Sydney is an interesting location, since Friendster has less than 1.3% of Social networking sites share of visits according to Hitwise* (they don’t make the top 5). Although the article states that there are 1 million registered users in Australia, I highly doubt the majority of these are active users.

Top 5 Social Networks by Share of Visits, Australia*

1 Facebook 51.57%
2 MySpace 33.38%
3 Bebo 5.36%
4 Orkut 1.74%
5 Tagged 1.30%

Read the article here Friendster relocates to Australia

* Source: Hitwise, September 2008: Hitwise Customer Categories of leading 40 Social Networking websites.

Friendster

Richard Kimber, CEO of Friendster kicked the morning off with some background on Friendster:

• Friendster is the biggest across Asia/SE Asia with over 62m registered users (Aug 08) and over 85m users worldwide (Aug 08).
• Friendster adds over 150,000 users every day.

He believes that  “social networks are the new portals” and ran through the following trends.

• 1 – Social Network are Media Platforms
• 2 – Further opening of social networks encourages more  developer programs
• 3 – Social networks as portals
• 4 – Mobile is a natural for social networking
• 5 – Advertising evolution on social networks
• 6 – Race is on for monetization

Richard  stressed the emotional links between people (friends and family)  as the success to social networks and that they are the ultimate UGC sites.

MySpace

This was a little disappointing as it appeared to be one big sales pitch.  Myspace makes lots of money ($850m in revenue last year) and this was to become the most important point of the whole presentation.  Rebecca Horne ran through how Myspace works,  how successful they have been and some demo and user info:

Age Demographics:

• 14-17 26%
• 18-24 39%
• 25-34 19%
• 35-49 11%
• 50+ 5%

Rush Hour

• Biggest usage is between 5-7pm, 68 % of usuage occurs in the evening.  This starts to alter the traditional media mx of everyone sitting down in front of the TV.

Myspaces’ biggest advantage was their ability to target users with advertising at a very granular level, age, interests, lifestyle etc,  and they believe “Hyper Targeting” will be the next big thing in advertising.

Surprisingly a swipe was taken at Facebook for their open user applications policy that supposedly began to annoy people.  Myspace didn’t.   I find it slightly amusing that Myspace try to claim the higher ground here, Pimp my Myspace profile anyone?

Bebo

Another sales pitch presentation, but full marks to Bebo General Manager,  Francisco Cordero for some great quotes:

• “Bebo is the Evolution of social networks”
• …in Ireland “Bebo is the closest thing to God”

Bebo focuses on the 13-24 market and Francisco ran through a few of their success stories, including Kate Modern (which I am finding myself strangely drawn to!).  Sponsors and advertisers are written into the script, so they become part of the contents, as opposed to sitting beside the content (eg Myspace).

Summary

Overall I was a little disappointed in the speakers because I don’t think they really catered to the audience.  Everyone there wanted to learn and exchange information on how to use social networks to help their business or to aid business collaboration.  Unfortunately all we really got were 3 sales pitches.

I do agree with Richard Kimber that social networks are the new portals.  So far I have never found a portal that I really stuck to (I’ve tried them all – Ninemsn, Yahoo, iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes etc.), but I find myself going back to Facebook all the time.  (Facebook has been my SN of choice in 2008).

Do you think social networks are the new portals?

Other blogs from the event

Online Social Networking & Business Collaboration World - Ross Dawson (Chair of the event)

Social Networking and Business Collaboration World – Day One - Jonathan Crossfield