According to compete, 2 out of every 3 people online visited a social networking site in June, and the number of people visiting a social networking site has grown 109% since January 2004 (driven mostly by MySpace).

Nielson//NetRatings claims that MySpace has achieved year-over-year growth (July 2005 – July 2006) of 183% compared to 23% for Google and 13% for eBay. MySpace also hit the 100 million account mark on August 9, 2006 at around 7:41 am EST. As I mentioned earlier today, del.icio.us is also showing tremendous growth with Hitwise claiming that Del.icio.us traffic has doubled since January.

The point of this post is not to obsess over exact numbers, many of which tend to contradict each other; however, it does show that social networking sites are continuing to grow at incredible rates. As markets mature, the growth tends to eventually level off as the market becomes more saturated. For example, when DVD players were new, the growth was rapid as people bought their first DVD player, but the growth has leveled off now that everyone owns a player and sales continue mostly in the slower growth replacement / upgrade market. I would expect social networking to level off as social networking moves from the early adopters into the masses; however, it is also possible that it will continue to grow at a rapid pace if early adopters keep moving to the next hot site bring the masses along behind them.

Business 2.0 just released a map of web 2.0 companies located outside of the United States, including one of my latest favorites Netvibes.

It would be interesting to see a similar map of web 2.0 companies within the United States. I am curious how many are located outside of the valley.

Hitwise just released data claiming that Del.icio.us traffic has doubled since January (note that other reports are showing a very different view of Del.icio.us traffic.)

I found the demographics released with the report even more interesting than the traffic numbers:

For the four weeks ending August 5, 2006, 59% of visits to Del.icio.us were from males, and 41% of its visits were from those between the ages of 25-34. That’s a very large skew towards a specific age group, and del.icio.us also has a large skew towards users with household incomes between $100k and $150k per year – 36% of its users fell into this income bracket, compared to 13% of the online online population.

So who are these 25-34 year olds with incomes greater than $100k per year, and why are they using del.icio.us? Claritas PRIZM NE segmentation of the site provides some clues. For a full explanation of the segmentation methodology, visit this post, or the Claritas site. What the chart below shows is that del.icio.us is highly skewed toward the social groups U1, “Urban Uptown,” and S1, “Elite Suburbs.” Members of these social groups have higher than average incomes and tend to be highly educated and are more likely to be early adopters of technology. My guess is that they’ve heard about del.icio.us through news media or through friends and are using it because it’s ‘the thing to do.’ This is not quite the MySpace crowd that I expected to find – instead Del.icio.us users are a more sophisticated breed of web power user. (Hitwise)

It would be interesting to compare the del.icio.us demographics with those of MySpace, Digg, and a few other web 2.0 sites.

Asterisk, open source telephony software, will benefit from $13.8 million in venture capital funding for Digium, the company behind Asterisk. According to Om Malik, “the company will use these funds to expand its operations by selling a variety of Asterisk-based IP-PBX systems to small business and large corporations.” Asterisk has been growing in popularity recently as companies make the move away from older, expensive PBX systems to VoIP. I know of several companies who have already moved to Asterisk, and people seem to be happy with the Asterisk solution.

From the official press release:

“We believe Digium has the potential to become one of our most successful open source companies, as every company in the world relies on telephony and the use of PBXs in order to run their businesses,” said David Skok, a general partner at Matrix Partners and JBoss board member. “As companies continue to be attracted to the cost savings and powerful new capabilities of Voice over IP, the opportunity for Digium becomes massive. Digium is definitely in a position to become the next big open source company, behind Red Hat, JBoss and MySQL. Their current revenues, profitability, and growth rates are extraordinary.”
With the anticipated growth of IP-based communications and the continued acceptance of open source, Digium has a unique opportunity to become a dominant player in the telecommunications market. Additionally, because of the built-in flexibility of Asterisk, companies are able to build hybrid PBX solutions (a combination of legacy and VoIP equipment) in migrating to a VoIP system. (Digium)

I always like seeing venture capital money go to strong open source products, like Asterisk.

