The Influence of Social Networking Sites

We wrote a piece about TV Links being raided and shutdown on the 19th of October, which was interesting as we were pretty quick on the posting side of that. What is interesting is where it all showed up, and when it showed up in the various social networking sites.

Digg – within minutes of posting
Google Search – within minutes of posting
Google Blog Search – within minutes of posting
Reddit – three hours after posting
Yahoo – five hours after posting
Live/MSN – six hours after posting
Technorati – posted on ping – visitors 8 hours after posting
Stumbled Upon – day after posting
Techmeme – day after posting
Various Forums – day after posting
Mahalo – two and a half days after posting

What is interesting was the watching of this puppy spread around the internet, and it got traffic from everywhere on the planet, including china and Saudi Arabia. That says something about the reach and depth of how popular TV Links was to the streaming media community.

The news was picked up by everyone who has an interest in the streaming media scene, and people who watch TV over the internet. So there were a lot of places to get the same information, where it all started with the Guardian UK.

What is interesting was the performance of new media social networking against the older web 1.0 style search engine systems. The reliance on web 2.0 as a way to get information out is somewhat doubtful at times, and when an article goes viral, the performance of Web 1.0 against Web 2.0 shows that web 1.0 technology is still what is being used by the majority of folks. The entrance paths for the file in terms of where they came from breaks down like this:

1. Google - 583 hits
2. Reddit – 84 hits
3. yahoo – 44 hits
4. Direct (forum or e-mail link) – 37 hits
5. Digg – 30 hits
6. Techmeme – 26 hits
7. Stumbled Upon – 24 hits

Data pulled from Google Analytics. In terms of performance, web 1.0 technologies was the obvious winner here in a file that has gone viral, and ended up all over the internet. Smaller search engines like AOL and good search ended up sending 2 hits each. Live does not even how up in the list of top 25 sources for the file.

While we jump through hoops for web 2.0, on an obviously popular file for the site, there needs to be more of an adoption of web 2.0 technologies to make them meaningful for the end user. This also means that they have to be easier to use than Google, or just as easy to use as Google. While Mahalo might have been slow on the reporting side, actual traffic for a file still comes from primarily web 1.0 technologies.

In terms of relevance, Web 2.0 is not performing well at least at this site. It would be interesting to see what other sites look like and if they care to share their information with us on what the influence of web 2.0 technology systems are for their web sites, we will post an addendum to this entry.