This Week in Social 4/23

Another crazy week in the emerging media world. Facebook had their f8 conference with some big announcements, Twitter finally released their member numbers showing their true size, and Mobile technologies are becoming and increasingly important platform for engagement. Below are some articles that I’ve run across this week to highlight these stories and more.

Social Platforms

Meebo’s Enhanced Social Play
“Meebo — which facilitates the integration of multiple services like Facebook and AOL Instant Messenger in one interface — has launched XAuth (Extended Authentication), which automatically recognizes active social platforms and lets users connect with ease on participating publishers’ sites.”

The idea is to increase engagement while diminishing user confusion.

Facebook Makes Major Announcements at F8
The “Become a Fan” button has become a “Like” button. Based on Facebook’s research, they found that users are two times more likely to press a “Like” button than a “Become a Fan” button, increasing engagement with brands.

Facebook also announced the development of the Open Graph API that will allow the “Like” button to be implemented almost anywhere on the web, increasing the reach of Facebook. The Open Graph API also allows people and brands to pull fans from Facebook to other web properties.

Facebook F8: One graph to rule them all

How Big is Twitter
Twitter announced this week for the first time, the actual size of its registered members. According to Twitter they have over 105 million worldwide registered users with 180 million unique visitors every month.

Twitter Stays Strong as Growth Slows
Traffic on Twitter has begun to plateau according to Comscore, Nielsen, and Compete. However, engagement on the platform continues to grow.

Mobile Technologies

Use of cell phone for pictures and video popular across age groups
Here is a great visualization of the rise of the use of mobile technologies across the “Teen” demographic for multimedia (photos and videos).

Foursquare vs. Gowalla: Who’s Winning the Geolocation War? [INFOGRAPHIC]
A great infographic of the battle between Foursquare and Gowalla, both geolocation platforms for mobile technologies. Users “check in” to locations they visit to score points and update their friends.

Decreased Media Usage Hurts Ad Market
Ad spending was down in 2009 as was the amount of time users spent with media (12 hours/day down from 14 hours/day). Every media witnessed a decrease in activities except one; mobile, which was up 39%.

Talk time on mobile was up 12%, while average daily mobile Web use rose 36% to 11 minutes. Texting was also up, by 55%, to take up 27 minutes a day in 2009.