Guy Kawasaki posted a snippet from Seth Godin‘s new book, “Small is the New Big”:

For an idea to be spread, it needs to be sent and received.

No one sends an idea unless:

1. They understand it.

2. They want it to spread.

3. They believe that spreading it will enhance their power (reputation, income, friendships) or their peace of mind.

4. The effort to send the idea is less than the benefits.

No one “gets” an idea unless:

1. The first impression demands further investigation.

2. They already understand the foundation ideas necessary to get the new idea.

3. They trust or respect the sender enough to invest the time.

Notice that ideas never spread because they are important to the originator.

Notice, too, that a key element in the spreading of the idea is the capsule that contains it. If it’s easy to swallow, tempting, and complete, it’s far more likely to get a good start. (Signum sine tinnitu)

The idea that “ideas never spread because they are important to the originator” is the part that caught my attention. This seems to be a difficult concept for many companies trying to capitalize on the web 2.0 phenomenon. Companies see how influential viral marketing can be and frequently fail when they try to replicate it. The reality is that you never know if a new video will be the next Lazy Sunday or just another unwatched video taking up disk space. Too many attempts at viral marketing look forced and artificial, while the really interesting examples of viral marketing seem to be the ones that are accidental successes. It is important for companies to participate in web 2.0 whether it is through blogging, encouraging user collaboration, social networking sites, or other methods; however, it may be impossible to predict whether a concept will be spread virally across the Internet.

According to Brad Feld from Mobius Venture Capital (a FeedBurner investor and board member), FeedBurner is testing a new series of blog “networks” designed to contain collections of the top blogs within a specific category. Feld is the coordinator / gatekeeper for the Venture Capital Network, which is the only network that I have been able to locate so far (FeedBurner does not seem to have announced this new feature yet). Feld lists several benefits:

There are benefits to subscribers:

• It’s easy to find high quality relevant bloggers / feeds for a specific topic through the aggregation into a Network.

• There will be a “micro-portal” for each Network – you’ll be able to go to a landing page that lists all the members of the network, selectively subscribe to their feeds, or explore their blogs.

• You’ll be able to subscribe to the spliced Network feed (for example, here is the spliced feed for the Venture Capital Network).

There are also benefits to publishers:

• The “micro-portal” will be another place for subscribers to find your blog / feed.

• You will get new readers as a result of people that subscribe to the spliced feed (this will show up in your subscriber metrics.)

• Advertisers will be able buy ads in the Network with higher quality advertising that is relevant to the readers of feeds in the Network.

• You’ll have Network oriented publicity tools (think stuff like “Widget with the latest X headlines in the Network”, or the Banner that I have on the top left of my blog stating that I’m part of the network) which will help cross-promote feeds in the network.

• You might make some new friends via your fellow Network members. (Feld Thoughts)

The VC network looks pretty good (I have already subscribed to the feed), but Michael Arrington is a bit skeptical:

The biggest issue around this will be what rules are used to determine which blogs are included in a given topic. It isn’t clear if there will be any real quality control – in his post Brad says each network will have a gatekeeper to make sure only blogs on topic are included, but there doesn’t appear to be any hurdle as to what constitutes a quality blog in a topic. That could work out badly. And if the bloggers and/or the network coordinator are making subjective decisions on which blogs can be included in a given network, this will end in tears. The politics around who’s in and who’s out of a blog network are impossible. I know this from personal experience. (TechCrunch)

I agree with Arrington, the FeedBurner Networks may not be successful depending on the quality control and politics involved in the selection of the feeds. With poor quality control these networks may be no better than the many other blog directories and aggregated feeds already available; however, at this point, I am still cautiously optimistic. If FeedBurner can find high quality coordinators who use an objective selection process combined with good judgment, these networks could be valuable. I anxiously await the next wave of networks and the official launch of this product to get a better feel for how useful these networks will be.

