myYearbook.com, a network founded by two high school students, is now the third largest and fastest growing social network in the U.S. The teen network’s market share grew by 426 percent this past year, according to leading online competitive intelligence service Hitwise.“As a social media company, we choose the best of breed applications and focus on an integrated suite of applications and a vibrant virtual economy,” said Geoff Cook, CEO of myYearbook.com. “Our growth this year shows that our highly focused applications such as Battles, Match and myMag resonate well with the teen market.”

myYearbook’s core applications are not only one of a kind, they are extremely popular with members. In fact, users spend more time on myYearbook than on sites with open platforms, such as MySpace and Facebook. According to Hitwise, the average visit length in minutes was 32:54 for myYearbook, compared with 29:54 for MySpace and 20:52 for Facebook.

“A TV network does not have 10,000 channels for a reason — too much noise,” said Dave Cook, co-founder of myYearbook.com. “We don’t want to spam our members with excess channels. We believe the right number of applications to be in the 100-200 range.”

By creating these core features, myYearbook.com became the third largest and fastest growing site in the U.S. without needing to spam their users with developers’ requests. myYearbook.com proves that opening a platform is not the only way to become one of the largest players in the social networking world.

About myYearbook.com

Founded by brother-and-sister teen entrepreneur duo Dave and Catherine Cook, myYearbook.com is the third largest social network in the United States, according to Hitwise, a competitive intelligence service. myYearbook has grown from a single high school to more than 5+ million U.S. unique visitors and 1+ billion page views per month. The average myYearbook member visits the site eight times per month and spends 30 minutes per visit, making myYearbook one of the most engaging social media destinations on the Internet.

myYearbook.com
Jeannine Schechter, 310-482-3461
jeannine@freshpr.net

TECH CRUNCH — June 4 — If you try to buy an ad on Facebook, there are certain words that are taboo. Any ads that contain four-letter words are automatically blocked. So too are ads with the names of competing social networks “MySpace,” “Friendster,” “Hi5,” , or “Orkut.” (Curiously, “Bebo” and “OpenSocial” go through just fine, as does “Microsoft,” “Yahoo,” “Google,” and “AOL”). 3Jam, the startup offering an SMS service, is blocked as well. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

LA TIMES — June 5 — A feature called YouTube Insight, introduced in March, gives YouTube account holders who have uploaded videos to the site a range of statistics, charts and maps about their audiences. Until recently, “it’s been hard to measure the success of online advertising campaigns,” said Adam Spielberger, EVP of a New York interactive advertising agency. Insight is part of a trend on the Web. Facebook offers account holders a weekly report that, like Insight, is free — and has a similar name, Insights. The information it provides is used by individuals and companies that have Facebook pages and want to hone their marketing. FULL ARTICLE @ LA TIMES

READ WRITE WEB — June 5 — The Executive Director of Europe’s top Internet security agency, ENISA, Andreas Pirotti, recently called for expanding EU legislation “to cover the taking of photos of people and posting them on the Internet,” noting that there’s no need to obtain consent before posting photos of others. In US the SNS regulation often focuses on the safety of children. Despite what may be good intentions, having government get involved with how SNS operate could be a very slippery slope, both in the U.S. and worldwide. Once you start demanding social networks comply with certain rules and restrictions instead of just being governed by their own TOS, you’re literally impacting an entire industry. FULL ARTICLE @ READ WRITE WEB

MASHABLE — June 5 — Twitter is working on adding the ability for users to separate their contacts into groups, support for sending and receiving messages by e-mail, and adding new IM and Internet channels for the service. They’re also looking to improve the way links are handled.  One of the many criticisms of Twitter is the ability to intelligently handle different media types, like links to Flickr or other image sources, and better use of inline linking.  Many of the add-ons to Twitter, like Twhirl, can do this by taking Twitter from the API and laying over their own functionality, but the Web interface has been the same spartan landscape since the service’s inception. FULL ARTICLE @ MASHABLE

BUSINESS WIRE — June 5 — ShoZu can now deliver new Facebook posts directly to the user’s mobiles as well as allow users to change their Facebook status from the ShoZu interface. ShoZu supports photo and video communities ranging from YouTube and Flickr to Photobucket, Google Picasa, Buzznet, Hyves, Kodak EasyShare Gallery and others. Other supported sites include personal blogging sites Google Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, Vox, WordPress and MetaWeblog; online storage sites Box.net, Qipit and Ipernity; citizen-contributed news desks at CNN, the BBC, ITV, Scoopt and NowPublic; global social network Friendster; and the hit micro-blogging service Twitter. FULL ARTICLE @ BUSINESS WIRE

CHRISTIAN NEWSWIRE — June 6 — HisHolySpace.com founder Jeff Broderick announced that he has sold the site to Christian.com Media Group and that the site would soon take on the name Christian.com. In the announcement Broderick indicates that he has also joined Christian.com Media Group and will still be helping administrate the site. FULL ARTICLE @ EARNED MEDIA

Social networking sites are on the rise in the UK and ad spending on such sites is expected to reach £285 million ($533 million) by 2012, according to eMarketer’s recently released “UK Social Network Marketing: Ad Spending and Usage” report - MarketingCharts writes.

