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in the same vein as what the hitwise blog mentioned last week about ‘youtube’ being the new ‘funny videos’, research this week shows that social networking sites are the new ‘chat rooms’.

We found a strong negative correlation between the weekly share of UK Internet searches for “myspace” and “bebo” with “chat rooms” and “free chat rooms” over the past two years. The charts below illustrate this nicely.

here’s a look at the correlation between ‘myspace’ and ‘chat rooms’, followed by ‘bebo’ and ‘chat rooms’.

all this great research is part of an initiative at hitwise to see how consumer search behavior has changed over the past couple of years.

Technorati Tags: hitwise, blog, youtube, funny videos, research, social networking, chat rooms, myspace, bebo

videosift, the largest community built on pligg (with over 1 million monthly unique visits), emailed techcrunch today to announce that they have developed their own content management system and will discontinue using pligg.

VideoSift says their new platform is built exclusively for video aggregation and will serve their needs better than the Pligg software. They were also hesitant, they say, to continue to contribute to the Pligg open source project. They cite a “serious security breach” that compromised part of their database and was based on a simple exploit that shouldn’t have existed.

this news comes less than two weeks after the founders of the cms put pligg up for sale.

Technorati Tags: videosift, pligg, cms

now here’s an advertising campaign for our times. a new social networking and dating site for geeks, appropriately called geek flirt has launched an incredibly viral (and may i say very cute) lolcatvertising campaign that makes you go ‘i can haz gurlfrend?’. here are the 5 ads:

Technorati Tags: lolcats, advertisement, geekflirt, geek, dating, social networking, site, viral

i know a lot of you have been asking me, well i finally got some invites for streamy. let me know if you would like one, i have five left.

check out all the other private beta invites i have.

update: we’re all sold out (i.e. i gave ‘em all away already).

Technorati Tags: streamy, private, beta, invite

in an attempt to simplify the users’ profile page interface, facebook has added ‘mini icons’ under your photograph. these mini icons show thumbnails of all the facebook features that you have enabled and the applications you have added to your profile, and is a much better (cleaner and clutter free) way to display these.

you don’t have to browse a friend’s profile to see what he has added, just look at these icons. as you can see, i’m not a big fan of facebook applications.

Technorati Tags: social networking, facebook, mini, applications

if you asked me, i would’ve said nothing, but the american intelligence agencies have something else on their minds: a-space, a myspace for spies.

Thomas Fingar, the deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, believes the common workspace – a kind of “MySpace for analysts” – will generate better analysis by breaking down firewalls across the traditionally stove-piped intelligence community. He says the technology can also help process increasing amounts of information where the number of analysts is limited.

this really underscores the strengths of the social networking model championed by sites like myspace, facebook, bebo, and so on. on another note, knowing that the cia has openly used facebook for recruiting purposes in the past, we have to wonder, does what happen on facebook stay on facebook?

Technorati Tags: myspace, spies, social networking, analyst, cia, facebook, bebo

jordan mccollum has an interesting post detailing the impending launch of invideo advertising on youtube.

As an alternative to preroll and postroll ads, InVideo ads offer more engagement, less disruption for viewers and lower video abandonment rates—a win all around.

while anyone who has watched cable television in south-asia knows that this isn’t anything new, i have to agree that invideo advertising (if done right) will definitely be much less distruptive and much more palatable than pre-roll or post-roll ads. these ads will start 15 seconds into a clip, will occupy the bottom 20% of the player, and if not clicked on within 10 seconds, will automatically disappear for the remainder of the video’s duration.

according to research done at yourube, invideo ads offer a deeper level of engagement and will result in improved conversion for marketers, making the site a much better marketing platform.

Technorati Tags: youtube, invideo, advertising, marketing, engagement, conversion

twitter has finally added one of the most requested features to their service - people search.

We’ve just added Profile Search to Twitter! Now you can search across profile information like name, location, bio, and url. That means you can find more people to follow. The search box is over on the right when you’re signed in. Go ahead and find other Twitter-ers in San Francisco, New York, or Tokyo or find out your friends are already Twittering and you didn’t even know it!

Technorati Tags: twitter, micro-blogging, profile, people, search

recently, there have been a lot of articles of the sort ‘x number of ways to improve twitter’. what i find striking about these articles is that pownce, a twitter competitor, has already implemented most of these improvements that people are requesting to be added to twitter.

what we see is that either 1) people recommended an improvement or found something missing in twitter, which pownce later implemented in its version of the micro-blogging platform, or 2) pownce foresaw the need for some functionality and implemented it, which people liked and subsequently felt was missing from twitter. either way, this shows how pownce is really what many expect the next iteration of twitter to be. here’s a look at 7 ways in which pownce improves upon twitter.

1. groups: pownce lets you organize your friends into groups and then allows you to send messages to sets of people.

2. better url handling: rather than using a 3rd party service like tinyurl (which can be unreliable at times), on pownce you can use the actual url without worrying about wasting characters (there is no limit to message size).

3 . better design: if there’s one thing that pownce really nailed, it is the beautiful design. the interface is also skinnable, which means there will be something for everyone.

4. better message handling: there are a couple of ways in which message handling on pownce is much better than on twitter. 1) there is no minimum message size, 2) you can send messages to the public, to your friends, to a self-created group, and to individuals, 3) all replies to a message are threaded, 4) you can forward messages to other people.

5. privacy settings: only messages you sent to the public can be seen by everyone. other message can only be seen by the subset they are sent to.

6. more versatility: in addition to sending messages, you can also share files and create events. there are also much better options for which notifications you would like to receive.

7. friends: pownce makes it a lot easier to look for and add friends. if you go to the ‘add friends’ page, you are shown friends of your friends to see if you know or want to add any of them. in addition you can also search for people to add as friends.

the point of this post isn’t to say that pownce is better, surely there are several things that twitter still does better or that pownce simply lacks. while the twitter versus pownce versus [insert micro-blogging tool name here] debate will rage on, the bottom line is that though pownce is far from revolutionary or even a totally new product, it does fix a ton of things that are wrong with twitter (and the prevailing micro-blogging platform) and that we can expect to be improved in twitter 2.0.

References:

1. Five Quick Suggestions to Improve Twitter by Allen Stern
2. Six Ways to Improve Twitter by Josh Lowensohn
3. Introducing Pownce, Like Twitter But Better by Hong Kiat

ever had a song stuck into your head that you wanted to hear a piece of right away? with yahoo! audio search now you can do exactly that.

Now on Yahoo! Audio Search you can play samples of millions of songs. The new inline player provides instant playback right next to the search results. There are no intrusive pop-ups or multiple browser windows to manage — only a 30-second, uninterrupted instant audio experience. And, there’s also a ‘Select Preferred Audio Service’ feature that helps you link to your favorite audio provider directly from the results page.

simply search for a song, an artist, album, or lyrics from a song and listen to a snippet right away.

now this is the kind of innovation that is going to put yahoo! back in the game. also of interest are these yahoo! audio search apis.