Have you ever noticed, the increasing interest of your old Aunts  in facebook or other social networking websites? Have you ever noticed, people updating their status messages (provoking conversations and chitchats). I have observed these kind of behavior and sometimes participated in these conversations as well. But where am I heading with all this? Letme ask you a question, How social are you?

Answer comes from a researcher Josh Bernoff who noted a “new behavior” in patterns of social technology usage by the people, and made a new category to describe such users: “conversationalists.” Bernoff defines conversationalists as “people who update their social network status to converse” on at least a weekly basis. According to Forrester surveys, the category is 56 percent female, more so than any other group, with 70 percent aged 30 and older. All of which fits quite nicely with my anecdotal evidence.

They take a close look at the social and demographic structure of the social web population ( To be more exhaustive and close to accurately model the user behavior, they analyzed the profiles for over a hundred clients, profiling Walmart shoppers, non-profit donors, and doctors).  The categorization of users is different than  Technorati’s statistics which mostly focus on raw blog growth numbers and structural features of the blogosphere.

P.S: Note that participation at one level may or may not overlap with the participation at other levels — so the ratios sum up to over 100%.

I am trying to explain as well as compare the increase and change in the user behavior for two years of their research. Results for previous year research can be found here.

Creators publish blogs, maintain Web pages, or upload videos to sites like YouTube at least once per month. Creators include just 24% of the adult online population. Creators are generally youngsters the average age of adult users is 39 — but are evenly split between men and women. This percent in year 2007 was just 13%.

Critics participate in either of two ways commenting on blogs or posting ratings and reviews on sites like Amazon.com. Critics represent 37% of all adult online consumers and on average are several years older than Creators. This percent in year 2007 was just 19%.

Collectors create metadata that’s shared with the entire community, e.g. by saving URLs on a social bookmarking service like del.icio.us or using RSS feeds on Bloglines. Collectors represent 20% of the adult online population and are the most male-dominated of all the Social Technographics groups. This percent in year 2007 was just 19%.

Joiners use a social networking site like MySpace.com or Facebook. Joiners represent 59% of the adult online population and are the youngest of the Social Technographics groups. They are highly likely to engage in other Social Computing activities — 59% also read blogs, while 30% publish blogs. This percent in year 2007 was just 19%.

Spectators represent 70% of the adult online population and are slightly more likely to be women and have the lowest household income of all the social Technographics groups. The most common activity for Spectators is reading blogs, with only a small overlap with users who watch peer-generated video on sites like YouTube. This percent in year 2007 was just 33%.

Inactives. Today, 17% of online adults do not participate at all in social computing activities. These Inactives have an average age of 50, are more likely to be women, and are much less likely to consider themselves leaders or tell their friends about products that interest them. This percent in year 2007 was 52%.

What we see from the above classification is a drastic change in behaviour of online users in last two years, most changes are directed towards the Inactives and Spectators. So now next time if you see your aunt updating her status message in Facebook, consider her among the new Joiners to the world of social networking.

Article Previosuly mirror-posted by me at Global Thoughtz.

Anand

(Hi, it’s Cecil here. A french version of this post is available on Heavy Mental)

Bertrand Duperrin explains in a quite remarkable post the risk of backslash when using standard web 2.0 key words while presenting social networks to a new audience. The reason is : there could be some misunderstanding from the audience.

Among these key words : Conversation. Bertrand exposes the issue :

Just try to explain to a manager who has been struggling for years to reduce wasted time and productivity due to gossip, that time is now for team talk and conversation. And even worst : that his role is to stimulate this conversation. Then watch his face that slowly turns sour.

6 reasons to bring management and the enterprise conversation back together. And to use collaborative platforms to foster the latter. Read more »

Continuing our short(!) screenshot-series on geeky innovations… Thank you, Skitch, for making it so easy!

I was really missing a collection of my Loved Tracks in Last.fm and it looks like the new version delivered. What we need next is a way for ratings in iTunes (and more specifically my iPod) to automatically register as “loved” in Last.fm, and for that to create a TheFilter-like service of creating custom playlists that I like.

*Sigh* why does interoperability of web-to-real-world-to-web have to be so complicated?

Vincent

Bangalore based startup wants to build social networking site for the poor. babajob.com and babalife.com are both the brainchild of Sean Blagsvedt.  Sean is originally from the US, worked for Microsoft in Redmond and then in Bangalore India.  He got the idea for starting a social networking site for the poor when he heard from the noted Duke University economist Anirudh Krishna, who found that many poor Indians stay poor not because there are no better jobs, but because they lack the connections to discover better jobs.  In a poor nation like India where majority of people, who live in an informal economy, get the temporary jobs by word of mouth i.e. their existing network. 

babajob.com (Sean calls it LinkedIn for the Villages!) and babalife.com (which is like Facebook for the poor) can be successfully used to help expand the network of millions of cooks, maids, construction workers, drivers, and others. How can one create a social network for the target audience where very few are literate let alone computer savvy? That’s the challenge that Babajob faces.  But, their model — pay people who help the poor find jobs, looks promising.  This is a perfect confluence of Altruism and Capitalism and can be successfully used to alleviate poverty at a faster rate.  The same model can be applied to other countries in South Asia as well as Africa and Latin America.  Currently babajob.com and babalife.org offer services only to the surrounding areas of Bangalore.  The plan is to eventually expand to the rest of India soon and then to the entire world.

Read more at International Herald Tribune’s article Internet revolution reaches India’s poor.