Thanks to Alec Saunders who points out a press release posted on the Cellular-News website. The press release states that mobile social networks will account for $52 billion in revenue by 2012 given the high growth scenario. How did they come up with these numbers? Well if you take 30-50% CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) multiply that by seventeen divide by twelve, throw that number into the mobile social network growth calculation formula you will end up with a bazillion dollars.

Well maybe not a bazillion but you get the idea. According to the post, mobile social networking has reached critical mass and Japan is poised to explode in the U.S. This will be a follow-up to the attack of the killer bees that will begin by killing off most of Texas sometime later this year. Toward the end of the press release it is stated that much of the growth will be dependent on mobile network operator policies.

There is no doubt that mobile social networks will be big in the coming years but the amount of money to be generated by them is still questionable. Not even web based social networks have come up with effective revenue models. MySpace, the largest social network on the web, made less than one billion dollars last year. Facebook brought in approximately $150 million in revenue last year and is expected to reach over $325 million by the end of this year. So how did they come up with $52 billion from mobile social networks?

While browsing through my Google Reader today I came across an article about a new mobile social network that will launch at Mobile World Conference. It wasn’t the social network that interested me in particular (although it’s definitely an interesting product), it was yet another social network that I have to register for. I am honestly fed up with having to register for websites. As someone who regularly registers for new sites, I’d like to have an easier way to manage my identity.

This is only the beginning of new services being launched. We will see thousands of new social networks spring up in the coming years and we will be forced to register to see what new services they offer. While on the basic level this may not appear to be a significant problem imagine how many people ask “what if I built a social network that …” each and every day. A large percentage of those people will eventually succeed at building their social networks whether or not their social networks are successful (most won’t be as Brian Oberkirch points out).

So as these spring up it is ultimately in our best interests to have a central location for managing all the places that have our identity. We should also be able to turn off websites’ access to our personal information. If you don’t know what OpenID is then go read about it, this post isn’t about what it is but why we aren’t using it? Personally, I haven’t embraced OpenID because most large social networks have yet to embrace it. Once they do I will be the first person to start using OpenID full-time.

Given that OpenID is already the solution for the multiple logins and multiple digital identities, why doesn’t the government step in? At this point I consider it a privacy issue and without it we will maintain the chaotic landscape of social networks that currently exists. I realize that this is nowhere near as important as ending war or fixing our healthcare system but it’s definitely an important in the digital age.

Yesterday, Ann Handley posted an article on The Huffington Post about how it’s rapidly becoming too much work to maintain all the contacts that she amassed on Facebook. This is become a serious problem for many of us as we now have social tools that enable us to stay connected with a much larger number of contacts than ever before. We end up with hundreds if not thousands of contacts spread across our email, social networks, instant message clients and countless websites.

On Friday I discussed how social media is overwhelming. This has become a serious problem. This isn’t really a new problem but is instead a problem that more people face thanks to the new technologies that make it easier to stay connected with others. A simple wall post on Facebook, tweet reply to someone on Twitter or web based purchase of a gift package for that special client can be all it takes to maintain a relationship.

Now multiply that activity by hundreds and you suddenly end up with a lot of time being spent in order to stay connected. There are definite trade-offs for staying connected. On one end you can stay connected with people that you care about as well as those that will bring you future business. On the other you now have a visualization of relational opportunity (a phrase I’ve made up to represent the added value of maintaining a connection) and decide that it’s better to maintain hundreds or thousands of connections to avoid the missed opportunity by not keeping in touch.

So how do we handle the overload after overbuilding our personal networks (which is inevitable on social networks)? I personally haven’t come up with a perfect solution but here are a few ideas I’ve come up with:

• Understand your personal threshold - Rather than obsessively commenting on everything that any of your friends or family post be selective about what you take the time to discuss. Ultimately the discussion has only begun once you make a statement in response to any of your contacts’ actions.
• Limit your social network activity - Rather than spending hours a day on Facebook or another social network, limit the amount of time you spend on them and specify the times of day that you will surf through your contacts.
• Outsource your life - Personally, I don’t like this option but Tim Ferris claims to have been successful at it. If you want to try this route there is really no limit on how large your network can get. The alternative to this is hiring your own personal assistant but I’d assume most of us cannot afford such a luxury.
• Leverage the newsfeed - Rather than browsing across all of the sites you have activity on, personal newsfeeds such as FriendFeed and Facebook’s newsfeed will help us to filter out what is important and what isn’t. While we aren’t there yet it is coming soon.

