Social Networking Watch

How Non-profits Are Using SN To Raise Money

CHICAGO TRIBUNE -- Apr 30 -- Non-profit organizations are testing ways to raise money through social networks. Charities see potential in recruiting young activists who already use online networks to broadcast their identities and make connections. Circle of Health International has its own Facebook page, and 26-year-old Matt Bieber clicked on an application called Causes that allowed him to invite more than 100 of his 200-plus contacts to publicize the non-profit on their profile pages. WaterPartners International, which promotes safe drinking water, created three fictional characters from Ethiopia, India and Honduras and placed them in a virtual village on Second Life to illustrate the challenges of accessing potable water. The avatars also have profiles on MySpace and Facebook. The Humane Society has raised more than $33,000 on Facebook from users who have set up pages to protest everything from puppy mills to seal clubbing in Namibia. The amount of money raised so far is tiny, but we could see online marketing and fundraising slowly displacing direct mail. FULL ARTICLE @ CHICAGO TRIBUNE

 Mark Brooks: Social Networking Watch has $1k in Kiva and $1k in MicroPlace. MicroPlace pays interest and you can sit back and let the money recirculate. Kiva involves user a little more, but doesn't pay interest. No biggie, it's a great cause. We'll be adding more money in and can't recommend these sites enough. 

Gaydar Sets Up China Networking Site

GUARDIAN.CO.UK -- Apr 30 -- The gay and lesbian media company Gaydar is expanding its empire into China, the world's largest internet market, with a social networking portal that will target a gay population of more than 50M people. GaydarNation China will launch later this year for the gay and lesbian communities across China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Malaysia. The site will run in partnership with the web and mobile advertising specialists GoConnect, building on a six-year relationship in Australia, where GoConnect provides advertising for Gaydar.com.au. FULL ARTICLE @ GUARDIAN.CO.UK

Users Are Translating Facebook

ASSOCIATED PRESS -- Apr 29 -- Facebook, worth more than $15 billion by many estimates, got a good deal on going global. Its users around the world are translating Facebook's visible framework into nearly two dozen languages - for free. The concept of collaborative translation is familiar in open-source programming communities. But Facebook's effort, as it builds sites in Japanese, Turkish, Chinese, Portuguese, Swedish and Dutch to join versions in Spanish, French and German, is among the highest-profile attempts to harness users' energy to do work traditionally handled by professionals. The Spanish-language version has taken a particular beating for grammatical, spelling and usage problems throughout. FULL ARTICLE @ COLUMBIA TRIBUNE

Hi5 A Victim Of Their Own Success

MASHABLE -- Apr 29 -- In the last month, third-party developers have launched well over 400 OpenSocial apps on hi5's network. These apps have continued to have faster adoption rates than on other social networks, with the hi5 Platform averaging around a million application installs on a daily basis. Around half of hi5's 80m members engaged with three or more installed apps. FULL ARTICLE @ MASHABLE

The Real Twitter Usage Numbers

TECH CRUNCH -- Apr 29 -- Speculation about Twitter's new round of financing is leading everyone to speculate on Twitter's actual penetration into the "mainstream," or lack thereof. Hitwise says web visits have increased 8x in the last year. Compete shows about 900,000 U.S. monthly website visitors. Comscore puts the worldwide number at 1.3m unique monthly visitors in March. None of that data is particularly useful, since so much of the action on Twitter occurs via mobile phones, IM and desktop clients like Alert Thingy, MySocial24×7 and Twhirl.

The key measure of Twitter usage is total users:
March 2008
Total Users: 1+ million
Total Active Users: 200,000 per week
Total Twitter Messages: 3 million/day
FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

Social Networking Goes Open Source With Insoshi

TECH CRUNCH -- Apr 29 -- Insoshi officially released their software for public download so anyone can install it on-premise to run their own social networks. Insoshi is not the first company to release its social networking code. Broadband Mechanics has always emphasized the openness of its PeopleAggregator platform, and even Ning, the most publicized DIY social networking company, will give you the underlying code if you request it. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

Rent Kong Helps Renters And Rentees

ASOCIATED CONTENT -- Apr 24 -- Rent Kong is a new social network where users can create a profile for their rental if they are a manager or owner. People looking to rent can create a profile that tells renters what they're looking for and the contact information and then renters can find them. FULL ARTICLE @ ASSOCIATED CONTENT

MySpace Stripped Of MySpace.co.uk Domain Victory

THE REGISTER -- Apr 29 -- Nominet's Dispute Resolution Service (DRS), had ruled in favour of MySpace in January, despite the domain having been registered by a small British ISP six years before the US social network was founded. The judgement, released on Thursday last week and passed to The Register today, means control of the address remains with Stockport's Total Web Solutions (TWS). TWS originally registered myspace.co.uk in August 1997 to provide its clients with a cheap and easy-to-use homepage and email address in the early days of the web. It also registered bigspace.co.uk for the same purpose. FULL ARTICLE @ THE REGISTER

LinkedIn Prepares For Lucrative Push Into Europe

PC WORLD -- Apr 29 -- LinkedIn is building up its European operations. It recently secured the http://linkedin.co.uk domain, hired an advertising sales head for its London office. LinkedIn has now 20m members worldwide with 1.3m joining per month. MySpace has 200m registered users and Facebook at least 70m. Advertisers are willing to pay more for display ads on LinkedIn than other social networks. LinkedIn's "cost-per-thousand" -- which is how much a company pays for its ad to be shown 1,000 times, known as CPM -- is around $75 in the U.S. and £25 (US$50) in the U.K. Other LinkedIn officials say those rates are far higher than what MySpace and others can charge now. FULL ARTICLE @ PC WORLD

Friends Reunited Goes Free

GUARDIAN.CO.UK -- Apr 28 -- Friends Reunited allows users to search for friends for free whereas it had charged users £7.50 to email contacts for six months. Now it has dispensed with the subscription model and will allow full access for free. Friends Reunited's head, Jon Clarke, said the business derives about 40% of its revenues from subscription, but he is confident that the extra members from a free service will generate enough advertising revenue to compensate for the loss. FULL ARTICLE @ GUARDIAN.CO.UK