Facebook And Twitter See Big Mobile Gains
March 4, 2010
Facebook and Twitter access via mobile browsers has grown by triple-digits in the past year, according to the latest research from comScore.
More than a quarter (30.8%) of smartphone users accessed social networking sites via their mobile browser in January, up 8.3 points from 22.5 percent one year ago. Access to Facebook via mobile browser climbed 112 percent in the past year, while Twitter soared 347 percent.
"Social networking remains one of the most popular and fastest-growing behaviors on both the PC-based Internet and the mobile Web," said Mark Donovan, comScore senior vice president of mobile.
"Social media is a natural sweet spot for mobile since mobile devices are at the center of how people communicate with their circle of friends, whether by phone, text, email, or, increasingly, accessing social networking sites via a mobile browser."
In January, 11.1 percent of all mobile phone users accessed a social networking site via mobile browser, an increase of 4.6 percentage points from the previous year. Much of the growth is due to smartphone owners accessing social networking sites on their mobile browsers. Just 6.8 percent of feature phone users accessed social networking sites on their mobile phones.
Access to the most popular social networking sites via mobile browser continues to see significant growth. In January, 25. 1 million mobile users accessed Facebook, up 112 percent from the previous year. MySpace attracted 11.4 million users about half that of Facebook during the month.
Facebook's mobile browser audience surpassed MySpace in February 2009, three months earlier than the Facebook audience climbed past that of MySpace on the PC-based Internet in May 2009.
Twitter, which has experienced solid growth in both mobile and PC-based visitation, attracted 4.7 million mobile users in January, up 347 percent over the previous year.
Local Business Search as Q&A
February 26, 2010
Human-driven Q&A search service ChaCha launched some new functionality this week for local businesses. Now users can access information about over 15 million businesses in the U.S., courtesy of partner Localeze.ChaCha spoke with WebProNews about why the company considers itself a legitimate contender in the ever-growing local search space.
"Across all platforms - mobile (SMS), online and now Facebook - we are up to nearly 20 million unique users per month," a ChaCha representative tells us. "Our run rate over the past several months has [averaged] 15 million uniques per month. The user base is split almost half male, half female - with over 80% of users between ages 13 and 24. We also answer over 1 million questions per day, and over 400 million answers have been served."
With an ever-increasing number of ways to access local business information, one might wonder what ChaCha brings to the table that can't be found from other existing sources.
"Unique User benefits on ChaCha were the deeper questions, answers and info about the businesses, and in the future, the ability to get mobile coupons, join a businesses mobile lists, get discounts and more," she says. "These are the ChaCha value-adds over other sources, and features and content will continue to expand."
"We will be providing means for businesses to not only upgrade listings to add mobile and online coupons, but to add and edit top questions about their businesses - for example, say it is a Sushi place and a business wants to state the most popular item...they could provide that as one of their key questions and answers," she adds. "They will also be able to add mobile text-based loyalty lists where users can get updates, news and special from that business on their mobile phones."
February isn't even over yet, and already 2010 has been a big year for local search. A lot of that has come from search giant Google, which could make for tough competition for anyone. Google has, for example, started showing mobile users "nearby places", allowing businesses to post announcements/coupons on their Place Pages, while also showing reviews from more sources, tailoring mobile search suggestions to location, and even suggesting competitors for local business searches.
Other sites and apps are taking advantage of consumer location-sharing, making local search more real-time in some ways. ChaCha has a lot to contend with, but clearly the company is confident it can compete as a go-to place for local business search. The company plans to expand on its local business features in he coming months.
Would you use a Q&A service to find local businesses? Comment here.
Facebook Mobile Count Hits, Passes 100 Million
February 11, 2010
Facebook recently updated its official "Statistics" page to reflect the fact that it attracts about 400 million users on a monthly basis. Today, Facebook announced another interesting piece of data: over 100 million folks can be counted upon to access the site from their mobile phones in the same timeframe.
Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook's vice president of user growth, disclosed this detail by posting it on the Facebook Blog, and also wrote, "This usage happens on almost every carrier in the world and comes less than six months after we announced 65 million people on Facebook Mobile."
Impressive, right? To put those figures in perspective, the population of the Philippines is in the neighborhood of 100 million, and so is the population of Mexico.
Also, the number of people who just started using Facebook mobile in the last five months (35 million) is about equal to the number of people who make their home in Algeria, and greater than the number of people who inhabit Canada.
More growth seems likely to occur, too. Palihapitiya concluded his post by stating, "No matter which mobile device you own, you can always stay connected through Facebook using our mobile applications, sites or SMS."
Have You Read This?
> How Over 400 Million People Use Facebook
> Facebook Version Of "Madden" Game In The Works
Google Offers $5.7 Million In Research Funding
February 2, 2010
Google said today it is increasing its funding for 12 university projects to further advance research in areas the company is interested in developing.
Google Focused Research Awards, totaling $5.7 million, include four categories: machine learning, the use of mobile phones as data collection devices for public health and environment monitoring, energy efficiency in computing, and privacy.
"These are all areas in which Google is already deeply invested, and yet there is a long way to go. We're excited to see what these projects contribute to the body of research in these important areas," wrote Alfred Spector, Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives, Google.
"These unrestricted grants are for two to three years, and the recipients will have the advantage of access to Google tools, technologies and expertise."
Have You Read This?
> Google Profiles Go to the SERPs
> Google Launches Social Search Experiment
