Facebook may 'lock in' its Internet dominance

LOS ANGELES, Jan 27 (Reuters) - College senior Alyssa Ravasio gave up MySpace on the day she got a Facebook account and never looked back. She has already lost interest in Twitter. But how does Facebook know it can keep her loyalty?

The brief history of the Internet is littered with the ghosts of Websites that people have abandoned in their relentless pursuit of something newer, faster, better and cooler.

Tech-savvy Ravasio, a 21-year-old UCLA student designing her undergraduate degree around the Internet's impact on society and communication, is irked by changes privately owned Facebook has made.

But for now, she says, Facebook is keeping her allegiance because of a concept called "technological lock-in." In other words, the site has become an essential part of her life.

"I think Facebook is the most valuable Internet commodity in existence, more so than Google, because they are positioning themselves to be our online identity via Facebook connect," Ravasio said.

"It's your real name, it's your real friends, and assuming they manage to navigate the privacy quagmire, they're poised to become your universal login," she said. "I would almost argue that Facebook is the new mobile phone. It's the new thing you need to keep in touch, almost a requirement of modern social life."

THE QWERTY KEYBOARD

Technological lock-in is the idea that the more a society adopts a certain technology, the more unlikely users are to switch. Its the reason why the QWERTY keyboard layout, devised for typewriters in the 1870s, is still the standard despite the development of several more logical configurations.

And Facebook, which has more than 100 million users in the United States and 350 million worldwide, appears to have nearly achieved technological lock-in, according to web marketing research company Comscore.com.

In December, for example, Facebook recorded nearly 112 million unique visitors in the United States, compared to 57 million for MySpace and 20 million for Twitter, according to Comscore.

Users also spent much longer on Facebook, averaging 246.9 minutes in December, compared to 112.7 minutes on MySpace and 24.3 minutes on Twitter.

"It's something that feeds on itself," Comscore director Andrew Lipsman said. "The more people who come into the network, the more connected they become to each other and there actually becomes a greater cost to leaving the network."

"At some point it becomes a critical mass," he said. "It becomes so strong that its difficult to unlock and I think Facebook has reached that point."

Skeptics might say that the same argument could have been made for MySpace just a few years ago, when it reigned supreme among social networking sites to the extent that few American teens would be caught dead without an account.

'THEIR GAME TO LOSE'

But those who study web trends say that MySpace, while wildly popular, never quite reached the worldwide domination of Facebook, which then-Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg started in his dorm room in 2004.

Facebook initially limited membership to Harvard, then universities, a move that heightened the draw for teens. And once Facebook opened registration to anyone in 2006, it was flooded with members between the ages of 25 to 45.

Tim Groeling, a professor of communication studies at UCLA, said that because it was possible to sign up for Facebook without dumping MySpace, many young people had accounts on both sites until the center of gravity slowly shifted to Facebook.

"MySpace wasn't focused as much on the social networking aspect, which they seem to enjoy. It wasn't quite the tight-knit social machine that Facebook seems to be," he said.

"Facebook has a certain amount of lock-in that's going to be hard for people to get past," Groeling said. "It's possible it could happen, but it has to overcome a high threshold of user cost. It's their game to lose at this point."

Ravasio says that, technological lock-in aside, Facebook could potentially lose her if it keeps annoying her, as it did when it abruptly changed a default privacy setting so that members' pictures were public.

"All these (Internet) companies saying they'll figure out how to monetize later seem to be forgetting that 'monetizing' has historically always meant a degradation of user experience quality," she said.

How Fast Is Your Web Connection?

PETER WAYNER

Published: January 20, 2010

When Andrew M. Odlyzko investigated why the Internet connection from his home in Minneapolis to his office just over two miles away was so sluggish, he found the answer: the data was taking a round trip to Denver.

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Photo illustration by The New York Times

Professor Odlyzko, a mathematician, studies the speed and quality of Internet service at the University of Minnesota. His team of researchers issues reports about the growth of Internet traffic, and he uses the team’s tools to watch his own connections, too.

Tracking the speed of Internet service is becoming more and more important as everyone asks the Internet to do more than handle e-mail messages and Web pages. A few lines of text can take its time arriving, but applications sending voice calls or streaming video become unusable if there is too much delay in delivery.

Some Web sites and software packages let users test the speed of data through their Internet service provider, or I.S.P. All the providers offer a glimpse at the quality of the connection, but that information is just one bit of data; each new request for a Web site or a file involves dozens of computers, and any of them could be a weak link.

“Even in Web browsing, pages are getting more complicated,” Professor Odlyzko said. “You click on a link and you end up setting dozens of connections. Ads are being served. You end up doing a database lookup. Any extra latency gets compounded because you have many, many stages.”

The simplest test involves downloading a big file, counting the seconds, and then dividing to compute the raw bandwidth in megabits per second. Most service providers offer a tool so their customers can test the performance inside the network, the last link in the long chain from a computer on the desk to a service provider’s distant server. Checking this last connection will usually pinpoint any problem that a service provider can fix. If the provider cannot speed up a slow connection, a user might want to make a switch.

