Connect with the world's leading business experts.
Get instant access to their expertise via world–class Q&A, Research, and Events.
The Boom of Social Sites
The brief years of the new century have seen the vast rise of modern social media. Formerly restricted to college students, the colossus of Facebook hulks today over a diminished Myspace that once was the darling of venture capitalists. Orkut was started by Google with high hopes, but is popular now only in in Brazil and India. The early front-runner Friendster is nearly lost in the pack, although it still has a significant presence in the attention marketplace. QQ has a quite large customer base, but nearly all of them are in China. LinkedIn is quite popular with professionals, but seems unlikely to move beyond that niche. The very early Classmates had many members, but has shrunk considerably and shows no signs of recovering. Habbo has held on to its popularity with teenagers and is a strong competitor. Twitter is a rising concern within a specialty niche that has caught on fire in a texting-crazy world.
There have been many surprises in an increasingly cluttered marketplace as one company or another has surged to the fore. The social media marketplace has become relatively mature in a single decade, with many smaller companies clawing for attention or even for sheer survival.
Events
- #TNLive Goes Global at #truLondon Feb 21 @ 4 pm PT
- Are You Already Behind On Your 2012 Sales Goals? Feb 22 @ 11 am PT
- #TChat Radio: Employee Super Powers: Is There an Assessment For That? Feb 22 @ 4 pm PT
- Defining Cloud Computing Feb 23 @ 11 am PT
Related Activity
37 Comments
I think this is the new result, because Facebook is 300,000,000
Facebook is now at 350,000,000; but the Twitter number is pretty close to correct. These stats are probably a month or two old, is all. Twitter's had huge growth because it started this year at around 14,000,000 -- but its still relatively small by social networking standards.
Despite all of the free promotion from TV news shows, Twitter isn't particularly popular outside of the addicted power users, mainly because it's completely non-functional outside of its basic "chatroom" experience. If it grows passed 100,000,000 I will be surprised.
How many actual Tagged.com users are there, tho? Remember they HEAVILY inflated their user figures because they were SPAMMERS.
This is a *terrible* visualization. It says nothing about how these sites have grown, it depicts population size (captured ....when, exactly?) with circle radius (or is that area? - ouch!) and uses color to encode..um....what exactly? This is like a case study in what not to do.
twitter should more bigger, ? alexa ! check ur data=?
impressive graph.
you could have added :
Stayfriends.de : 9 million users, founded in 2002 (Germany)
update :
Trombi.com : 6.8 million users
Your are missing SixDegrees
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SixDegrees.com
What about stumble upon?
and http://www.faceplanet.co.uk is another one
twitter isn't as big as i thought it would've been. unless they didn't include the new accnts made this and last yr.
Social media, in one word, awesome! Unbelievable growth and still...so much untapped potential out there. We have only just begun.
www.lacrosseplayground.com
Despite the comments regarding twitter i think, it is the perfect base for any e-marketing campaign, that you can link to all social networks, sites and all kind web ad and promos you want to deliver to a specific audience, so i think this is just the beginning for twitter.
Wheres Asianavenue?!?
Super
Where is xing.com? Formerly known as openBC?
Very fun to see graphically done. Thanks! Trina
Where is Bolt.com on this list? I recall it being the original MySpace - it was huge around 99-00!
I am not crazy over twitter at all. But the alternatives are worse.
Great article. Amazing how the giants fall so easily....
http://www.groovypost.com
To be fair Charlene, Twitter has gotten pretty big in just a 3 year span. Compare their growth to MySpace and Facebook over the same time periods and you will see that it is on par to those behemoths.
Their next barrier is finding a way to generate revenue, not customer acquisition (even though this is always an ongoing process).
It's cool to see the list start with Classmates.com. Randy Conrad, who was a high school classmate, started it because our high school was on a military base in the Philippines and after we came back to the states, it was hard to locate everyone. We had all dispersed and many of us hadn't kept in touch with each other.
Classmates.com was my first experience in being able to reconnect with people I hadn't seen in a number of years and never thought I'd find again.
The progression for the surviving sites like Facebook and Twitter, will be able to see if they can successfully move to more profitable financial models. It appears Facebook is heading to an IPO.
http://www.rocknfreeworld.com/
This is a very cool infographic, but I agree a bit with MattC's complaints (although not the way he delivers them).
As far as I can tell, the colors don't have any correlation with size. Is there another characteristic they represent?
I assume the timeline represents year of appearance and the numbers represent current (if still active) or peak (if defunct)?
It would be nice to see some notes on which sites are active and which are defunct. This could've been accomplished with the colors.
For the American audience some notes on the foreign social networks would be very helpful.
A key would've been helpful to decipher this infographic a bit.
Notes for version 2 perhaps?
Otherwise nice work!
It's cool, but in terms of value none of them really present anything significant.
It's only a matter of time before facebook is passe and the idea is tired.
Wow! The common denominator is that people are meeting people! That will never change.
Where is Wordpress.com?
Amazing that there is social networks bigger than Twitter that are completely unknown to me at least. Interesting!
What about Farmville? Heard some figs that is is huge... Or is it under fb?
and http://uniknotions.com ? damn so many social sites!?
Your article is really very interesting. This is the information, I’ve been looking for… Thanks
http://welcome-re.ru/
I guess Twitter has more registration than this table shows, however there are people, including me ;-), who have more than one account
featured @ smokingdesigners.com. loved it.
I suggest this site to my friends so it could be useful & informative for them also. Great effort. mafia wars cheats
Alexa rank can be fake. I don't trust Alexa.
http://www.buyacompliaonline.org/
I can see a few site missing, like redbubble.com (well you do have deviantart.com in there), plurk.com, icq.com and I am sure there are others.
twitter isn't as big as i thought it would have been. unless it doesn't inclue the new accnts made this and last yr.
An otherwise well done infographic, it has a major gap by not including SixDegrees. While the site ultimately failed, more than any other site, it pretty much created the "social network" model that all the subsequent sites have built upon, had over a million members and was started in 1997.
Answer This Question