August 31, 2003
traffic patterns

It would be interesting to investigate out the traffic patterns of some of the hip interlinking sites out now, like friendster, linked-in, tribes.net the venerable ryze, eCademy, etc.

I've noticed that I take action in post-work structures for these - friendster, of course, is mostly dorking around because I have no interest in their stated purposes (though am intrigued by the implicit utility). Friendster as well has been blocked by our corporate firewall (wisely yet surprisingly).

Ryze actually based a part of their pricing structure on the after-hours market, so you could do certain things in post-COB time.

Linked-In and Tribes, because they are business/professional-interest structured may show a more gradiated pattern of hourly usage.

It's worth a bit of musing. I suspect that the traffic pattern might be too messy to count (the underemployed would use more consistently, those whose business (rather than semi-professional interest) is social networking would use more consistently as well). But gross patterns might be interesting - the rate of signup to Friendster at the start of the school year, for example - though differentiating that from the growth through network effect would be challenging. A geographic increase after a layoff in a particular company might also be a spike to watch for.

I'm sure people inside the companies are doing this kind of analysis - I would hope so, anyway. It was one of the interesting (and frustrating, given the paucity of good data) tasks I got to do at PlasticsNet. Someday there will be research of this, I trust.

Posted by esinclai at August 31, 2003 02:07 PM |