Page 22 - Sphere No.26 (Mar 2010)

Co
You love Facebook and can’t
stop Twittering, but what’s
next for social networking?
By Felicity George
Making
New Trends
•
Sphere 20
IN THE SPAN OF JUST A FEWYEARS, online social networking has rapidly become as ubiquitous an
activity as sending e-mail or doing an Internet search. Facebook, which has grown to more than 350
million users worldwide since it was founded in 2004, along with micro-blogging service Twitter, have
emerged as the most popular of the many social media sites established during the past decade.
Just as with the trend seen in e-mail and Web searches, access to online social networking
applications has made the jump from desktop personal computers to today’s Internet-ready
mobile phones. “The prevalence of owning a cellular phone over a PC in most Asian countries
has directly boosted the popularity of mobile social network sites,” says Debbie Swee, a Market
Analyst at IDC Asia-Pacific’s emerging technologies research group.
According to Facebook, there are more than 65 million active users worldwide currently accessing
the site through their mobile devices and people who use Facebook on their mobile devices are almost
50 per cent more active than non-mobile users. Leland Rechis, Mobile User Experience Designer at
Twitter, says plenty of people access their Twitter accounts through the online community’s mobile
Website. Established in 2006, Twitter was reported to have had more than 60 million users worldwide
at the end of last year.
New