Brett Glass, the owner of Lariat, an I.S.P. in Laramie, Wyo., said that many customers did not trust their service provider’s test and instead worked with other speed tests available on the Web. “There are a number of providers that put their thumb on the scale,” Mr. Glass said, giving a higher priority to tests for speed. Using an independent test will not isolate the last link, but it will reveal information about how well the service provider is connected to the larger Internet. Several independent Web sites can provide speed results, but the results can vary drastically.

Gary Doda works as a troubleshooter for the service provider Bright House in St. Petersburg, Fla., and owns a broadband-speed tracking site called ISPGeeks.com. Mr. Doda said many of his competitors used overloaded servers and overburdened lines linking cities and continents — called backbones — that skewed measurements. In one set of tests, he found that measurements from different sites could easily vary by as much as 50 percent to 80 percent. He suggested users try several tests and view the tests and the results with a some skepticism because Internet connections vary worldwide.

Some sites offer multiple tests bundled together. Toast.net, for instance, lets the user try downloading a variety of files from different servers scattered throughout the world that gives a better impression of how performance may vary. There are also more sophisticated tests. VisualWare offers some basic tests free online and also sells a more complex suite of testing tools at prices beginning at $30.

One measures the variation of bandwidth over time to reveal whether a service provider is slowing down or speeding up connections. Some service providers like to restrict the flow of data after a few seconds, favoring users browsing Web pages over those downloading large files.

VisualWare also simulates a voice call similar to those made on applications like Skype orVonage. These place entirely different demands on an Internet connection because a phone call cannot survive the sporadic pauses that might not bother someone trying to download a new software package. Among other things, the test measures the amount of data lost along the way. A little lost data can be resent, but losing too much causes gaps in conversation.

On Pingtest.net, the user’s PC sends a small request to distant servers and then computes the average time to receive a response. This measure of the latency — or delay in a connection — is often a better predictor of how snappily your computer will operate, because many Web pages are assembled from multiple small files, not one big one.Pingtest offers a letter grade evaluating the quality of service.

“My dad doesn’t want to talk about latency and he doesn’t have to know,” said Mike Apcar, the chief executive of Ookla, the creator of the ping test. “So we created a grading system. If you come to our site, you get a grade A through F. Most people are going to get a B or C, but occasionally I’m having some trouble with my cable connection and I’m seeing that I’m getting a D.”

Some users are also setting up Web sites to share test results so others can see the general performance of an Internet service provider. DSLReports.com and BroadbandCensus.com, for instance, both offer tests and collect their results to produce reports to help consumers decide whether problems are sporadic or part of a larger pattern.

Unfortunately, gathering information about speeds from distant Web sites is not always helpful in diagnosing or fixing problems. The service providers have direct control over only the last link to the home, and they often cannot do much about congestion on a trans-Atlantic cable or about a sluggish server. Any difference in the results of a local test offered by the I.S.P. and an independent test could indicate whether the service provider or Internet at large is responsible for the delay.

Still, service providers have some control over how data is routed through the Internet at large, a complicated technical process called peering.

Professor Odlyzko said he was overjoyed to find out that his local service providers had set up connections with the University of Minnesota’s campus network to speed the movement of data.

“I had nothing to do with it,” he said. But he is happy that his data is no longer going to Denver.

How SEO Marketing Can Boost Website Traffic

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“Website design” may bring to mind colors, fonts, and graphics. Think deeper than that. Website design, the heart of your online marketing plan, is a critical link to attracting future customers and keeping the ones you have.

Online marketing has come of age. The internet is poised to live up to the expectations of businesses who need to engage customers. From the standpoint of integrating the Internet into your business plan, this is an optimal time. The bust of the dot com phenomenon is a dim memory, the public is more tech-savvy than ever, and the Internet

is prepared to accommodate them.

Internet accessibility is burgeoning:
• Computers are gaining power while costs are plummeting
• 50.8% of Internet users have high speed connectivity at home1
• 71% of the general population has Internet Access

Compare these facts to the year 2,000, when 51% of Americans had a home computer. Only 41.5% of those home computer owners accessed the Internet

What are all of these connected people doing? They are putting down “roots” in online communities such as Twitter and Facebook, which are growing exponentially. This growth crosses broad demographic bands, from “tweens” through the elderly. As of December 11, 2009, Facebook had reached more than 350 million users with the ages of 35 to 54 being of the fastest growing group.

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Steps to Developing a Success Online Marketing

The purpose of Marketing is to get people attention regardless if it is directly or indirectly. Do this online can be very cost effective. I have read all the books and seen most of the trends. I will keep everything rather simple on here to establish a successful market is to go where the people are. With this in mind the first step is to create an facebook page. Of course this is on the bases that you already have an website. The second step that I will cover in this series is making blogging work for you ie. "blogger, Wordpress". The next will be everyone else we will discuss and if directories effectiveness along with email marketing.