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The rise of social networking Changing the web as we know it
Historically, it used to be enough to have an online transforming online user behaviour in terms of users’ presence on the Internet for the one-way broadcast- initial entry point, search, browsing and purchasing ing and dissemination of information. Today, social behaviour. Some experts suggest that social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter are driving will become the Internet’s new search function — new forms of social interaction, dialogue, exchange predicting that people will spend less time navigat- and collaboration. Social networking sites (referred ing the Internet independently and instead search for to more broadly as social media) enable users to information or make decisions based on “word-of- swap ideas, to post updates and comments, or mouth” recommendations from their friends, the so- to participate in activities and events, while shar- called “friend-casting”. In the process, social media ing their wider interests. From general chit-chat to are changing users’ expectations of privacy, accept- propagating breaking news, from scheduling a date able online behaviour and etiquette — fast. to following election results or coordinating disaster Morgan Stanley estimates that there were about response, from gentle humour to serious research, 830 million “unique” users of social networks world- social networks are now used for a host of different wide at the end of 2009. Based on a total Internet reasons by various user communities. user population of 1.7 billion at the end of 2009, Social networking services are not just bringing according to ITU’s World Telecommunication/ICT Internet users into fast-fl owing online conversations Development Report 2010, this suggests that around — social media are helping people to follow breaking half of all Internet users could currently be using social news, keep up with friends or colleagues, contrib- media applications. Current estimates of the number ute to online debates or learn from others. They are of social media users vary signifi cantly, partly due to
ITU News 6 | 2010 July | August 2010 35 The rise of social networking
diffi culties defi ning and categorizing sites and appli- VKontakte in the Russian Federation, and Cyworld cations as “social networks”, but also due to margins in the Republic of Korea. There are also numerous of error in estimating the number of “unique” users smaller social networks that appeal to specifi c inter- (since users of one social network are more likely to ests, such as ResearchGATE, which connects scien- use several other social networking services as well). tists and researchers, or to languages or nationalities Many social network users access these services (for example, the Polish Nasza-klasa.pl service with over their mobile phones. According to ITU’s re- 11 million users or Tuenti in Spain, with 4.5 million port Measuring the Information Society 2010, mo- users). bile broadband subscriptions reached an estimated Given that online content and traffi c volumes are 640 million at the end of 2009, driven by growing increasingly interlinked with the pipes over which demand for smartphones, new applications and so- they are carried, it is vital to understand the demands cial networking services, and are set to exceed 1 bil- that the evolution of social networks will make on lion this year. The market research fi rm eMarketer underlying information and communication technol- projects that just over 600 million people will use ogy (ICT) infrastructure. First and foremost, social their phones to tap into social networks by 2013, media are resulting in a huge explosion in demand compared with 140 million in 2009. Facebook passed for capacity in both fi xed and wireless infrastructure. the historic milestone of 500 million users on 21 July Real-time connectivity is required, to ensure that sta- 2010 — if Facebook were a country, it would be the tus updates can be accessed and distributed instantly third most populous nation in the world after China across networks. Geolocalization raises important and India. technical challenges in pinpointing, publishing and Figure 1 shows how many users are drawn to disseminating users’ location in space as well as time, some popular social networks in early 2010. Twitter as well as questions over personal security. enables its members to post or send short (140-char- acter) messages called “tweets”, whereby users can broadcast what they are doing or thinking to the world, to closed “list” groups or to other individual Twitterers. Its original question (“What are you do- ing?”) has been reinterpreted as: “What do you fi nd interesting or funny?”, “What do you think?” AFP/Photononstop or “Please help spread the word!” (or sometimes all three together). MySpace concentrates on music and entertainment, while LinkedIn targets career-minded professionals. Orkut, a service owned by Google, is used mainly in India and Brazil, while in China, Qzone is reportedly one of the largest social networking sites with over 380 million registered accounts now. Other community sites include Skyrock in France,
36 ITU News 6 | 2010 July | August 2010 The rise of social networking
Figure 1 — Twenty most popular social networking websites (according to Wikipedia), May 2010
500 450 400
Facebook 350 300
Qzone 250
Habbo 200
MySpace 150 Windows.Live Twitter
Orkut 100 Registered users in millions Registered Friendster
LinkedIn 0 Flixster Netlog MyLife Classmates Odnoklassniki Bebo Flikr
Source: Wikipedia List of Social Networks, at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites. Current as of May 2010. Note: Omits eBay, YouTube and Wikipedia itself and dating services.