Have any other useful tools for managing social networking activity? Do you think it’s possible to maintain a large digital identity? I surely haven’t figured out an effective way yet. I’d love to get any advice you have.

Peter Kafka has posted the January comScore statistics for Facebook and MySpace and last month wasn’t too great. A quick look at Compete.com statistics for Facebook.com shows a pattern of decreased activity during the months of December and January as a seasonal problem. As I will be covering in my post early tomorrow morning users are becoming fatigued from social networks though making it increasingly important for these sites to come up with effective monetization strategies.

As the user base increases on sites like Facebook and MySpace we are also witnessing a decrease in general activity. This is expected though. Early users on social networks are typically more active then the late-comers. Also reading too deep into monthly comScore statistics is never to useful. It is much better instead to look at year over year growth of page views and time spent on the site.

Facebook experienced 23 percent growth in page views over the past year and an 80.5 percent growth the total number of minutes spent on the site. MySpace on the other hand experienced an 8.6 percent growth in page views over the past year and was flat for the total number of minutes spent on the site compared to last year. Honestly, I think January numbers a less effective gauge for future growth. Wait for February statistics to see if there is a pattern of decreased traffic.

One surprising note in the comScore data was a 13.7 percent gain in the number of minutes spent by each user on MySpace.  That’s a significant gain for the social networking behemoth.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to sit down with Ann Bernard the Founder and CEO of WhyGoSolo.com. Why Go Solo, a D.C. based startup, provides users with the opportunity to find people to attend events with. I kept trying to allude to the fact that this site would be best suited for dating but Ann insists that this is a site for platonic relationships. However WhyGoSolo.com ends up being used, it was launched last month and has been gaining users since. Ann is probably one of the most entrepreneurial people I have ever met. Her company is currently seeking a round of funding so if you are looking for a company to invest in, you should talk to her!

2008 is the year that OpenID is laying it on strong. They started out the year with Yahoo announcing their support and then today OpenID announced that Google, Yahoo, IBM and VeriSign will become their first corporate board members. All of this ultimately adds up to a lot of hype but provides a lot of hope for those that want to see the use of single source logins become an industry standard.

I haven’t seen this much momentum since one year ago when there was a series of OpenID announcements that made some of us begin to wonder if OpenID would finally become a widely accepted standard. Well one month later the movement lost momentum and it has taken one year to revive it. OpenID has blasted out of the gates and is running at full speed. I can’t help but be a little bit cynical though.

OpenID is definitely the best solution for having a single login for all sites but it still fails at managing your personal social graph. This is what the DataPortability Group attempts to solve and it too has received a lot of momentum since the start of the year. It appears as though 2008 could shape up to be an instrumental year in transforming the social web into a place that utilizes web standards to enable users to manage their identities.

The acceptance OpenID is simply one component that will help jump start the acceptance of standards across the social web. Do you think the movement will gain traction this year?

Techcrunch is spreading rumors and just as Alley Insider says, it’s always fun to play games. According to Erick Schonfeld, Bebo may be sold to Google for between $1 and $1.5 billion. If there was a social networking fund to invest in, shares of it would be up a ton over the past few years following the MySpace acquisition by News Corp. and Facebook’s $15 billion valuation.

If this is true, it appears that it has now become common knowledge that social networks are the future of media. Rupert Murdoch saw it coming years ago and now has the largest social network on the planet with over 107 million active global users. Erick Schonfeld points out that this would be great expansion for News Corp. into countries where they are currently weak. For Google consolidation of Orkut and Bebo would create the third largest social network following just behind Facebook who now has approximately 70 million active users.

For Google this appears to be a funny acquisition considering their recent statement about poor social networking performance being one of their primary causes for missing earnings. Then again, that’s a pretty good strategy to use right before you acquire a company in the space. At this point this is all speculation as Erick Pegged this at 50% odds meaning that this is a coin-flip. Do you choose heads or tails? Does a Google acquisition appear likely?

MySpace announced that their platform is now open for developers last night and by the end of the month, Google will be launching the Orkut platform. Suddenly within a couple months the social platform landscape has transformed from a single platform environment to multiple platforms all with different standards. You could have seen this coming long ago and that’s exactly the reason that Google announced OpenSocial in the first place.

