INFOGRAPHIC: The Current State Of Social Networks 2012

By Shea Bennett  at Media Bistro:
Did you know that Twitter is the social network with the strongest growth rate in 2012, ahead of LinkedIn, Pinterest and Reddit?

Facebook? That didn’t even make the cut. Still, when you’re closing in fast on one billion users, your annual growth rate does tend to slow down a smidgen. Still, don’t shed a tear for Mark Zuckerberg – save those for the owners of Digg, Bebo, Friendster and, of course, MySpace, who are the four social networks most in decline, reminding us that success in this space can be both dramatic and fleeting.

This data comes courtesy of Ignite Social Media, who have compiled the infographic of infographics about the state of social media, worldwide, in 2012. Ignite’s research revealed that while social media as a whole continues to plateau – we haven’t seen any real growth, planet-wide, since 2009 – there are many success stories to be found. Pinterest has quickly established itself as the de facto social network for women, and Plaxo (who knew that was still going?) is incredibly popular with senior citizens.

Check out all this, and more, in the visualization below.

The New Digg Arrives, Features Tight Facebook And Twitter Integration

By Frederic Lardinois at TechCrunch:
After just six weeks of hard work, Digg‘s new owners at Betaworks just flipped the switch and re-launched the site. The new Digg was originally scheduled to launch tomorrow, but despite the tight deadline, the Digg team managed to get this completely rewritten version of the site out ahead of schedule. As promised, the new version of Digg puts a strong emphasis on images and is currently free of ads. With this relaunch, Digg is also shipping a new iPhone app and mobile web app.

Why Relaunch In Just 6 Weeks? Old Digg Was Too Expensive To Run

Over the last few days, the Digg team already provided a few sneak peeks into the thought process that went into redesigning the site. Earlier today, I talked to Digg’s new CEO John Borthwick who seemed genuinely surprised how much interest there still was in Digg. During our interview, he told me that one of the reasons why the team wanted to rebuild Digg as fast as it could was the simple fact that Digg’s old infrastructure was very expensive to run. According to Borthwick, it would have cost “hundreds of thousands per month” to keep the site running on its old platform. Even though the site was state-of-the-art just a few years ago, most of the infrastructure would be considered legacy technology by a modern startup. Because of this, the new Digg team decided to throw away virtually all of the old underpinning of the site in favor of a fresh start. Borthwick wants to rebuild the company and to do so, he says, it’s important to turn it back into startup mode and develop a completely new and modern platform to develop the new Digg on.

Digg + Facebook + Twitter

This means that all of Digg’s voting algorithms are gone, too, but Borthwick said that users will be able to use their old Facebook-based Digg accounts on the new site and will be able to get back most of the data they put into Digg in its earlier incarnations in the near future. Just like in the last version of Digg, users will use Facebook to sign in to the site and vote. This Facebook integration also means that users’ diggs will be posted on their Facebook timelines, by the way.


Read the full story here






 

NYC-Based BetaWorks Buys Digg

By Liz Gannes at AllThingsD: 
The remaining assets of social news aggregator Digg — its site and brand — are being sold to Betaworks, the New York-based technology studio. Betaworks CEO John Borthwick will become CEO of the new Digg.

Once massive and influential, 7-year-old Digg has receded in recent times, but still has more than 16 million monthly unique visitors. It will be combined with Betaworks’ social news summary email service and app, News.me.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the deal was worth just $500,000, a massive decline in value, considering that the company had raised $45 million. Digg CEO Matt Williams disputed that figure, saying “the overall consideration is significantly larger,” and that it was a combination of cash and equity.

Williams, who was brought in nearly two years ago to replace founder Kevin Rose, is going to become an entrepreneur in residence at Andreessen Horowitz. In recent months, he has been working to sell the start-up, and had brokered a deal for its technology team with the Washington Post.