I recently talked about how several high profile bloggers including Jason Calacanis, Robert Scoble, and Mark Cuban were making job offers via their blogs. This week, Michael Arrington introduced the CrunchBoard job site to help match the right people with the right companies leveraging the strong community of web 2.0-savvy readers of the TechCrunch blog.

Om Malik has a nice summary of why niche job boards like CrunchBoard work better than traditional sites:

CrunchBoard, 37Signals and PaidContent – they are all bringing attention to the fact that narrow niche sites work, and the job boards don’t seem to have the necessary impact or perhaps get the right kind of users. These three sites have very strong communities, and as a result their job boards work and will continue to work. These three boards should enjoy success, because the number of technology job listings in on an upswing. Indeed.com reports that there are 121 job listings per 1000 people in San Jose, and 74 job listings per 1000 in San Francisco. (GigaOM)

Like many people, I have been on both sides of this coin: job seeker and hiring manager. When looking for a job, the big online sites like Monster.com have so many positions that it can be hard to sift through everything to get past the scams and undesirable jobs to find something interesting. As a hiring manager, these big job boards tend to generate hundreds of worthless resumes from people who are not even remotely qualified for your position. I like the niche approach of sites like CrunchBoard to allow companies to find smart, qualified people more easily, and I will be curious to follow the progress of CrunchBoard and similar sites.

I am in the Portland Airport, and this is my final blog post before heading off for the next 7 days. I will be spending the next week (July 28 – Aug 3) offline in rural Ohio visiting my family. This is the land of dial-up Internet, no television, and newspapers as the only link to the outside world. It is too remote for DSL or Cable, and the closest high-speed access is the Starbucks at a truck stop about 20 miles away.

I’ll be spending the week on low-tech pursuits like hanging with my family, playing with my nephew who turns 8 on July 30, playing Scrabble, and drinking wine with my Mom.

I will have my CrackBerry … just in case 🙂

R0ml’s presentation was the highlight of the keynotes today. I will try to capture the gist of it; however, for those of you who have seen him present, his presentation style is so dynamic that it can be difficult to really capture the essence in just a short paragraph. I will give it try. “Open source is like a tomato”, but how much is healthy? According to Stallman, everything should be open source, which R0ml compared to vegans in the world of food (just for full disclosure, I am a vegan). He believes that both the Stallman and vegan approaches are a little extreme and that fanaticism is not good on either side. We should be striving for a balanced approach with open source; some open source is great, but both can coexist. I agree with R0ml on this one; open source is great, but we do not need to exclude proprietary software from the mix.

Danese Cooper led a panel with Mitchell Baker, Tim O’Reilly, Geir Magnusson. David Recordon, and Susan Wu talking about what happens when money enters the picture in an open source project. OSS projects have a free agent model where the project contributors / leader positions are not held by the company. When Mitchell left AOL, AOL did not seem to grok that she would continue to lead the Mozilla projects and that they could not just usurp her title / responsibilities. Open source projects make it more difficult for management to make decisions that are not in the best interest of the project because of the transparency inherent in the open source model. They also discussed how the lack of money is not necessarily a nirvana. Lack of funds reduces monetary corruption, but it also prevents scale. Tim worried that the worse thing he ever did for open source was to hire Larry Wall to work full-time on Perl. Some people thought that Perl 6 was a piece of performance art. Perl was originally rooted in Larry’s ability to resolve real world problems; however money may have removed Larry too far from the real problems and into more theoretical and academic concerns. Too much money can have as big an impact as too little. When developers are sponsored by a corporation do you lose the grassroots feel and the people coding for the joy of it rather than because they are being paid (Apache is seeing this now, especially since most of the incubator projects are being submitted by people being paid to do it). My key takeaway from this session is that money changes the dynamics of an open source community both to an advantage and disadvantage.

We also held our Art of Community Session today at OSCON. I thought that it went very well. The speakers were interesting, the session moved at a rapid pace, and we had a fairly large audience of engaged listeners. The notes from my portion of this session are posted on my Trends in Web 2.0 blog.