Social Media Application Smackdown

This excellent article over at Internet Duct Tape has reviewed data from the explosively popular social sharing application Friendfeed to determine the most popular Social Media applications. Although this Friendfeed sample has some challenges this is probably a great snapshot of social media application use among many early adopters in the US technology crowd, and thus offers a lot of insight into what is hot and what is not in terms of social media:

Two interesting findings:

90% of the Friend Feed participation comes from the top 8 services (Twitter, Blog, Google Reader, del.icio.us, Digg, Tumblr, YouTube, StumbleUpon). 46% of that comes from Twitter. It’s not surprising that Twitter leads the pack, because the nature of the service makes it easy to update many times a day.

The bottom 12 services (not include the ones added this week) can’t even manage to scrape 1% of the total between them (Pandora, Ma.gnolia, Upcoming, Picasa, iLike, Google Shared, LinkedIn, Vimeo, Furl, Yelp, Zooomr, SmugMug).

The author suggests that the maximum number of social media applications a person will use is about six, and that the consolidation of social applications provided by Friendfeed make it a very powerful application.

I'd suggest we are still in a very transitory mode with social media, where the holy grail has yet to be found that will provide simple, broad, fast, and efficient social and data networking across almost all applications and hardware platforms.