At the WSIS Forum in May 2010 in Geneva, co- Who are your friends? organized by ITU, the United Nations Educational, In the information economy, Pete Cashmore, edi- Scientifi c and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) tor of Mashable (a key information portal for social and the United Nations Conference on Trade and media services), suggests that your friends may be- Development (UNCTAD), a high-level debate on come content curators for your consumption, fi lter- “Social Networking” was held, which triggered lively ing information such as movies, books and television discussions on political and social implications of so- shows and making recommendations for your leisure cial networking for knowledge societies. The debate, time online. He cites Facebook’s Connect programme jointly by UNESCO and ITU, brought together repre- as one early example of this. Facebook’s most recent sentatives of government, legislators, policy-makers, changes to personalize the web will see emoticons industry, civil society and users to exchange views on and friends’ avatars popping up all over users’ brows- the opportunities and threats of these tools for the ing. The content of sites can be tailored to readers’ future (see pages 13–14). preferences, as defi ned by the preferences of their social networks.
ITU News 6 | 2010 July | August 2010 37 AFP/DDP
There will be a move from current personalized era of social context”, sites will start to recognize advertising (based on cookies and websites you have personal identities and social relationships to deliver browsed recently) to personalized web content, with customized online experiences. One simple example search results ranked according to your online profi le, of such a customized online experience is Facebook preferred language, profession or interests, as well as and LinkedIn’s ability to propose possible new friends the preferences of your online social networks — the and contacts. web you see may be shaped by the web your friends like. The risk? Far from being a leveller of content and Internet traffi c opening people’s eyes to the broader online world, The Internet transports roughly 10 billion giga- Internet users’ world-view may in fact be restricted bytes of data a month — a fi gure that some observ- and constrained by “fi lter bubbles” whereby they link ers expect to quadruple by 2012. The market and with similar communities of like-minded individuals advertising research company Nielsen estimates that sharing a similar outlook. Conversely, your activities the average time spent on social networks grew and preferences could in turn infl uence your friends’ from three hours in December 2008 to fi ve and a half surfi ng behaviour. Surfi ng online will no longer be a hours in December 2009, based on a survey of social question of browsing the same sites as everyone else media use in ten countries. Half of all mobile data use in a vast online library of resources — the sites you in the United Kingdom is accounted for by Facebook, see may be predetermined or preselected to suit your so social media look set to continue driving future tastes in advance. growth in traffi c, with video-streaming applications The future social web may see users driving in- (such as YouTube) expected to account for a large novation and development in new applications. proportion of that traffi c. According to Forrester, a technology and market Over the past seven years, Internet data traffi c research company, social networks could become has grown by a factor of 56, driven partly by people more powerful in building brands and relationships uploading more data. On average, people uploaded than corporate websites and customer relationship fi fteen times more data in 2009 than they did just management systems. In what Forrester calls “the three years previously. Cisco projects that global
38 ITU News 6 | 2010 July | August 2010 The rise of social networking