Read the full story here

INFOGRAPHIC: Who Likes What: Social Media By Demographic

By Sean Work, Via KISSmetrics:
Do you ever wonder what social networking sites you should be focusing your marketing efforts on?
This handy infographic breaks down the top social networking sites by gender, age, income, and education demographics. We also discuss the affinity score of certain keywords for a few social networking sites. The sites included in this graphic are Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Digg, StumbleUpon and YouTube. Click on the graphic below for an enlarged view.

About The Author: Sean Work is the marketing coordinator at KISSmetrics. Follow him on twitter (@seanvwork) and ask him for a free cup of coffee :)

by KISSmetrics.

How Digg Works [The Marketer’s Guide to Digg]

By Kristi Hines at KISSmetrics: 
While Digg, formerly one of the top social voting sites on the Internet, lost a lot of its luster since their major update last year to version four, they still receive at least 2.5 million visitors per month in the US alone and have an Alexa rating of 167, PageRank of 8, and Domain Authority of 100.
Digg is also a little bit more marketing friendly than their main competition Reddit. The following guide will help you learn to use Digg for sharing your awesome content with a larger audience.

How Digg Works

 

Members of the Digg community can submit and share content to the Digg network under the main categories of Business, Entertainment, Gaming, Lifestyle, Offbeat, Politics, Science, Sports, Technology, and World News. These broad categories allow for almost any area of content to be submitted.
When content is voted upon by other members of the Digg community (also known as getting diggs or being dugg), it gets the chance to be discovered not only by your own followers, but also the community at large by making it to the Holy Grail – the Digg homepage (or when you’re logged in, the Top News section). While the exact formula to what gets on the homepage is a mystery, the general theory is that a submission which receives a high number of votes within a short amount of time will likely make it to the top of the list.

Setting Up Your Digg Profile

 

Once you create an account on Digg, you can add some information about yourself under your profile settings including:

• Full Name – If you want people to be able to find your Digg profile amongst search results for your name, you’ll want to put your real name here.
• About Yourself – Put in some details about who you are and your interests so people sharing the same interests will be more likely to follow you.
• Links – You can add up to five links to any website you choose on your profile. The exception is links to your Twitter or Facebook – these won’t show up. Google+ will though. Although the links are nofollow (meaning they get little SEO value), they are handy to have up in case someone wants to know more about you.

The other thing you can customize under your profile settings is your Viewing Digg options. You can set your default view to My News (the latest submissions made by people you are following) or Top News (the top submissions made by the entire Digg community), how to open external links (within a new window or the same window), how to order comments, and other details.

Getting Followers

 

If you want your submissions to get views and diggs, the best place to start is by having a strong Digg following. Getting followers on Digg is a bit more tricky than getting followers on Twitter. My best tips on the matter are as follows.

• Digg and comment on submissions in your area of interest. The more active you are, the more your profile will be seen by others and followed by people with similar interests.
• Link to your Digg profile everywhere. This includes your email signature, forum signature, website, blog, and social networks that allow you to have links to your other social profiles such as Google+ and Facebook. Give your Digg profile a tweet every now and again too so you can get new followers off of your Twitter connections.
• Follow people in hopes that they follow you back. If you want to find new people to follow on Digg, including the top users based on most promotions, rising stars, and top commenters, you will want to visit the Find People page. You can find people based on who you are currently connected with on Twitter, Google, and Facebook too.

Getting Diggs

Now, the part you’re probably the most interested in – how to get diggs for your submissions. From my experience, your best bets are the following:

• Add the Digg Button to your content. Digg offers a few styles to choose from – you can add the JavaScript code directly onto pages you want dugg or, for self-hosted WordPress and other CMS driven sites, you can add the JavaScript code into your theme’s template.
• Share your submission on Twitter. If you’re not sure people will get the hint by just directing them to your piece of content with the integrated Digg Button, your next option is to send them directly to the submission itself on Digg. To get a link to your submission, just click on the comments for the it and share the direct URL which usually looks like digg.com/news/category/your_submissions_title. I wouldn’t ask often, but it never hurts to throw out the occasional Digg request to your followers on Twitter.
• Reach out to people directly via Instant Messenger and email. Some of the most successful pieces of content (besides the ones that naturally get diggs) are the ones marketed by people with a network. Know who your connections are that use Digg and send them a friendly request to give your submission a vote if they like it.
•  

New: The Digg Newsroom

Your Digg Experience

What has your experience with Digg been since the last revamp of the system? Please share your tips and tricks in the comments!


