JUNE 5, 2009

Social Media Summary - 6/05/09

Nielsen just released a chart that compares the shift in total minutes spent on several popular social media sites throughout the last year (April 2008 to April 2009).

As expected, Twitter takes the cake with a whopping 3,712% growth over the last year. Interestingly, Myspace and Facebook have switched places as numbers 1 and 2, with Myspace having a 31% drop in total minutes compared to Facebook’s 699% growth. Brian Solis remarks on the extreme changes and growth in this lineup of websites, saying:

Competition for our attention is escalating and it’s just a matter of time until our experimentation officially leads to distributed and uncommitted presences. Perhaps this will lead to a series of strategic acquisitions to prolong prestige, relevance, and stature.

Solis made a good point about saturation in the social media space. Social media sites can rise and fall siginificantly in the space of just a single year now. It will be interesting to observe the strategies that sites adopt not just to persuade new audiences to join, but also to sustain a sense of loyalty among entire social commmunities.

June 4th was the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and this year it was marked by a censorship blitz by the Chinese government that generated a good deal of commentary from bloggers. In China, popular sites like Twitter, Youtube, Wordpress, Bing, and others were blocked right before the anniversary. Some sources have suggested that the government censorship sparked a veiled protest by Chinese internet users, who staged a “Chinese Internet Maintenance Day” to comment satirically on the situation. China has received significant press coverage in the past for blocking sites, but its actions this week were particularly significant because it highlighted how Chinese internet users could circumvent any effort by the government to cut off an online service - and then comment on it. The fact that this occured around a politically-charged event that is the springboard for a great deal of ideological conflict also intensifies the emotions behind the issue. In the future, I believe that we will continue to see incidents similar to this, in which the spirit of an open web will provide an avenue for continued debate over the political state of the nation. Additionally, the most powerful impact on this debate will most likely come from Chinese users themselves as they react (and rebel) against government censorship online.