Some 11 million people, or 30 percent of UK internet users, spent time at sites like Bebo, MySpace and Facebook, eMarketer estimates. Those three sites account for the lion’s share of users in the UK.

Though social sites account for only a tiny portion of UK online ad spending (3.4 percent in 2008), social-network ad spend will rise 77 percent this year to £115 million ($225 million), eMarketer projects. Spending in 2012 will have increased 148 percent over 2008 levels

Social networks have been part of the UK internet landscape for several years, and the UK dominates social-network spending in Western Europe with 68 percent of the market.

eMarketer expects the UK social-network market to enjoy slightly greater ad-spending percentage gains than that of the US; the UK social-network ad market trails that of the US by one to two years.

“Though social network advertising is forecast to grow aggressively this year, it will only do so if social network operators can develop substantial metrics showing the value and performance of the advertising,” said Debra Aho Williamson, author of the report.

Source:www.marketingvox.com

WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) Chief Executive

Steve Ballmer said Tuesday his company’s interest in Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) hinges on developments in online advertising.”The fundamental driver for us is we’re looking to accelerate our moves to get scale in online advertising,” Ballmer said.

“We do think software technology and the scale of user interactions will be an important part of the way the media and the advertising business shakes out in the future,” he added.

Ballmer predicted that the $550 billion annual advertising industry is “going to get turned on its head, basically, in the next 10 years” as media moves almost exclusively online.

Last month, Microsoft withdrew an offer to purchase Yahoo but the two companies are continuing to talk about possible partnerships.

Microsoft’s initial offer for Yahoo was $31 a share, or $44.6 billion. It boosted the bid to $33 a share before walking away when Yahoo’s co-founders

Jerry Yang and

David Filo said they wanted $37.
Ballmer spoke at the annual AeA Technology for Government Dinner.

-By

Fawn Johnson, Dow Jones Newswires; 202-862-9263; fawn.johnson@dowjones.com

Greek social networking service wadja.com has been generating some interest recently, mostly because Facebook has apparently banned emails that contain any mention of the site - so they must be doing something right. Facebook said it’s because of spam, while Wadja thinks it might be more to do with their popularity in their home country.

The first version of the site rolled out in August 2006 funded by angel investors and 16 people work at the headquarters in Athens, Greece.

Managing director Alex Christoforou tells us more.

Alex Christoforou, managing director of Wadja.com

• Explain your business to my Mum.
“Wadja is a communication service that goes where you go. You can collect, organise, and manage your friends, photos, videos, and contacts in a way that can be accessed on your PC and mobile phone. Wadja can also help you connect via email, web or global SMS, for free, so you are always connected.”

• How do you make money?
“We don’t rely on the standard cost per click revenue models that power 99% of community-centred sites. Our revenue model is based on providing premium content to our users, partnerships with mobile operators, premium messaging services targeted at businesses and professionals, and a new message advertising platform based on friend-to-friend communication.”

• What’s your background?
“I was born and raised in the US, I have a degree in economics and masters in international business and management. I split my time between our offices in Cyprus and Athens.”

• How many users do you have now, and what’s your target within 12 months?
“We currently have 1.5m registered users. Our target is to surpass the 10m user mark, but more importantly to add value to our users through great communications, which also helps to grow our business.”

• Name your closest competitors.
“Many of our users also have connections with Hi5. We see many similarities in our international feel and language support, though I feel we are more European focused with a big tilt towards mobile.

• How are personalisation and recommendation part of your business?
“Focusing heavily on mobile communication means generating local buzz while growing usability on a global scale. Wadja was the first network to provide interface language while giving users the option to view other communities on a totally different country level. For example, you can set your Wadja profile language to Greek but view, browse, and search for friends located in the UK if that is where you live. It is simple but very personal. ”

• What’s your biggest challenge?
“Creating a social networking site that is fun, innovative and financially viable. That is, based on a business model not funded purely by sponsorship and banner ads.”

• Any weird business experiences so far?
“Just last week Facebook banned the word Wadja.com throughout the whole site. That was weird and quite amusing. Here is this big Silicon Valley social network banning the word Wadja, an outfit based in the Mediterranean, having fun connecting people.”

• Are we in the middle of a new dot com bubble?
“Not a bubble - a readjustment. People are questioning the financial viability of social networking. People are asking how these sites make money, but so far none of the big three or four networks have solved this issue, irrelevant of their astronomical valuations. We need to get back to basics and build open, useful services and tools, anchored in a business model not entirely dependent on serving traditional banner ads to visitors.”

• Which tech businesses or web thinkers are the ones to watch?
“Steve Jobs - always. He reinvents the industries he goes into with a precision and flair for design that is second to none. Eric Schmidt of Google is also great. He executes a plan better than any other.”

• Where do you want the company to be in five years?
“We are all about open, device independent messaging and media sharing, so really in five years I would like Wadja to be the service of choice for the mobile active generation.”

wadja.com

Source:blogs.guardian.co.uk