe that social networks are the most effective platform for spreading values and ideas.

Over the next 6 months look for lack of language support to become a thing of the past as all the social networks become multi-lingual.

A few months ago I pronounced on AllFacebook that Facebook is in the process of releasing an iTunes killer. Well months later the service hasn’t launched but Reuters has confirmed that a deal between three of the four major music labels and MySpace could be announced within days.

According to Alley Insider the various music labels will get cash payments including Universal Music Group who has received a cash payment for settling a prior lawsuit. The other music labels will also receive cash bonuses. All music will be streamed for free (ad supported) via the site but they can also be downloaded for a fee. While I think MySpace can gain a nice chunk of the online music space, they are going to need some seriously good software to generate strong revenues.

I’m a frequent iTunes customer and my primary reason for making a purchase is the insanely easy to use interface. I also use their software for managing all of my music. Prior to iTunes I had a crappy Dell application which crashed regularly so the iTunes application brought a sigh of relief for me. It will be interesting to see how this new music service is offered.

Profiles are dead. If someone tells you of their new startup idea that involves the creation of user profiles, tell them to quit while they are ahead. It’s not that profiles are useless it’s that I’ve created a profile one too many times. I only need basic information about you to identify you and if I really wanted to know more I could check out your Facebook profile where you potentially placed more information on your interests and other personal information.

All we need is a centralized place of my profile information and that’s it. We can link to it wherever that is. That’s what’s so great about the Twitter profile. All you have is your name, your city and state and a link to a website of your choice. It could be your Facebook profile, your blog or anything else. The bottom line is that you get to choose where that is. There is another problem that arises when you start examining the usage and limitations of profiles and friend lists.

As Loic Le Meur discussed yesterday, we want a centralized me. Prior to all the social networks and other social sites, we had one website that was our own website. Now as we register for countless sites, our identity is getting spread around the web. We want one centralized location which we have ownership of where we can manage our contacts.

Perhaps Facebook will be the platform that enables us to control all of our contacts from within our own websites but that doesn’t appear to be happening anytime soon. In the meantime the DiSo project was created to develop a solution. The first platform for testing is Wordpress but the system is meant to expand. If you don’t want someone else managing your own content, this new platform will give you complete control.

There is already a combination of various services that can already be leveraged but unfortunately none of them have been perfected. In the meantime, new services are launching daily and a few of them are asking me to recreate my profile. Seriously, don’t ask me again for my information. I think limiting profiles to the information Twitter asks for is sufficient. What do you think?

When I began writing this post I had the same attitude I always have on location based social networks: what’s the point? Well I went and checked out the mobile social network, Loopt, after reading about their new partnership with Verizon and I have to say that I’m pretty impressed.

Initially I figured location tracking services would be only useful for parents that want to keep track of their childrens’ activities. Loopt on the other hand enables you to mash together text messages with location. This is really useful for close friends because rather than texting somebody, you could simply walk on over and say “Hello!” For now Twitter has worked sufficiently for knowing what my friends are up to but perhaps my voyeuristic needs will grow over time.

While I think automatically being updated of my friends locations is weird on its own, combining location with messaging makes a lot of sense. If I was on a camping trip and lost in the woods, it would be helpful to see my location relative to my friends. Then again if I knew my location, I wouldn’t be lost! As we make the transition from desktops to mobile, I have a feeling that we will see in an increase in location based offerings. Do you think location based services are useful? Would you use them?