Google, Yahoo, Lycos and others have been making news about adapting their formats, networks, and/or platforms to Friendster style Social Networking.
Social networking, although it has been around awhile, seems to be the latest Internet rage. Friendster, one of the original social networking sites, now finds itself in the company of mammoths such as Google (through its relation to Orkut) and Lycos, who is getting out of the search game altogether to pursue revenues instead from social networking and subscription services.
Social networking sites, especially the newer ones, are nipping at the tails of the dating and business niche sites. According to a November 2003 release from Nielsen/NetRatings, Friendster had approximately one million people spend an average of 35 minutes on its site. That much of a user’s time is nothing to laugh at.
With search engines changing and swapping partners left and right, this user time bonus may be a big stepping stone in the change from soley search to friendly-portal esque networking.
Don´t think so? Did you know what an Orkut was one month ago….
Nice page. It’s good to have kids who can use this medium to find you
Thank you for the great web site – a true resource, and one many people clearly enjoy
Search engines already use collected data from SocialNetworks. Yahoo use del.icio.us to improve search results and Google partnered with StumbleUpon.