Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Checking Out Some Social Networking Sites

I've been part of the social site community for a while now and one thing I definitely notice about networking sites is that it is trendy. Back in the days xanga.com was very popular amongst my group of friends. People would post weblogs and their friends will comment on it. I remember one ting about xanga that made it really popular was the "eprops" you received for your post. Everyone would try to get as many eprops as possible. But then xanga just kinda fell off.

Then after xanga came friendster. I guess at that time friendster was the revolutionary form of social networking. It allowed your to add pictures and have all your friends to comment on your pics. It was different from xanga because it allowed more interaction with your friends. I remember friendster becoming very popular in brooklyn and then like xanga it sort of just dwindled away.

I think myspace took over the place of friendster. It is funny watching your friend just migrate from one site to another. I think the best feature about myspace was the ability to personalize your profile, like changing the templates, different color and most of all adding your own music. When this feature became available I think this is what pushed music artists to create myspace. If I can remember correctly I think Sean Kingston found through myspace.

And now, amongst my friends myspace is seldom used. All my friends migrated to facebook. It is unbelievable how much im's i receive from facebook from a friend inviting me. Here is an interesting fact I discovered from alexa.com.
These are the data as of 10/28/2008:

Xanga.com users come from these countries:

Friendster.com users come from these countries:

Singapore5.5%


these two sites are no longer popular among my friends but yet they still maintain a fairly high traffic ranking and the reason is be cause other countries began to take light from these sites. As you can see 40% of users of xanga are from Hong Kong and 23% from United States. And for friendster only 7% in US .


4 comments:

John said...

The breakdown of users by region is really interesting. We in the US may think Friendster is "not that popular" but you've shown us that it has reached a global status. Nice work.

newmediaadls said...

I used to use xanga back in the day too. I think it's very similar to blogging. The statistics you put up were very interesting. I didn't know xanga was highly active in other countries.

David Fang said...

Very interesting analysis. I remember a lot of my friends used Xanga, but apparently the number of people actively using that site has dropped tremendously compared to the height of it's popularity.

NEW MEDIA DL said...

haha, I remember being on xanga for like a year, and then once I made a MYSpace I stopped updating my xanga.