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Search terms ‘change’ with time. A couple of years ago the terms in usage were blogs, blogging, blogosphere and then lately the terms of use have shifted to Social Media, Social Networking, Dynamic Web etc. any comprehensive trend study has to take into account the transition of words too.

I do believe though the days of blogs being used as mainstream forms of expression for personal diaries or journals are over for most – that need is nicely met by Social Networking sites but the days of focused blogging have just begun. The numbers may not grow that quickly but the quality is going to see a quantum leap.

Cheers

Rajesh

Summize (Search.Twitter) is a handy tool if you’re using twitter as it lets you to keep up with the conversations in realtime. To take it from a biz perspective, it can be used to listen what people are talking about your brand/service or anything related to your company (good or bad) which might be of much interest.

You can say, its another way to keep up with Online Reputation Management (ORM). Read http://sampadswain.com/2008/12/tools-tips-to-manage-your-online-reputation/

BTW if I’ve left something unanswered, pls revert!

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Sampad

One thing I am not very sure of but how does search.twitter.com play in Indian markets. Twitter is big when it comes to social interactions but google search stats don’t do justics to that.

Cheers
Vishal

I have been interested in social media evolution for some time, and blogged a while back about such trends (although lacking your excellent data).

Basically, there are two countervailing trends, fragmentation and consolidation.

The former arises from disruptive technologies such as Ning that have, as Kanika puts it, made creating online communities “easy as selling insurance”.

So users will migrate into those communities that best suit their interests, and the space fragments.

Consolidation arises as survival of the fittest kicks in and certain tools come to dominate, such as Facebook. There is another kind of consolidation, viz. aggregation, with tools such as FriendFeed which aggregate content from several different sources. There is also dissemination of content in the other direction through tools that push out to multiple channels, such as ping.fm and Utterli.

Those stats are actually true. Specially in case of the Social Network Trends. We, the heroic Indians, over did it. We thought creating Social Networking sites is as easy as selling insurance and sticking up ugly stickers behind auto-rickshaws and buses. People are quite fed up of it unless they see it giving them something completely different.

But had those websites taken a different route to reach out to their audience, it would have been a better game. Too bad most of them never realized it. And Good Luck SMM. I am in it!

As always, Great write-up (I’m fed up of the word “blog”)!

Cheers