MySpace is running out of breath, while Bebo and Facebook are fast catching up. That’s the message from the latest figures on social networking in Britain.
MySpace has long been the leading site for young networkers who want to run their social lives online.
But research firm Nielsen/NetRatings says May saw a drop in UK traffic to MySpace, while Bebo and Facebook continued to attract new users.
Facebook, once largely confined to American colleges, has grown its audience by more than 500% in the last six months – making it more popular in Britain than in the US.
Nielsen says 10% of UK internet users visited Facebook in May, compared to 9% of US online users.
Alex Burmaster of Nielsen/NetRatings says: “If the April to May growth rates were to remain consistent, both Bebo and Facebook would catch MySpace in September this year.”
Number crunch
MySpace is still well in the lead with 6.5 million UK users, compared with 4 million for Bebo and 3.2 million on Facebook.
But the figures also show that MySpace is proving much less compulsive for its users than the other two sites.
Its users spent an average of 96 minutes on the site in May, while Bebo users were there for 152 minutes and “Facebookers” spent 143 minutes on their site.
There was also evidence that there is plenty of promiscuity amongst the social networkers – at least when it comes to visiting the various sites. Around half a million British users visited all three services in May.
But the battle to win the loyalty of this fickle crowd is hotting up.
In the last few weeks, Facebook has opened its doors to a crowd of outside applications and Bebo has announced plans to run its own TV mini-series on the site.
Rupert Murdoch, who bought MySpace in 2005, has already expressed concern about the growth of Facebook. His executives will now be under even more pressure to find ways of making MySpace fashionable again.
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After four drafts, broad discussion, and extensive public review, the FSF has finally published the official, much-anticipated GPL revision 3 (GPL 3). The new version aims to clarify aspects of the previous version, strengthen unencumbered redistribution by imposing new patent licensing requirements, and protect the user’s right to modify GPL software on embedded systems.
The GPL is the most popular open-source software license, and it is used by many high-profile open-source software projects, including the Linux kernel. Unlike proprietary software licenses, the GPL explicitly guarantees users the right to modify, repurpose, and redistribute software. “Since we founded the free software movement, over 23 years ago, the free software community has developed thousands of useful programs that respect the user’s freedom,” says FSF president Richard Stallman in a statement. “Most of these programs use the GNU GPL to guarantee every user the freedom to run, study, adapt, improve, and redistribute the program.”
Many contentious issues addressed in the GPL 3 caused controversy and debate throughout the draft process. An unexpected patent agreement between Microsoft and Novell compelled the FSF to revise the patent licensing language in a late GPL 3 draft in an effort to block similar deals in the future.
Despite the controversy and debate, the highly transparent draft process has ensured that the GPL 3 is the product of broad consensus. “By hearing from so many different groups in a public drafting process, we have been able to write a license that successfully addresses a broad spectrum of concerns,” says FSF executive director Peter Brown in a statement. “But even more importantly, these different groups have had an opportunity to find common ground on important issues facing the free software community today, such as patents, tivoization, and Treacherous Computing.”
Now that the GPL 3 has been released, it is likely that it will be broadly adopted within the open-source software community. Although Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds initially rejected the possibility of migrating the kernel from the GPL 2 to the GPL 3, the developer has recently stated that the possibility is once again under consideration.
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MySpace is likely to change its technology strategy to allow other online companies to “plug” their web services directly into its social networking site, according to Chris DeWolfe, one of its founders.
The move would mark a new step in the evolution of social networks into fully fledged internet platforms, while opening a new front in the battle for audience share among the web’s fastest-growing companies.
The expected change in approach is a reaction to the success of rival Facebook, which last month unveiled a similar step to open its network to outside developers. Although it has less than half as many users as MySpace in the US, Facebook’s approach has won it strong backing from other consumer internet companies, which hope it will give them an easier way to reach the network’s 27m members.
More than 1,000 applications and services are already available, letting users do things like publish slideshows of personal pictures to their Facebook pages, or add a box that keeps track of when their favourite bands are playing concerts nearby.
“The [Facebook] platform is interesting,” Mr DeWolfe said in an interview with the Financial Times. He argued MySpace’s current technology approach gave its users many of the same benefits but said: “We’ll probably offer users the choice of both.”
The aim was to attract more online companies to create services for MySpace’s users. “We’ll be bringing in more developers.”
The race to lure other internet companies to build services on top of their networks reflects an attempt by the social networks to consolidate their recent audience gains and become central parts of the online landscape.
Many internet companies, from Google to Ebay, have started making parts of their platforms available to outside developers, although Facebook’s gambit marks a more radical attempt to turn itself into an “open” service.
However, the strategy raises sensitive financial issues that have yet to be resolved. Facebook has said any company that builds services on its network is free to make money from them, for instance through advertising.
MySpace has taken a more restrictive attitude, blocking services that have tried to make money by advertising or selling directly to MySpace members.
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