mobile data traffi c will grow by sixty-six times from Facebook is estimated to account for as much as 2008 to 2013, with video forecast to account for 25 per cent of all web traffi c (taking into account around 64 per cent of all global mobile data traffi c posted video). There are now over 60 million status by 2013 (Figure 2). updates to Facebook daily and 260 billion page views YouTube is a major contributor to the current ex- monthly. Some 100 million users access Facebook plosion in Internet traffi c and demand for bandwidth. over their mobile phones, accounting for a signifi - Not only does it make available video and user-gen- cant proportion of mobile web traffi c. For example, erated content on demand, it also enables com- half of mobile web traffi c in the United Kingdom is ments, popularity ratings and easy sharing of sources for Facebook use. — all features of social networks. YouTube has also In the United States, according to a survey con- introduced a system called Video ID, which checks ducted in December 2009, Facebook usurped Google uploaded videos against a database of copyrighted as users’ favourite entry point to the Internet and content to avoid copyright violations. Launched in now directs a greater proportion of Internet traffi c November 2005 and founded by three former PayPal (13 per cent) than eBay (at 7.6 per cent) and Google employees, YouTube is now owned by Google. In (at 7 per cent). Also in the United States, Facebook May 2010, YouTube was serving more than two bil- displaced Yahoo! as the leading publisher of display lion videos a day. YouTube is one example of a so- advertisements in the fi rst quarter of 2010 (Figure 3, cial networking service that could have major im- page 40). Facebook traffi c is expected to grow even plications for network infrastructure in terms of its faster, with the planned release in October 2010 of present and growing demand for bandwidth. the movie entitled The Social Network, which tells
Figure 2 — Explosion in the demand for Video, 2008–2013 (estimates)
Global mobile data traffic, by type 2008–2013 (estimates) 19% 2 000 000 2008–2013 (estimates) CAGR* 10% 1 500 000 Total 131%
Data 112% 1 000 000 64% P2P 101%
500 000 per month) (Tetabyte Video 154% Total mobile data traffic mobile data traffic Total Voice 112% 7% 0 2012 2013 *CAGR: Compound annual growth rate 2010 2011 2008 2009
Source: Cisco, quoted at: http://www.morganstanley.com/institutional/techresearch/pdfs/2SETUP_12142009_RI.pdf.
ITU News 6 | 2010 July | August 2010 39 The rise of social networking
the story of the Facebook founders and how their roughly USD 1 billion in revenues in 2009 (Figure 4). vision turned into a social networking phenomenon. Other than Google and Amazon, however, the new Meanwhile, Twitter traffi c continues to grow Internet players are still by and large waiting for the exponentially, with users sending over 50 million billions to arrive. tweets a day by February 2010. However, many Recent analysis carried out by the Organisation for sources note that estimates of the number of tweets Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for and page views over Twitter may be understated, as some of its member countries suggests that Internet they may omit users accessing it through third-party players are the only group among the top 250 ICT clients from their desktop or mobile devices. fi rms to have succeeded in signifi cantly increasing their revenues relative to the year 2000. However, Can the new Internet players make money? the cash fl ows of Internet players may have been Despite the rapid growth of many social network- small in 2000, and Google’s growing revenue has a ing services, the central challenge remains — how disproportionate effect on the results — Google is can these new Internet players generate cash? Some still ranked as the number one site on the web (ac- social media networks are just beginning to make cording to the page ranking service Alexa), although money. Facebook is estimated to have turned over Facebook is catching up fast.
