Social networking and blogs beat emails in popularity

Published by Charl Norman on Mar 12th, 2009, 1 Comment

Survey firm Nielsen Online has revealed that its latest survey has seen a quantum shift in the number of people who have jumped over from the traditional email to the use of social networking sites and blogs.

Clubbing the two and calling them as ‘Member communities’ (MC), Nielsen says that all across the globe, the phenomenon of social networking and blogging is taking over and growing rapidly.

Latest stats suggest that 67% of global population is hooked to the MC on net and Brazil tops the list with 80% of its people clicking away at these sites. But it is UK and Germany that have registered the greatest MC user growth in the last year with a 10.3% and respectively 12.5% increase.

The phenomenon is being attributed to the staggering popularity of sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Digg along with the interest of companies like Microsoft and Yahoo in such ventures.

Also the problem of Spam when it comes to emails seems to have forced more and more people in this direction. But the most important reason seems to be the introduction of mobiles that are being custom crafted to access such sites. This has seen a humongous 249% user increase in the UK and 156% in the US when it comes to MC users through mobile.

Seems like blogging and social networking are taking over for now, and we’re happy about it.

Source: TheGuardian
Image by coolme

AfricaMars WebTV

The Internet is here to stay, though we may see a shift from one thing to a newer thing depending on change in technology and IT, an example is the shift from email to MC. Soon email services and sites like Google will get less important as users rely more on user generated content and interactivity online.

More Africans are starting to use the internet and are mainly going straight into social networking on sites like facebook.

I think there is danger with MC moving mobile as people on the move will be tempted to use these services to check for updates and these may increase accident on the roads.

Anyone looking to get a new site up online should look at ways to put the features that MC comes with into the site.

Popular Now: The Developer Crunch in South Africa