电商路

在线社交网络正在改变人们沟通、工作、游戏的方式，而且大部分是朝好的方向发展。

一年一度的世界经济论坛正在达沃斯举行。世界经济论坛以让全球优秀的人们产生联系而闻名。但当代表们回到家后，让他们中的几个人聚在一起都变得非常 困难。为了让领袖们能保持联系，论坛组织者们去年发布了一项保密的在线服务的试验版，在此服务中，用户们能发布微型档案以及其他信息，并与其他用户联系从 而组成一个协作工作组。这项服务的名字为世界电子社区（World Electronic Community，简称WELCOM），这个世界经济论坛唯一的在线网络服务只有5000名用户。

但值得拥有世界电子社区这么大头衔的服务只有Facebook。Facebook下月将庆祝其成立六周年，现在Facebook是Google之下 的全球第二大网站。这个全球最大的在线社交网站拥有逾3.5亿用户，如果把它看成一个国家的话，Facebook的人口仅次于中国和印度。这不是唯一与此 行业相关的令人震惊的数据。Facebook的用户每天发布逾5500万条更新，每两周分享35亿份内容。它的增长极其快速，并且已经扩展到发源地美国之 外：其70%的用户生活在美国之外。

尽管Facebook是世界上最大的社交网站，但还是有不少其他全球社交网站巨头：如专注音乐和娱乐的MySpace；面向关注职业生涯的专业人士 的LinkedIn；还有Twitter，这是一种让人们发送140个单词以内的名为“tweet”（推文）的短消息的网络服务。以每月互联网访问量计， 所有这些网站都属于世界上最受欢迎社交网站（见图1）；还要包括Orkut，这款Google服务在印度和巴西使用人数非常多，另外就是在中国使用人数众 多的QQ。除此之外，其他国家的大型社区网站如法国的Skyrock、俄罗斯的VKontakte、韩国的Cyworld以及无数专注于特殊兴趣的小型社 交网站——如面向世界穆斯林人群的Muxlim、连结科学家和研究人员的ResearchGATE。

公众化

所有这些都显示出在线沟通离我们多近了。直到上世纪90年代，这些还是极客们用网络昵称聚会的地方。由于便于使用的界面和良好的隐私控制，社交网站 已经转变为大型公众空间，数以百万计的人在这些网站上使用他们的真实身份，感觉非常自在。市场研究公司ComScore估计，2009年10月大型社交网 站共接待了逾8亿访客。“社交网站最大的成就就是将人性带入了曾经冰冷的技术世界”，咨询公司Altimeter集团的Charlene Li说道。

社交网站的其他成就则在于将自身转变成了大型沟通的超级工具。简单地在Facebook上更新个人页面或发一条推，用户们就能让他们网络中的朋友 ——有时是世界上的朋友——知道在他们的生活中发生了什么。而且，他们只需要点击几下鼠标就能发送视频、推按以及大量其他内容。“这让人类与其他人交往的能力得到了显著而永久的提高”，曾投资Facebook、Twitter和Ning的硅谷老手Marc Andreessen表示。Ning是一家为将近200万个社会网络提供托管的美国公司。

而人们也擅长使用这种能力。市场研究公司Nielsen 估计，自2009年2月开始，人们在社交网站上花费的时间开始比花费在电子邮件上的时间多，而这种差距越来越大。根据每个社交网站用户花费在社交网站上的 时间计算，在社交网站上用时最多的是澳大利亚人，随后是英国人和意大利人。2009年10月，美国人用在社交网站上的时间少于6小时，几乎是 2007年同一时期的三倍。而且上面也不仅仅是年轻人在交友和互相戳——在Facebook上向父母问好吧。所有年龄段的人正在以更加庞大的数目加入社交 网站。

社交网站的惊人增长吸引了大量关注，因为这些网站让人们的个人关系变得比以前更加可视化、更加可计量化。社交网站还变成了重要的新闻载体和影响渠道。Twitter就定期根据对诸如孟买恐怖袭击这样的事件以及包括饶舌音乐明星、作家和皇室在内的高级用户的活动的实时更新发布头条。而Twitter 和Facebook在帮助巴拉克·奥巴马横扫总统选举取得胜利的在线竞选策略中也都发挥了担纲作用。(可以看看《通向白宫之路》的网络视频》

