Adapted from

http://www.emblematiq.com/blog/the_future_of_social_networking/#comments

These past few years witnessed a real surge of social networking websites. Following their success and traffic booms - with MySpace receiving more page views than Google at one time according to Alexa. Today almost a third of the most popular sites on the web are, in fact, dedicated social networking hubs. Although there is great potential for success, entry in this overly saturated market can now be extremely tough.

Apart from the multitude of choices, a regular user faced with another major dilemma - keeping it all together. Let's say you:

• have an account on Facebook where you chat with friends;
• use LinkedIn to manage professional contacts;
• keep a photo collection on Flikr
•  upload the occasional video on  YouTube
• blog on WordPress
• post updates on Twitter.
  That would seem like a fairly common scenario these days. Add in to the mix a Hi5 or MY Space account for friends that aren't on Facebook, maybe a couple of other more focused networks and one or two forums, and my online identity is now spread out on about ten different platforms. Talk about a handful! Updating and keeping in touch with everybody just started to look like a whole lot of work.

Years of preaching the power of web standards and semantic coding helped us get to the point where it's just a matter of somebody putting it all together and making all those separated accounts and bits of information scattered around on dozens of sites play nice with each other. That would be the real Web3.0 revolution.

It's all about the swiftness of interaction and the rewards it provides, usually through content, and that's one of the most important rules of usability. We already came a long way in that department but, as the market reaches its saturation point, new approaches must emerge.

Pownce, the microblogging service often compared to Twitter, has been acquired by Six Apart. The site will be shutdown on December 15th, while the main Pownce development team will join Six Apart.

Despite the early buzz and in many ways a superior feature-set, the service hasn’t been able to gain nearly the type of traction as the darling of short-form messaging – that of course being Twitter.

This deal is about acquiring talent from Pownce, writing, “we are very sorry the site will be closing … We’re planning on doing great things with the help and expertise of the Pownce team, and can’t wait to see all the results of their hard work.”

Interesting and useful data collected by compstud

Between April and June 2008 there were 342 interviews, which revealed details about the 1600 top managers.

 31% of top managers are the founders of the company in 2008 (last year the figure was 28%)

The most frequent founders are the executive and technical directors in 2008

In comparison analysis between 2008 and 2007 years, the average wage increased by 4.7%.

Guest CEO (if not owners) receive 5.4% shares of the company.

Technical Director receive 1.53% shares of the company - the highest rate of none-CEO/President positions.

CEO-founder of the first round, on average, owns 33% shares of the company. After a couple of rounds this number drops to an average of 18%.

CTO-founder in similar situations owns 17.1% and 7.49% of shares respectively.

Average base (ie, not including bonus), CEO pay rose from $ 227k to $ 237k per year.

Average income (taking into account bonuses, joy, etc.) guest CEO of $ 339k per year. CEO-founder - only $ 286k. [The reason is clear: the founder of more shares in the company, and the size of that share the founder motivates a good idea.]

The average CEO-founder owns 22.05% shares the company. Visiting CEO - only 5.46%.

Chairman of the Board and CEO -- the same person in 56%

On early stages 99% CoB and CEO - one person, and then it all depends on the structure and environment to attract investment

In the normal Board of Directors, investors took more than half the seats. About 20% of the seats occupied by the Director.