Figure 3 — Facebook displaces Yahoo! as the Figure 4 — Strong growth for social media, by all leading publisher of display advertisements in the counts fi rst quarter of 2010
US display ad impressions US social media revenues, (in billions) 180 2008–2013 3.5 160 3.0 140 2.5 120 100 2.0 80 1.5 Billions
60 USD billions 1.0 40 0.5 20 0 0.0 Q1 2010 2013 2014 Q4 2009 2011 2012 Q2 2009 Q3 2009 2010 Q1 2009 2008 2009
Facebook Yahoo Microsoft FOX Aol Facebook Other
Source: Comscore, available at: http://www.businessinsider. Source: Forrester, Next Up Research Estimates quoted at com/chart-of-the-day-us-display-ad-impressions-2010-5. http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/31/sharespost-report-values- facebook-at-9-billion-estimates-2010-revenues-at-1-billion/
40 ITU News 6 | 2010 July | August 2010 AFP
One factor long-argued to work in favour of the market value of this segment is so far largely unprov- new Internet players is the current size and future en. Growing numbers of social media users (especial- growth potential of some social networks. These net- ly children and youth) are buying virtual currencies works do not need to make large amounts of money with real money to purchase avatars and other items out of any individual user — just a small margin on to decorate their social media page. some — or better still, all users. This is the approach As one of the earliest and most commercially vi- that eBay has adopted in charging small commissions able social online communities to date, one of eBay’s on online transactions, and also Google’s approach most valuable assets is its PayPal system (now almost in deriving revenue from click-throughs. a de facto virtual currency), as well as its loyal cus- Compelling content is vitally important. But the tomer base, customer relations and sophisticated on- overriding diffi culty lies in predicting what consumers line system for ranking users’ reputations. Although are interested in at any time and channelling traffi c eBay is perceived by some as an e-commerce site towards promising content. Here, Google is at an im- rather than a “pure” social networking service, eBay mense advantage, with the vast stores of information features many of the characteristics of social net- it possesses about people’s online surfi ng behaviour. works, including user-generated content, real-time Google Analytics enables webmasters (and Google) status updates and messaging, and group interac- to identify how users arrive at sites, where they click tions between its online communities of buyers and and what they are interested in. In contrast, Apple sellers. It is one of the few social media sites that has has essentially outsourced the problem of knowing delivered solid fi nancial revenues and profi ts since what consumers want to its community of applica- its inception. Total company revenues are expected tion developers — who are also iPhone users. to reach USD 10–12 billion in 2011, up from USD Advertising is a tried and tested business model 8.5 billion in 2008. which is already delivering commercial value. Virtual “A world of connections”, a special report on goods have also been heralded as a new source of social networking, published by The Economist at revenue (such as greetings cards, virtual fl owers, the end of January 2010, looks closely at the rise of e-books, music and ringtones), but the potential Facebook, MySpace and other social networks as
ITU News 6 | 2010 July | August 2010 41 AFP/Onoky 42 Looking ahead tors andregulators alike. importance forbusinessleaders,governments,inves- recognizes thatsocialnetworksare atopicofglobal social networkingintotheirproducts andservices.It eogaming topublishingare introducing elementsof also highlightsthewayinwhichindustriesfrom vid- nomic modelsonwhichthesenetworksare built.It businesses intheirownright.Itexaminestheeco- dia activitywillbetreated asone,nomatterhow sume thatyourprofessional andpersonalsocialme- has largely broken downonlineandyoushouldas- distinction betweentheprivateandprofessional the Reutersnewsorganization observedthat“the In theirrecently publishedsocialmediaguidelines, media worldlongaftertheendoftheirworkingday. dia meanthatpeoplemaynowcontinuetoliveina and disseminationofnewsviewsoversocialme- ries betweenworkandplay. Andtheonlinetracking ITU News Social mediaare increasingly blurringthebounda- 6 |2010 July | August 2010 The riseofsocialnetworking tion anddissemination. with limitedusercontrol orconsentoveritspublica- “liberate” personaldataoverthepublicInternet, these servicesmay(intentionallyorunintentionally) by socialmediaservices,especiallythewayinwhich ine someofthekeyprivacyandsecurityissuesraised of our professional andpersonallives,bothonline in aworldwhere itisincreasingly dif intellectual property issuestakeonnewdimensions hard youtrytokeepthemseparate”. Identityand other communitiesandacquaintances. videos, whichtheyshare amongfriends, family, and by postingnews,views,presentations, pictures and and which—informationisshared overtheInternet data. Socialmediausersare nowdetermininghow— the premise thatpeoplefreely share informationand fl ine. The September2010issueof Many socialmediaare fundamentallybasedon ITU News fi cult toseparate willexam-