Social Networking

Friendster has announced a change of direction. The social networking site, which is now owned by MOL Global, an Asian payments company, will be focusing on social gaming from now on. Speaking in the Philippines, Ganesh Bangah, the chief executive of MOL Global, said that the site will ultimately feature hundreds of games.

The new platform, which currently goes under the name Project Neutron, will be available next year. It will make use of a virtual currency with which virtual goods, online games and other applications can be purchased.

This partly explains Friendster’s increased ties with Facebook, which will presumably function as more of a partner than a competitor in future. The Friendster patent portfolio was recently sold to Facebook and there are also gift cards in some Asian countries that feature Facebook Credits.

Launched in 2002, Friendster currently has around 115m users worldwide with around 61m unique visitors each month.

Recent research has revealed that social networking is costing the UK economy £14bn a year due to workers going on such sites during work hours.

The study said that 2m UK workers spend an hour of each working day on Facebook and similar sites and as many as half of UK employees spend half an hour a day on them.

Of those people, 14 per cent said social networking made them less productive, while 10 per cent said it improved their productivity. Twice as many people thought social networking sites should be accessible at work than thought they should be blocked.

The managing director of Myjobgroup.co.uk, Lee Fayer, said:

“Whilst we are certainly not kill-joys, people spending over an hour a day in work time on the likes of Facebook are seriously hampering companies’ efforts to boost productivity, which is more important than ever given the fragile state of our economy.”

As you would expect, staff who work on computers were far more likely to use social networking sites at work. However, with social networking sites now accessible via mobile phones, the situation could deteriorate.

Recent figures released by comScore confirm what many have suspected. Of 38.2m people over the age of 15 who used the internet in May of this year, nine out of ten visited a social networking site.

That puts the number of social networking users at around 33m, which represents a 13 per cent increase compared to the same period last year. Furthermore, people are even more involved, spending longer hours on the sites as well. The average rose hugely from 4.6 hours per person to 7.1 hours.

Facebook is used by 80 per cent of UK internet users, while Twitter and MySpace lag behind. Twitter had around 4.3m UK users in May and MySpace around 3.3m.

British internet usage increasingly revolves around social networking and this is now as significant as email or general web research, taking up a substantial percentage of users’ online time. In fact, with 90 per cent of people who go online using social networking sites, it is actually the most popular web activity.

A number of famous faces are in the running to be the first to gain 10m friends on Facebook. The current US President, Barack Obama, is currently at 9.41m, but pop musician, Lady Gaga, is fractionally ahead with 9.76m.

Up until last week, Obama was ahead, which means that Lady Gaga is making a timely surge. Neither, however, is in the same league as Michael Jackson. A remembrance page for the late ‘King of Pop’ has attracted over 14m friends.

Lady Gaga also leads Barack Obama on Twitter. The @ladygaga account has 4.72m followers against 4.42m following @barackobama. However, there is also a White House account, @whitehouse, which has 1.77m followers. Can Obama take credit for any of those?

Again both are a little way short of the outright leader though. On Twitter, Britney Spears is way out in front. @britneyspears has 5.24m followers.

To put that level of popularity in some kind of context, at the minute, it is said that around 65m Twitter updates are made every day. That equates to about 750 tweets a second, on average.

According to Yuri Milner, the head of Digital Sky Technologies (DST), which has made an investment of around £670m in a number of related Russian companies, Russian internet usage could potentially reach 85 per cent. Milner cites the climate and the large pool of engineering expertise in the country as reasons why this might be the case.

As well as investing in a Russian social networking company, DST also has a stake in Facebook. Milner points out that Russia is a large country and that people have a need to stay in touch, therefore what better tool than social networking?

He says that internet usage is greater in cold countries quite simply because people tend to stay indoors more.

“I think that Russia is moving in the direction where internet penetration would be 80-85% over time, as opposed to 50-60% [in many other countries].”

Along with Japan, China and South Korea, Russia is one of the few countries where Facebook is not the leading social networking site. There are around a million Facebook users in Russia, although that figure is doubling roughly once every six months.