Social Networking Watch: News on the Social Networking and Social Media Industry

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The Top Viral Video Ad Campaign, Updated Jan 25, 2010

Brand: Air New Zealand
Campaign: Grab a seat
Agency: -
Source: VisibleMeasures.com

Tagged.com Wins $201,975 In Default Judgment Against Spammer

TECH CRUNCH - Jan 29 - Tagged.com has been awarded more than $200,000 in a default judgment against Erik Vogeler, who spammed thousands of Tagged members by sending them unsolicited messages with links to an adult dating website. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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This post also appears at the SNC Forums.

Social Shopping Site ThisNext Raises $1.2 Million

TECH CRUNCH - Jan 28 - ThisNext has raised $1.2M in funding according to an SEC filing. This brings the startup’s total funding to ~$9M. Launched in 2006, ThisNext’s social shopping site combines browsing for items online with comments, tagging, social recommendations, comment ratings and a wish list. Users can also create a website widget to show products they like to others via any website. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

Elevation To Invest $100 Million In Yelp

TECH CRUNCH - Jan 27 - Elevation will invest as much as $100M in Yelp. For now, Yelp will be raising a $25M in a Series E round from the firm. Elevation co-founder Marc Bodnick will be joining Yelp’s Board of Directors. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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Has Twitter Peaked?

CNN - Jan 26 - Compete, a Web analytics firm, says the Twitter's number of visitors hasn't changed much since June and that its ~22M visitors in Dece was about 770,000 fewer than its highest number, which was in August. "Maybe Twitter was a victim of its own success," said Andrew Lipsman, an analyst at comScore. "It grew so quickly that it isn't meeting its own expectations." Lipsman suggests Twitter's recent stagnant numbers look anemic largely because its growth in early 2009 was so astronomical. After several months of double-digit growth, traffic to Twitter.com skyrocketed in March, increasing by 131% in one month. FULL ARTICLE @ CNN

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Vimeo Video Site Nurtures Its Video Creators

USA TODAY - Jan 27 - Vimeo, which is based in New York, is a unit of publicly traded IAC, which owns many sites, including Match.com, Citysearch and Ask. IAC doesn't break out revenue for its sites and won't say if Vimeo is profitable. But traffic has more than doubled to 2.5M visitors in November from 957,000 in November 2008, according to ComScore. YouTube reached 129M visitors in Nov and showcasing 12.2 billion videos. (Vimeo showed 14.7M videos.) FULL ARTICLE @ USA TODAY

MySpace Mail Now Has Over 15 Million Users

READ WRITE WEB - Jan 27 - Last July, MySpace decided to get into the email business and launched MySpace Mail. In total, over 15M MySpace users now use the service to receive and send email with an @myspace.com address and according to ComScore, MySpace Mail now gets ~38M unique visitors every month. FULL ARTICLE @ MYSPACE

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iovation Stops 30,000 Online Fraudulent Activities Daily

BUSINESS WIRE - Jan 26 - iovation, provider of the reputation service for preventing online fraud and abuse, today announced monthly recurring revenues are up 50% over the beginning of 2009. Since inception, iovation has performed 2.7 billion reputation checks on behalf of customers, processing nearly double in 2009 over 2008, and actively stopping more than 30,000 fraudulent activities per day on the Internet. FULL ARTICLE @ EON

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This post also appears on OnlinePersonalsWatch.

BoonEx Partners With Messmo

PRESS RELEASE - Jan 26 - BoonEx, a supplier of downloadable open source software for social networks, dating sites and online communities partners with messmo, a mobile messaging company for dating and personals websites. The messmo Extension is planned to be available for Dolphin 7 in March 2010. Thanks to messmo sites can easily extend the reach of their existing member-to-member communications, such as email or IM, to now reach members when not at their PC by delivering rich messages. FULL ARTICLE @ PR WEB

This post also appears on OnlinePersonalsWatch.

XIHA Life Receives $1M In Seed Funding

PRESS RELEASE - Jan 26 - XIHA Life, the multilingual and multicultural social network, announced today that it received $1M in seed funding. Veraventure led the round, joined by international angel investors and the company founders. XIHA Life connects people through a multilingual, cross-cultural exchange. Simultaneous, real-time translation allows XIHA citizens to share travel tips, pictures, music, videos, games, knowledge and personal perspectives. FULL ARTICLE @ EARTH TIMES

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Facebook Largest Mobile Social Network

TECH CRUNCH - Jan 26 - Browser maker Opera released their latest State of the Mobile Web report. Facebook comes out as the most-visited social network on the mobile Web, but Twitter’s growth has surged even faster in 2009. According to the report, unique users of Facebook grew more than 600% during 2009. Twitter saw its usage increase more than any other social network, surging 2800% in one year. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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People Limited To 150 Friends

WIKINEWS - Jan 25 - Human brains cannot manage more than 150 friendships. This is the conclusion of Robin Dunbar, Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford. He found that the neocortex in the brain, used for thinking and language, cannot cope with more than 150 friends – a conclusion known as "Dunbar's number". The interesting thing is that you can have 1,500 friends but when you actually look at traffic on sites, you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people that we observe in the real world. FULL ARTICLE @ WIKINEWS

Consumers To Spend $6.2B On Mobile Apps

RESEARCH BRIEF - Jan 25 - According to a new Gartner report consumers will spend $6.2 billion in 2010 in mobile app stores while advertising revenue is expected to generate $0.6 billion worldwide. Mobile app stores will exceed 4.5 billion downloads in 2010. Worldwide mobile app stores' download revenue exceeded $4.2 billion in 2009 and will grow to $29.5 billion by the end of 2013. FULL ARTICLE @ MEDIA POST

The Top Viral Video Ad Campaign, Updated Jan 18, 2010

Brand: Lego
Campaign: LEGO CL!CK
Agency: Pereira & O'Dell / Sharethrough
Source: VisibleMeasures.com

Facebook's U.S. Usage Boomed In 2009

PC WORLD - Jan 22 - In December 2009, ~112M unique visitors went to Facebook, up 105% compared with Dec '08, making Facebook the fourth-most-popular site in the country. On average, 37.7M people visited the site per day, up 181%, and viewed a total of 45 billion pages during the month, up 151%. FULL ARTICLE @ PC WORLD

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Adult Social Media Use Hits New Highs

LOST REMOTE - Jan 20 - Forrester Research report shows adults using social networking sites in big numbers. Some of the report’s findings:

    - A third of adults post at least once a week to social sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
    - A quarter of adults publish a blog and upload video/audio they created.
    - ~60% maintain a profile on a social networking site.
    - 70% Read blogs, tweets and watch UGC video.
FULL ARTICLE @ LOST REMOTE

Microsoft May Lose More Of Facebook’s Ad Business

BUSINESS WEEK - Jan 20 - Microsoft, an investor in Facebook, has lost part of the social-networking site’s advertising business and is renegotiating an agreement as it faces the possibility that more ads will be pulled. The changes come more than two years after Microsoft invested $240M in the site. At the time, Microsoft touted the related ad deal as a major win for its Internet business, which has struggled to catch up with Google. FULL ARTICLE @ BUSINESS WEEK

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