交卷时间

但和奥巴马类似，一路上社交网站同样也引起了巨大的期望，现在它们必须交答卷了。它们需要向世界证明自己会长存。它们必须展示出产生能回馈投资者们 给予它们的高昂估价的收益的能力。它们在这么做的同时，还得保证用户的隐私权不会被利润的追求所破坏。

在商业世界中，围绕被称为“企业2.0”的东西产生了许多骗局。企业2.0（Enterprise 2.0）这个词被用来形容将社交网站和博客这样的技术引入工作之中。钟爱这一概念的人们宣称，新社交网络技术现在已经成熟到可以进入企业市场了，这将赚取 巨额的商业利润。这样的服务包括Yammer——它推出了一种企业版Twitter，还有Chatter——由Salesforce.com开发的社交网 络服务。

对怀疑论者们而言，所有这些关于社交网站的讨论都预示着另一个互联网泡沫的形成。他们争论到，即使如Facebook这么大的社交网站都会为赚钱而挣扎，因为变幻无常的网民们不会在一个地方呆很长时间，例子就是MySpace。MySpace曾经风行一时，而现在只能算是以前的影子。作为重振方案的 一部分，新闻集团拥有的这个网站去年换了一个新老板，裁员45%。批评者们还认为，社交网站的广告驱动商业模式是有缺陷的。

而在各个公司内部，对于办公室中使用在线社交网站能带来好处还有许多质疑。招聘公司Robert Half技术去年针对1400名CIO做的一项调查表明，只有十分之一的人给雇员们白天访问社交网站的全部权限，许多公司屏蔽了Facebook和 Twitter。管理层最大的担忧在于社交网络会导致社会交往，雇员们使用网站和朋友们聊天，而不去工作了。一些老板害怕这些网站奖杯用于泄露敏感的企业信息。

这份特别报告将细致地检验这些事情。报告表示，尽管不会每个网站都繁荣，社交网站要比其批评者们认为得要更具生机。而社交网络技术让欢迎它们的公司受益匪浅，不管这些企业大还是小。最后，这份报告表明这只是全球互联的新纪元的开始，在新纪元中，思想和创新在世界的传播速度要比以往任何时候都快得多。

来源：东西网 http://www.dongxi.net/article/3823（中文翻译）
来源：经济学人（英文）
作者：佚名
译者：ithinco

THE annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, currently in progress, is famous for making connections among the global great and good. But when the delegates go home again, getting even a few of them together in a room becomes difficult. To allow the leaders to keep talking, the forum’s organisers last year launched a pilot version of a secure online service where members can post mini-biographies and other information, and create links with other users to form collaborative working groups. Dubbed the World Electronic Community, or WELCOM, the forum’s exclusive online network has only about 5,000 members.

But if any service deserves such a grand title it is surely Facebook, which celebrates its sixth birthday next month and is now the second most popular site on the internet after Google. The globe’s largest online social network boasts over 350m users—which, were it a nation, would make Facebook the world’s third most populous after China and India. That is not the only striking statistic associated with the business. Its users now post over 55m updates a day on the site and share more than 3.5 billion pieces of content with one another every week. As it has grown like Topsy, the site has also expanded way beyond its American roots: today some 70% of its audience is outside the United States.

Although Facebook is the world’s biggest social network, there are a number of other globetrotting sites, such as MySpace, which concentrates on music and entertainment; LinkedIn, which targets career-minded professionals; and Twitter, a networking service that lets members send out short, 140-character messages called “tweets”. All of these appear in a ranking of the world’s most popular networks by total monthly web visits (see chart 1), which also includes Orkut, a Google-owned service that is heavily used in India and Brazil, and QQ, which is big in China. On top of these there are other big national community sites such as Skyrock in France, VKontakte in Russia, and Cyworld in South Korea, as well as numerous smaller social networks that appeal to specific interests such as Muxlim, aimed at the world’s Muslims, and ResearchGATE, which connects scientists and researchers.