About the Author: Kristi Hines is a freelance writer, blogger, and social media enthusiast. Her blog Kikolani focuses on blog marketing, including social networking strategies and blogging tips.

6 Crazy Tech Predictions for 2012

By Lance Ulanoff at Mashable: 
We live in a world of absolutes: Here’s what happened. Even when we look to the future, our predictions are couched in the world’s sometimes difficult realities. It can, to be honest, take all the fun out of guess work. So, once a year I allow myself to go beyond the likely, beyond the possible and deep into the world of the implausible. What follows are my most ridiculous and unlikely predictions. Most are just nuts, but one is, to be honest, all too scarily possible. See if you can guess which prediction I’m talking about.

1. Facebook Buys Digg

Facebook’s 2012 will look a lot like its 2011: More growth, more change. Still, it hasn’t quite broken through on the content curation and voting side of things. With all the frictionless sharing people will be doing, they may no longer think about accumulating “likes.”

Digg started using Facebook’s OpenGraph in 2011, which makes it easy to share what you’re reading on Digg to Facebook. As I see it, this is simply the first step on the road to a much deeper relationship. When Facebook buys Digg next year, users will get the ability to “Digg” not only profile pages, but people. That’s right, you could really “Digg” someone on Facebook. It’s so 1976, but also so cool.
I foresee another side to the Facebook universe where people, places and things are Dugg on a more generalized basis, but those Diggs bubble up to individual profile pages and appear alongside Likes, Readings, Watching, etc. There is an 85% chance that all of Digg’s existing audience will walk away from the service if this acquisition happens, but I’m not sure most of them will stay with the content curation destination anyway.

2. Scientists and Hollywood Develop New Way to End Movies

3D has pretty much flopped, and it’s getting tougher and tougher to get movie-goers into theaters. Scientists will partner with Hollywood studios to unveil a new technology known as “Fresh Ends.” Using CGI, Hollywood script writers, voice and context recognition and logic algorithms, Fresh Ends technology will generate new endings for some of the world’s most popular films. These slightly rewritten movies will be re-released to theaters — just like the 3D rereleases — and are expected to add 15- to 20% additional box office returns to each film. For now, Fresh Ends only works with movies shot digitally

3. SOPA Becomes the Law of the land

Myopic congressman and a distracted president take the Stop Online Piracy Act and pass it into law. Designed, at least according to the bill, “To promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes,” SOPA has an almost unprecedented chilling effect on the web. Thousands of U.S. sites shut down, other larger ones continue, but are now full of boring pap that could never be misconstrued as content piracy.
Content creators of all stripes are so unsure of what will be labeled piracy they struggle to create anything. By the end of 2012, however, an underground Internet (The UnderWebs) arises. It’s full of unfettered communication and content, and slowly but surely, millions of web surfers around the world begin using it instead of the government-policed Internet — a platform that dies a sad, quiet death in 2018.

4. Apple Intros a 5-inch Tablet Phone Hybrid

Sorry, no iPhone 5 or iPad 3. Unable to decide whether it should deliver a 7-inch iPad 3 or a 4.5-inch iPhone 5, Apple comes down squarely in the middle with a giant handheld that, naturally, makes calls and is almost large enough to be a usable tablet. The hidden bonus? It’s also a fully functional HDTV. Apple, however, will remain mum for most of the year on whether or not it plans on actually delivering a larger Apple iTV.

