Facebook experiences 194% of YoY market share growth - Hitwise

Famous online marketing intelligence Hitwise says - Top social networking site Facebook is proving it's no fad as its market share continues to grow at a pace and time spent on the site rises, according to the data available till last week.
At the last commercial year Facebook has grown 194% to capture almost 60% of the market share of US. Back in September 2008 Facebook captured a relatively miniscule 19.9% of the overall U.S. market, way behind rival MySpace and other social networking sites. Nowadays, Facebook's share is almost double that of MySpace.

Twitter also witnessed enormous growth, reported Hitwise, rising 1170% YoY, although the micro-blogging platform only represents 1.84% of the U.S. market.

However, MySpace users spend more time on the site than any other social networking venue averaging 25 minutes and 56 seconds each month. In comparison, Tagged users hang around for 25 minutes 17 seconds and Facebook users 23 minutes.

Man 'asked daughter for sex on Facebook'

A father has been arrested for allegedly approaching his daughter for sex over Facebook.

John Forehand referred to himself as "Bad Daddy" as he made explicit suggestions to his biological daughter on the social networking site, investigators claim.

He allegedly told the child, who has not been identified and from whom he lives apart, that "not many other fathers and daughters are this brave, so not many of them are so lucky to experience all these pleasures."

Forehand. from Lititz in Pennsylvania, was held in a police sting after the girl told her mother about his Facebook messages.

He was tricked into coming to what he believed would be a meeting with his daughter, where he was detained in possession of a camera, tripod and box of condoms.

Tom Corbett, the Pennsylvania attorney general, called on all parents to be vigilant about their children's online activities.

"Predators know that colder weather and shorter days mean that kids are spending more time inside, in front of their computers, and that many may be home alone – either before or after school," he said.

"As we have seen in a number of cases this year, including two of these most recent arrests, predators are reaching out to real families in Pennsylvania – and tips from those families are resulting in arrests."

Forehand faces several charges relating to his alleged approaches to his daughter. He was one of five men held in the sting last week.

Facebook shows when you're happy

Facebook is even more omniscient than you thought: it can now chart the world's collective hopes and dreams and highs and lows--sort of, at least.

The company's data team on Monday launched a trippy new application called the "Gross National Happiness Index." Taking a similar format to its "Lexicon" trend-tracking product, the "GNH" currently displays a graph of data tabulated over the course of the past few years to track the "happiness" of Facebook users based on words picked up in their status messages.

The GNH is currently restricted to United States-based Facebook users--keep in mind, they now represent less than a fourth of the site's 300 million-strong memberships--who have set English as their default language. That will likely change at some undetermined date.

"Earlier this year, data scientists at Facebook started a project to measure the overall mood of people from the United States on Facebook, based on the sentiment expressed in status updates," explained a company blog post by Facebook's Adam Kramer--who is also a Ph.D. student in psychology:

Examples of positive or happy words include "happy," "yay," and "awesome," while negative, or unhappy words, include "sad," "doubt," and "tragic." We also did a brief survey of some Facebook users, which showed that people who use more positive words, relative to the number of negative words, reported higher satisfaction with their lives.

Holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Valentine's Day tend to generate spikes in happiness, as do days of historical significance like the election of President Barack Obama. There are notably "sad" days, too, Kramer pointed out, like the double whammy on January 22, 2008, when the Asian stock market took a dive and young actor Heath Ledger was found dead.

In January, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg chatted with blogger Robert Scoble at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and expressed interest in using the staggering amounts of data on the social network to generate a sort of "sentiment engine."

"He said that already, his teams are able to sense when nasty news, like stock prices are headed down, is under way," Scoble wrote at the time. "He also told me that the sentiment engine notices a lot of 'going out' kinds of messages on Friday afternoon and then notices a lot of 'hungover' messages on Saturday morning. He's not sure where that research will lead."

Sound creepy? Facebook doesn't think so. "To protect your privacy, no one at Facebook actually reads the status updates in the process of doing this research," according to Kramer's post. "Instead, our computers do the word counting after all personally identifiable information has been removed."

Vivox's Facebook Application for Voice Chat

A voice chat application launched on Monday in open beta enables Facebook users to place and receive calls within the social network.

Vivox, which also provides voice services for online virtual words and accommodates more than 15 million users worldwide, is offering the app.

In order to use it, Facebook users first need to add Vivox Voice to their applications list and download a Vivox plug-in. From there, a Vivox channel and phone number are created to accept calls. Users can then place calls to (or receive calls from) Facebook friends also using the app. And because each Vivox channel has a call-in number, non-Facebook users can also participate in the conversation.

In order to invite friends to talk, an invitation is sent via Facebook chat. The recipient can click on the included link and start chatting with the other person.

I had the opportunity to use the app this morning. Overall, I was impressed by it. The installation took just a few minutes, and connecting with others was quick and easy.

The only issue I had with Vivox's Facebook app was its audio quality. At times, the transmission was clear. At other times, I could barely hear my wife, who was on the other end of the call. Luckily, those moments were few and far between.

If you try it out, let us know what you think of the free app in the comments below.