A GeoSocial and GeoCultural World

Without doubt we are living in a geosocial universe as the above graphically demonstrates.  The omnipresent hump that represents the mobile market should be a pointer that all marketers should follow.

Equally interesting is the global share that Skype occupies.  As an enabling technology it may have been around for a while but is still a key player.

JESS3, who produced this infographic,  have been trying to accurately depict the size of the key players in the geo / social space.

Source:JESS3

See JESS3's charts on Flickr.  The rise of the professional networking platform LinkedIn is also a trend of note.

As well as our social method of communication, those bound by cultural and religious conventions have been making their own presence felt online.

Members of the Muslim faith are celebrating Ramadan and Muxlim.com, a Muslim lifestyle site has a vision of connecting the world's Muslim communities to each other, and to the wider world, through shared online experiences.

There are a number of Ramadan apps that they promote online including the Ramadan Daily Dua which offers a prayer of supplication specific to each day during the holy month.  Another is the Ramadan Booster Pro offers "tips and recommended good deeds to help organise your Ramadan".

Finally this week comes updated data from Nielsen, that shows a continuing decline in search.

 The only exception is the rise of MSN/Windows Live/Bing which has risen 28%.  The effectiveness of placing advertising with search engines would appear to be even more in doubt.  Geo Social and Geo Cultural sites would be a better bet.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The State of the GeoSocial Universe [INFOGRAPHIC] (mashable.com)
• Infographic: The Geosocial Universe (gigaom.com)
• 9 location-based infographics showing how and why the mobile world is checking in (socialwayne.com)
• New smartphone apps help Muslims during Ramadan (newstatesman.com)
• Ramadan goes hi-tech with phone apps to remind the devout to pray (guardian.co.uk)

Scary Ideas About Privacy

There have been a number of disconcerting revelations about platform privacy in recent times.  Facebook has drawn a lot of flak for introducing Facebook Places which has the ability to pinpoint where a person is accessing their account and entering data.

Not every one wants this information available to third parties. If you don't wish to have Digital Big Brother knowing your every move then you should go to your account and do the following:

• Go to Account which is at top right of the screen
• Account settings
• Notifications
• Scroll down to Places
• Uncheck the 2 boxes

There have also been some very strange pronouncements from the CEO of Google. Gawker with its usual eloquence, highlights this as " the Google CEO outlining his dystopian vision of the future, in which children change their names at adulthood to escape damning online dossiers — dossiers of the sort stored by Google."

In earlier statements Eric Schmidt would have us believe that we should not have any secrets and that the virtuous Google is better at maintaining our privacy than a government; I think not.

The other flaw in this post-adolescent  name change idea is that the inference that upon reaching adulthood one becomes sin-free. There maybe be super mortals in this category but I have yet to meet one.

Stephen Colbert skewers Schmidt on the privacy issue in this video.

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The Word - Control-Self-Delete
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Valleywag has got even hotter under the collar over this issue and lists six delusions of Google's arrogant leaders.

Of course the other side of the coin is that it is not Google's responsibility to dictate to users what they should or should not put online. 

There has to be a level of personal responsibility and if a person is silly enough to ruin their own reputation on the web, whose fault is this?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google's CEO Has Scary Ideas For Children [The Way We Live Now] (gawker.com)
• Google CEO Eric Schmidt's answer to online privacy concerns: change your name (telegraph.co.uk)