5. Google+ Takes Center Stage

Virtually unchanged for more than a decade, Google’s search page undergoes a subtle, yet important transformation. The search giant places a “+” sign right next to the “Google” Logo. But the change is more than logo-deep. If you hit your own “+” sign on your keyboard before typing in your search query, all results will feature Google+ search results on top. If you hit “+” twice, your search query can be used to launch a new Google+ post. You’ll still have to select which circles you want to share your search query with. Rumors will swirl throughout 2012 that Google wants to rename the entire company “Google+.”

6. Honda Releases Asimo to Consumers

Japanese auto manufacturer Honda shocks the world by unveiling a fully operational, $1,999 Honda Asimo Home Helper Robot. Like the Asimo we’ve seen in product demonstrations and on YouTube, “Home Asimo” can walk, run, jump, make coffee and sandwiches and, as we soon learn, clean toilets. Honda sells a stunning half million units before August, 2012. The most startling news, though, comes when one Home Honda robot in Dearborn, Michigan turns on its family’s computer and signs itself up for Twitter and Facebook. By December, more than 300,000 of the robots have been destroyed or returned.

Now it’s your turn. Drop into comments and share your wildest predictions for the New Year!

 

Digg Brings Social Newsrooms Feature To iPhone, iPod Touch App

Digg has rolled an update to its iOS app, in which it brings its Newsrooms feature to iPhone and iPod touch devices. Other new features include commenting, social sharing and the ability to log out faster.

Digg launched the Newsrooms feature last month to help you find the most meaningful and relevant news. When you visit a specific newsroom, you’ll find the best news for each topic as determined by popular vote and the opinions of top contributors.

Through the iPhone and iPod touch app, you’ll now be able to browse the list of newsrooms and easily view the ones you’ve subscribed to — these are highlighted in blue. When you have entered a newsroom, you can choose to follow or unfollow it. You can read the top stories on the front page and also browse through stories in the Newswire.

Using the button on the top left of the screen, you can flick between the Top News section and the Newswire. Additionally, you may opt to use filters to, for instance, view stories from the last 30 days rather than the last week.

  

The app now allows you to add your own opinions by commenting on an article in the story view. There is currently no support for threaded comments within the app, but Digg is currently figuring out the best way to display these comments on the iPhone and iPod touch screens.

The social sharing button allows you to share stories with your friends via Facebook, Twitter and email. It also takes advantage of the deep Twitter integration in iOS 5. Meanwhile, you’ll have the option to log out more quickly by holding your finger on the Digg logo. Various performance and reliability improvements have been made to the app with regards to loading story lists, individual stories and comments.

Digg has had somewhat of a rollercoaster year. Although it has launched several features — such as Newsrooms, Newswire, an updated site design and a story view counter – the company’s founder Kevin Rose decided to quit in March to focus on new projects. Digg also has stiff competition in the form of Reddit, which is serving around 2.1 million pageviews every hour.

You can check out the latest version of the Digg app by downloading it on your iPhone or iPod touch now.

 

By Chris Holt at Scribbal

Digg Launches ‘Newswire,’ New Method Of Social News Curation

In what looks like an attempt to improve the social discovery aspect of Digg, the service has announced a new feature called the Newswire that lets you filter stories by number of Diggs and see what is being Dugg in real-time.
On the Digg website, there is a link to Newswire Beta on the top navigation bar. Clicking this will bring you to the Newswire, where news appears in real-time in an activity feed on the right side of the page. From here, you can see which users are Digging which content as it happens. Pretty cool. Once you have submitted a story to Digg, it will automatically be featured at the top of the Recent section of the Newswire. As the story is Dugg by other users, it will begin to move up the ranks in the Trending section.

Is Reddit Eclipsing Digg in Traffic?

Digg’s precipitous plummet has left Reddit with a bigger-than-ever piece of the Internet pie, according to stats from three major traffic-tracking organizations.
In fact, according to two of these sources, Reddit is already the larger web property in terms of page views and visits.
For the first time ever Thursday, Alexa showed Digg’s reach being eclipsed by Reddit. According to the online ranking service,