ComScore recently did a research, which found that among 40 individual countries reported by comScore, Russia has the world’s most engaged social networking audience, with the average online Russian spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per month.

Brazil ranked close behind Russia at 6.3 hours, followed by Canada (5.6 hours), Puerto Rico (5.3 hours) and Spain (5.3 hours). The US ranked at #9  in terms of social network engagement, with an average of 4.2 average hours and 477 pages consumed per visitor.

I was surprised at once, because I thought that the Asian countries will definitely top the ranking. But neither China, Korea, or Japan is even showing up in this top-20 list. So I looked closely and found out that this data/research doesn’t include the internet Cafe or mobile web browsing…

This is really a good example of showing how mis-leading a social networking research could be. In my opinion, this research totaly ingored the big social networking factor - how it’s being social networked. In other words, in what way people are socializing. Without Internet Cafe data, China of course will not show up; without mobile web browsing, Japan, Korea, South Africa or China will probably not show up. Because that’s how people in those countries socialize. If you cut their main social networking platform, there is no way to understand how they are engaged.

Here is the list of the top 20 countries from ComScore research:

Tags: Australia, Canada, china, ComScore, mobile, Puerto Rico, Russia, Social network service, social networking, Spain

Happy Friday!

To save time and put things in a more organized way, I decided to create some pages in this blog as my library, that captures my regular finding around the topics that I’m interested, such as Crowdsourcing, Mobile, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and China.

I update these pages in stead of writing all different small posts. Check out these pages if you are also interested in these topics

For other topics that I have more to say, I’ll continue to write as separate posts.

Tags: amazon, china, Facebook, linkedin, mobile, Online Communities, social network, Twitter

This is my weekly mobile wrap up around “thinking”. You can find my weekly mobile wrap up around “trends” in a separate post. You can also check out my ongoing mobile news & event updates from my Mobile page.

• Mobile Web or Mobile Apps?

Lots of people ask: should we build mobile web or mobile applications? It’s a common questions for everyone who is thinking of going mobile direction more. I found this article very informative.

It lists out the pros and cons between mobile web and mobile apps.

• N2Y4 Mobile Challenge, Money for Mobile Developers Aiming to Change the World

The nonprofit N2Y4 Mobile Challenge from Netsquared is accepting project submissions from mobile developers through this month and will provide seed funding to a handful of lucky winners. The submissions so far are quite interesting. You can see some early submissions.

• Can you build one mobile app once and deploy it to multiple mobile platforms?

This used to be my question. Apparently, some people are working on it. Rhomobile promises: Build once, deploy to any smartphone.

• Follow the Mobile User, Thoughts from Vic Gundotra, Vice President of Engineering for Google’s mobile and developer products.

Focus on the mobile user, and all else will follow. Simpler data, better browsers, and a smoother experience.

• Finally, One Mobile Related Video for You to Enjoy: TED - David Pogue: “Cool new things you can do with your mobile phone”
  

You can also check out the other two mobile videos that I recently posted about ( Nokia Morph and MIT Sixsense Technology)

Tags: google, mobile, mobile apps, Mobile Computing, Mobile Web, six sense technology, Smartphone, TED, Vic Gundotra, weekly wrap up

A friend just shared a video with me. All I can say is “Wow”! It is really inspiring to look at how new technology is being developed. Here is a new Sixth Sense mobile technology from MIT Media Lab. No words can explain it better than seeing it. Enjoy

Tags: Media lab, MIT, mobile, technology, TED

It’s year end and I want to pull some interesting web data points together. It’s how I look at the world from the online space in 2008, given that I spend so much time online reading, researching, writing and learning, given that my job is web focused, given that I enjoy shopping and socializing online, and given that I believe that there are still a lot of fun and creative things that we can do on the web!

• Many hopes are on Omaba: here are the Top 10 Ways Obama Can Change American Culture and the Change.gov has a lot of the social applications and social thinking in it

• Hot Products - Toys and Electronics Categories: Hitwise has this analysis in Dec for these two holiday categories:

• Another look at holiday shopping: Holiday comparison - Brick & mortar vs. online-only retailers from Hitwise

• The First iGoogle Banking Gadget Released By Fidelity in Dec: you can see some screenshots here or try it out yourself

• Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008: by ReadWriteWeb

• Burger King launches a perfume that smells like meat, named Flamed by BK: isn’t this funny! more detail on TechCrunch

• Get a taxi from your iPhone at the push of a button: TaxMagic is featured on TechCrunch

• Mint, the popular financial website, is getting more features out of the door: you can now watch every penny in your account on the go with it’s iPhone application. featured on TechCrunch

• Omiture is extending its SiteCatalyst measurement tool to native iPhone applications. Some other analytics suites also offer this service on iPhone

• USA Today redesigned its iPhone news portal: and it is a lot prettier (screenshots on VentureBeat)

You see the trends:

• changes are everywhere, big changes and small changes
• people need to have fun no matter what
• it’s all going to be the mobile

Have a fun and changing holiday season!

Tags: 2008, Add new tag, change, getting mobile, mobile, web in general

What can I say about Google? There are too many things we could argue about this giant Internet company. This week, two new features from them really made me happy

1. the Gmail theme - Isn’t it nice that I can choose different skins for my Gmail. Some themes are dynamic, meaning they might change based on your location. I’m using the tea hour theme now. I’ll see if the sun goes down when it’s afternoon. Also see TechCrunch. Takeaway: sometime, one product wins, not only because of all the functional features that they provide, but also the little cute and emotional features that they bring to life.
2. the Google Mobile applications - I wanted so bad to use Google map from cell phone. Here it comes! I can use Google map on my cell phone the way I use it online! It made my travel a lot easier when I need to find directions on the way, when I try to find a restaurant to meet friends, when I want to know the traffic sitting in the car…it is helpful! Check it out yourself. Takeaway: when something is helpful, it will be a great feature quickly no matter what it takes.

Tags: gmail, google, mobile, web in general, web marketing