Going public

All this shows just how far online communities have come. Until the mid-1990s they were largely ghettos for geeks who hid behind online aliases. Thanks to easy-to-use interfaces and fine-grained privacy controls, social networks have been transformed into vast public spaces where millions of people now feel comfortable using their real identities online. ComScore, a market-research firm, reckons that last October big social-networking sites received over 800m visitors. “The social networks’ greatest achievement has been to bring humanity into a place that was once cold and technological,” says Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group, a consulting firm.

Their other great achievement has been to turn themselves into superb tools for mass communication. Simply by updating a personal page on Facebook or sending out a tweet, users can let their network of friends—and sometimes the world—know what is happening in their lives. Moreover, they can send out videos, pictures and lots of other content with just a few clicks of a mouse. “This represents a dramatic and permanent upgrade in people’s ability to communicate with one another,” says Marc Andreessen, a Silicon Valley veteran who has invested in Facebook, Twitter and Ning, an American firm that hosts almost 2m social networks for clients.

And people are making copious use of that ability. Nielsen, a market-research firm, reckons that since February 2009 they have been spending more time on social-networking sites than on e-mail, and the lead is getting bigger. Measured by hours spent on them per social-network user, the most avid online networkers are in Australia, followed by those in Britain and Italy (see chart 2). Last October Americans spent just under six hours surfing social networks, almost three times as much as in the same month in 2007. And it isn’t just youngsters who are friending and poking one another—Facebook-speak for making connections and saying hi to your pals. People of all ages are joining the networks in ever greater numbers.

Social-networking sites’ impressive growth has attracted much attention because the sites have made people’s personal relationships more visible and quantifiable than ever before. They have also become important vehicles for news and channels of influence. Twitter regularly scores headlines with its real-time updates on events like the Mumbai terrorist attacks and on the activities of its high-profile users, who include rap stars, writers and royalty. And both Twitter and Facebook played a starring role in the online campaign strategy that helped sweep Barack Obama to victory in the presidential race.

Delivery time

But like Mr Obama, social networks have also generated great expectations along the way on which they must now deliver. They need to prove to the world that they are here to stay. They must demonstrate that they are capable of generating the returns that justify the lofty valuations investors have given them. And they need to do all this while also reassuring users that their privacy will not be violated in the pursuit of profit.

In the business world there has also been much hype around something called “Enterprise 2.0”, a term coined to describe efforts to bring technologies such as social networks and blogs into the workplace. Fans claim that new social-networking offerings now being developed for the corporate world will create huge benefits for businesses. Among those being touted are services such as Yammer, which produces a corporate version of Twitter, and Chatter, a social-networking service that has been developed by Salesforce.com.

To sceptics all this talk of twittering, yammering and chattering smacks of another internet bubble in the making. They argue that even a huge social network such as Facebook will struggle to make money because fickle networkers will not stay in one place for long, pointing to the example of MySpace, which was once all the rage but has now become a shadow of its former self. Last year the site, which is owned by News Corp, installed a new boss and fired 45% of its staff as part of a plan to revive its fortunes. Critics also say that the networks’ advertising-driven business model is flawed.

Within companies there is plenty of doubt about the benefits of online social networking in the office. A survey of 1,400 chief information officers conducted last year by Robert Half Technology, a recruitment firm, found that only one-tenth of them gave employees full access to such networks during the day, and that many were blocking Facebook and Twitter altogether. The executives’ biggest concern was that social networking would lead to social notworking, with employees using the sites to chat with friends instead of doing their jobs. Some bosses also fretted that the sites would be used to leak sensitive corporate information.

This special report will examine these issues in detail. It will argue that social networks are more robust than their critics think, though not every site will prosper, and that social-networking technologies are creating considerable benefits for the businesses that embrace them, whatever their size. Lastly, it will contend that this is just the beginning of an exciting new era of global interconnectedness that will spread ideas and innovations around the world faster than ever before.

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