Can a billion people be wrong?
During the last year, we’ve all enjoyed the rise of social media and social networking, with many of us now happily Twittering, Facebooking, Beboing, MySpacing, Cyworlding, Mixiing, QQing or whatever takes your fancy.
In fact, the numbers are quite incredible as demonstrated by this press release from Comscore in January:
"The number of worldwide visitors to social networking sites has grown 34 percent in the past year to 530 million, representing approximately 2 out of every 3 Internet users. MySpace and Facebook are in a tight battle for the global leadership position, each attracting more than 100 million visitors per month."
Two out of every three internet users are socially networking online.
That’s a lot of people.
And Comscore’s figures do not include what I consider to be the planet’s biggest social network, QQ. QQ is a Chinese network run by Tencent, a mobile network carrier. Maybe that’s why they are left out of Comscore’s figures, because they are mobile based, but QQ has 300 million users.
In fact, if you add in all the mobile network social capabilities, such as Twitter, you have over a billion people networking socially through electronic media.
That’s 1 in 5 people on the planet.
That’s a helluva lot of people.
But what concerns me, as regular readers of my blog will know, is how careful or careless these people are, when using these networked worlds in managing their identity. And there is more to this than just identity theft as, for a bank, it creates a really easy way for me to access the vault.
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