Segmentation in social networks

Social networks are popping up everywhere and for different age groups. Recent the UK consumer group Which? published a survey grading the various social networks. Bebo, Facebook and Saga Zone came out as the best three. The top ten, including MySpace, show segmentation, according to age groups, but also to globalisation.

In the UK segmentation in age can be distinguished. MySpace is aiming at the segment of older teenagers and early twens. Bebo and Facebook and is aiming at a target group from 20 onwards. Now also the age group of silver surfers has its own social network in the Saga Zone, a site still at its infancy.

Of course the global internet has had from the beginning a segmentation in sites with regard to age. The site Habbo Hotel is a typical hangout for teenagers. LinkedIn and Xing have been the social network for professionals. And in several countries, like in the Netherlands, there is a network for seniors. From the beginning they have not been typified as social networks, but functioned like them, even to the point of organising physical meeting like Xing and Seniornet do in the Netherlands.

But the social networks have also another interesting aspect, the globalisation. Social networks like Facebook and My Space as well as LinkedIn and Xing aim at the whole world. Yet Bebo and Saga Zone are typically active in the UK. Also in the Netherlands there is a social network for young professionals, Hyves, which is not limited to the Netherlands, but has most of its subscribers there. Of course language is one of the factors as well as a limited national outlook. I can imagine that Saga Zone will do it better in the UK, as the target group looks for contacts in its own country. Yet Facebook is internationally oriented and has a global target group. I guess it will be very hard to set up a European social network as this geographical region is fragmented by languages.

Recently Ofcom, the UK telecom watchdog, released a study saying the UK social network participants spent more time on social networking than their European counterparts, devoting 5,3 hours a month and visiting them 23 times, roughly 14 minutes per visit. Yet people are getting cautious about participating in social networks. According to a survey by the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) no less than 71 per cent of 14- to 21-year-olds did not want their future employers to see their profiles on social networking sites; only 40 per cent realised that their online activities could be traced indefinitely. Also security of the network such as identity theft is an issue before subscribing.

Blog Posting Number: 670

Tags: social network

Mindtrek 2007 (3)

Digital exhibitionism

Mindtrek has as theme: Back to the Future. As a start of the conference a concept video for a hypothetical product, called the Knowledge Navigator, was shown, which Apple Computer produced in 1987. Voice control was predominant in the video as well as an intelligent interface.

But the first presenter Teemu Kurppa did hardly go back in the future. He told about the company Jaiku; the name is a word combination between the Japanese poem form haiku and the Finnish word yukku?). I had not heard of the company yet, but I should have known as Tim O’Reilly said at the occasion of the launch of iPhone the memorable words: I love my iPhone, but bah, no Jaiku. So he was missing Jaiku badly; question is of course whether I would miss it.

I understood that Jaiku is a mobile social network. Or, as the founder of the Jaiku Jyri Engestrom, defines it as an object-oriented sociality. The service is about aggregating the personal textual, photographic and video activities and that of your friends on the web. Jaiku brings together streams of reactions and discussion and indicates locations, current calender data. The service entails web, chat, SMS/MMS, rich mobile content, mobile web and third party applications such as a gateway from and to a Blackberry.

Teemu Kurppa described the service as routing content such as text, photographs and videos or even better mobile story telling with shorter messages. Mobile is involving people in an event.

In the back of my mind a mental tickertape kept telling me Twitter, Twitter. Jaiku is a service like Twitter, but different. Twitter is more a social text service; Jaiku is a router and organiser of social events and mobile interaction.

Jaiku is a start-up which picked up see funding and has now 7 people working worldwide. It is basically burning venture capital money at present. A real business model is not present; it is important to grow as fast as possible internationally. Jaiku users can be found in the USA. There are presently 500 users online all the time with traffic of 20Mb per month.

I talked with some people of the Dutch delegation about the service. Would they use a service like that? What make people tick when they use such a service, which muy business partner Hans calls digital exhibitionism (but he is far over 35 years of age)? I can only see that I am not in the target group. Kids are messaging the whole day and telling what they do. I guess that they like to tell their peer group that they are still alive and kicking. But more companies have their angle in the pond: Yahoo groups, Hyves, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and now Jaiku. A lot of personal information can be gathered through these services. Some kids will be come quite unhappy about letting out personal information. Or they might just end up in a group which takes a direction they do not like. Recently I talked to a girl from Polish descent. She had joined the group I love Polish girls; the group tuned into a prostitutes’ bulletin board.

Blog Posting Number: 884

Tags: social network