David strikes Goliath again, with Facebook overtaking Google’s Orkut in India.

Orkut was leading social networking  scene in India, but marketing research company comScore reported says not anymore.

According to comScore, Facebook climbed to the number one spot in July 2010 with 179 percent growth in the last one last year, while Orkut registered a growth of 16 percent within the same time period.

An interesting fact shown by the report is the popularity of social networking sites in India. In July 2010, more than 33 million internet users age 15 and above visited social networking sites, representing 84 percent of the total internet audience in India.

“The social networking phenomenon continues to gain steam worldwide, and India represents one of the fastest growing markets at the moment,” says Will Hodgman, comScore executive vice president for the Asia-Pacific region. “Though Facebook has tripled its audience in the past year to pace the growth for the category, several other social networking sites have posted their own sizeable gains.”

In terms of unique users, Facebook took the top spot with 20.9 million users, orkut dropped to second with 19.6 million users, and Twitter with 3.3 million users took the fifth place.

Twitter show the highest growth rate with an impressive growth of 239 percent from last year.

India now the world’s seventh largest market for social networking. In terms of unique visitors for social networking sites, United States retains top spot, followed by China, Germany, Russian Federation, Brazil, United Kingdom, India, France, Japan, and South Korea.

Note: This comScore data reports doesn’t include visitation from public computers such as internet cafes or access from mobile phones and PDAs.

American internet users are spending increasing amount of time on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, while the amount of time spent on e-mail and traditional web portals have declined,according to a recent research report from Nielsen.

The result of the study says that web users, in June, devoted 23% of their online time to social networking sites, up from 16% a year ago. Online games ranked second, previously held by e-mail use, where people spend 10% of their time, powered by social games like Zynga’s Farmville.

Another major service to enjoy increase user time in June was streaming of videos and movies  with 3.9%, up from 3.5% a year ago.

This is no major surprise as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube together enjoys close to one billion users, or roughly 20 percent of the world’s population.

Time spent on E-mail dropped from 12% to 8.3%, while online time spent on traditional portals like Yahoo! also fell from 5.5% to4.4% in the last one year.

“You can start your daily online experience on Facebook and perform many essential communications functions,” Nielsen analyst Dave Martin said. “In the past, you might have to log into Yahoo Mail and then log into MSN Messenger and then maybe check the Yahoo home page for new, breaking news.”

Another interesting detail the report showed was; twice as many users over the age of 50 are using social networks than users under age 18, indicating the social network audience is getting more matured.

There are many ways a user can become a victim of online oversharing.

Leaving aside the social-network related crime, have you ever though that your post on Facebook and Twitter could raise your insurance premiums or get your insurance claims denied?

Experts on an insurance comparison website, confused.com, warned that people who use social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter could eventually face price hikes of as much as 10% in their home insurance premiums.

Darren Black, Head of Home Insurance, confused.com says, “criminals are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their information gathering even using Google Earth and Streetview to plan their burglaries with military precision.

“Insurance providers are starting to take into account when they are assessing claims and we may in future see insurers declining claims if they believe the customer was negligent.”

The website pleaserobme.com has recently highlighted the issue and dangers of online oversharing by listing empty homes, which have created quite a debate on the affects associated with it.

We have also heard about Nathalie Blanchard whose insurance benefits were reportedly pulled back by her insurance company in regard to her info and photos on Facebook.

So, it’s apt to say that not only informing others you are not home, but posting photos of extreme sports hobby or one that depicts your negligence etc might as well cost you dearly.

It is very advisable to be very careful about what you share online, which in the worst-case scenario might even endanger your life and those around you.

More than 3,500 registered sex offenders in New York have been kicked from social-networking sites, Facebook and MySpace. This is the first time that the new e-Stop (Electronic Security and Targeting of Online Predators) act of 2008 has actually been used.

Under the state’s e-STOP Act, registered offenders are required to register their emails and other online identifiers with the state so that their online activities can be monitored. Sex offenders have 10 days to notify the state after creating new online profiles or face prosecution for a new felony.

It will be good to see more and more of these pervs who prey on the naive and defenceless cyberspace kids be rounded up and put aside.

There has been a lot of incidents regarding social networking sites lately and also a few recent calls for Facebook to actively do some background-check of its users, which is obviously almost impossible. But it’s nice to see the New York law enforcers taking this proactive stance on the issue of online prevs.

This act will be more effective if the other States and countries adopts it. Also hoping that more social-networking sites come forward to help the law enforcers in their quest to protect the minors.

Source [ NY dailynews]

The older generations of the Internet users have witnessed the evolution of the Internet and World Wide Web from the mid 80s. The younger generation was lucky enough to take the full advantage of the next version of the Word Wide Web or Web 2.0 which is the next step over the first version of Web.

Web 2.0 has many significant differences over its predecessor. In the previous version of Word Wide Web, the website sponsors were in total control of the content. Most of the content were static and later became dynamic with the advancements of the technologies. With the introduction of Web 2.0 the end users of the web sites were given the authority over the content, so they are the authors, editors, and publisher of the information in the website. This way, the sponsors of the website reduces the overhead of maintaining the content while; many users are attracted to the website as it can be customized by the users.

After reading the above paragraph, doesn’t it cross your mind that this concept is best suited for social networking? Yes, social networking is a brain child of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 adopted many recent trends due to the advancements and demands of social networking. Therefore, social networking platforms such as Facebook became one of the first experiments of Web 2.0.

If you go to Facebook, all what you see is Web 2.0 features giving the end users more flexibility over the content they maintain.