When you arrive at a site that asks you to register for an account before you can access certain content or functionality, does that drive you away?

A recent research report shows that a site that requires users to register does just that, drives users away. On the flipside, the same report shows that about half of all users are attracted by personalization capabilities on a site.

So, on the one hand, we don’t want to register but, on the other, we want personalization.

How can you deal with that in a way that finds a balance between the two? Perhaps social login is the answer.

Read more

Every single day – well, except the weekend – we’re giving away a 1-year Basic Account package, worth almost $120.

This promotion continues and one lucky person every day has a chance to walk away with this catch.

What we do is that each day, at a different time each day, we post a message to one of our social media accounts – Facebook, Google+, or Twitter – with a link containing a discount code.

The code entitles the first person that applies it to a transaction to a 100% discount on a 1-year Basic Package, worth $119.40.

Read more

So what happened with the Internet in 2011? How many email accounts were there in the world in 2011? How many websites? How much did the most expensive domain name cost? How many photos were hosted on Facebook? How many videos were viewed to YouTube?

We’ve got answers to these questions and many more. A veritable smorgasbord of numbers, statistics and data lies in front of you. Using a variety of sources we’ve compiled what we think are some of the more interesting numbers that describe the Internet in 2011.

Read more

Facebook currently has more than 800 million active users. With a world population having just passed the 7 billion barrier, that would mean that around 11% of people on Earth are on Facebook.

That’s of course not necessarily true, as there are organizations and businesses that have Facebook accounts, and some individuals may have more than one, but it’s a staggering number nonetheless.

But in which countries does the population take more to Facebook than in others? Some say that Philippines is number one with 93.9% of the Pinoy population on Facebook. Read on for our very own top 10 list.

Read more

The Next Web published an article in August entitled “How text messaging as we know it will die in 3-5 years.” In the article Niall Harbison argues that the advent of smartphones and apps such as WhatsApp results in users transitioning away from SMS to these alternative messaging options. So let’s try to see what we can find out.

Read more

And now for something short and sweet, or bittersweet if you worked at MySpace back in 2006-2007 when the social network was still going strong.

To say that Facebook stole MySpace’s thunder in those years is probably the understatement of the decade. By the end of 2008, the social media focus (and mindshare) had already shifted away from MySpace to Facebook in a massive fashion. A picture is worth a thousand words, or in this case, a chart.

Read more

Online social networks are everywhere these days, a truly global phenomenon. But where are the different social networks having the most success in terms of popularity? That is what we’ll try to answer in this post.

We have included 11 social networks in this survey: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Orkut, Tumblr, FourSquare, MySpace, LiveJournal, Hi5 and Bebo.

Read more

At the recent F8 conference Facebook revealed that they now have 800 million active users. Europe, with Russia included, has a population of 727 million. We now have a social network that is so large that it could fill up a major world region with people and still have some to spare (this “spare” being twice the size of Canada’s entire population).

Another cool comparison is that Facebook now has as many users as the entire Internet did back in 2004, the year Facebook was founded.

For fun, here are some other size comparisons you can make.

Read more

Google’s new social network, Google+, is gaining users at a frenetic pace. Presumably people are signing up for it faster than any new social network in history.

There will be many who bemoan that there’s now yet another social network out there to keep track of. Weren’t there enough already? Don’t Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and all those other sites cover our social networking needs? “I don’t want another social network!”

But here’s the cool thing. The fact that Google+ has gotten some serious wind in its sails (unlike the dead-in-the-water duck that is Google Buzz) will bring something sorely needed to the social space: Competition.

Read more

Protecting one’s brand is pretty much standard practice for large online properties like Facebook. As a result, the social network giant now owns hundreds of domain names, of which only a few are actually used. The rest have been taken over from others for “safekeeping.”

We find it rather amusing that Facebook itself now owns domain names such as:

Read more