OpenSocial Has No Standard Implementation
MySpace is the first major implementation of OpenSocial and it has only been a few days since it launched. Much of the conversation in the blogosphere so far has been focused on the benefits of the MySpace platform. One conversation in the OpenSocial group on Google Groups is fairly critical of the new MySpace platform:

This is setting a very dangerous precedent for the future of OpenSocial and Google needs to step in right now and force MySpace to comply with the spec. As it stands now, MySpace is the least common denominator among the OpenSocial implementations. This means that in order to write cross-platform apps, developers have to limit themselves to only using features that MySpace chooses to support. If you let every site pick and choose their own pieces of OpenSocial, you will soon end up with a pretty small common denominator.

Apparently OpenSocial is now a victim of the same problem they were trying to resolve. In theory it would be great if developers could build one application and it would immediately work across all platforms. This is the same problem that companies like Clearspring solved for the widget industry. Unfortunately OpenSocial needs to be adapted for each website that it interacts with. For those looking to learn OpenSocial as a development platform, MySpace is a great start but don’t expect it to be easy to simply port your application into Orkut and other social networks.

Applications Easily Get Lost in the Noise
Have you taken a look at the Facebook application directory recently? There are approximately 15,400 applications and there are over one hundred being added daily. By the end of the year there will be over 30,000 applications and it is going to be practically impossible to find anything that is useful. The application directory reminds me of Yahoo when it was a directory for the web instead of a search engine. Finally search came along and solved most of our problems.

Soon enough the platforms are going to need to come up with more effective search algorithms for their application directories. Also, as users began receiving a mass influx of application requests, they rapidly became less effective and now they practically have no effect at all. On the social web whether it is within social platforms or whether it is social media, things spread via word of mouth. That will continue to be the most effective form of marketing which also means that it will become increasingly challenging for applications to stand out from the rest.

Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research has a great post about why social applications will thrive in a recession. This is definitely encouraging new for me considering that I make my living from this industry. One of the primary reasons for this space’s continued growth is the low budget required for application development. Significant ad campaigns cost millions whereas social applications range from $10K to $200K depending on complexity.

The other primary driver of social applications is that they are measurable. Companies can track the number of users interacting with their application and can track the number of conversions to their existing web properties. According to Procter & Gamble, beinggirl.com is four times as effective as TV ads. That’s impressive news and that means that social applications will be one of the primary advertisement channels of choice during a downturn.

I can speak from someone who interacts daily with clients looking for applications in this space, I have only seen growth over the past few months. My guess is that most of the readers of this site are experiencing the same thing. Even as the economy perks up over the next couple years I would guess that we will see a continued movement toward online advertising since it is much more effectively measured than traditional advertising. If you work in the digital space, have you seen any slowing in spending by businesses?

One of the biggest complaints of both the Bebo and MySpace platforms was that they gave an unfair advantage to early participants. This time around it won’t be the case according to Mashable. Instead, developers are going to have a fair shot at competing against each other. Do you have a widget or application that you think is too good to pass up? Now is your chance. Developers will have to try and learn the platform as fast as possible to get their applications launched on the platform.

As opposed to leveraging FBML or SNML, the new MySpace platform is going to use OpenSocial with MySpace extensions called “Action Scripts.” Not really creative for a development language but this is what will enable developers to access social information such as friends lists and profile data. There also be a REST API that enables applications to interface with third-party websites.

One of the additional feature sets of the platform is detailed privacy features. Applications will only be visible to those that have been approved to see other applications such as photos and profile data. Given the security risks of enabling JavaScript for applications, MySpace has developed a JavaScript sanitizer that prevents malicious code from being approved. I initially suggested that applications would be more like widgets but it appears that there will be application canvas pages that developers can build on.

For developers these new features are great but for users the applications will not be available until March. That means developers will have one month until they get their applications published. This means that on the day that the platform launches there will most likely be hundreds if not thousands of applications immediately available to users.

One other interesting feature to note is that MySpace is launching a new development resource in conjunction with Google called Caja. “Caja’s purpose is to make Javascript safer for use on sites like MySpace, so that developers can create rich, full-featured applications in a way that is secure and trusted for our members.” Developers now have the next month to test out in the sandbox and launch in one month.

I have a feeling that this model is going to be more successful as there will be immediate discussion among a multitude of developers. Conversely, you will also get a lot of novice developers trying to build applications an cluttering the message boards with useless inquiries. Either way, this is a big day for social platform development. If you are a developer you can at least get a good night’s rest knowing that you have one month to build out your apps. Good luck!