Our Digital World: A Snapshot

I did a quick poll via Twitter and email last week to see what sites, services and apps some of the people I know are using in their daily lives. These are of course likely to change as more and more services make their appearance (or, as I sometimes wickedly dream in the case of Facebook, slowly die), but for now I notice some clear trends:

News sites will continue to be a key source of information, even as print fights for survival

BBC News, the Guardian, the Huffington Post, Dallas Morning News, Al Jazeera, News24, the Daily Mail and the Sun were the most commonly visited sites amongst respondents to my poll, with the BBC and Guardian clearly leading the pack. Smaller, more local sites still have their audience amongst people who have an affiliation to those areas. News sites found a mention by all respondents, so whatever happens to print magazines, their digital avatars are here to stay. As the Times prepares to go behind a paywall, it will be interesting to see how they respond to the changes in the behaviour of their audience – something that is bound to happen.

Social networking is going nowhere but up, and Facebook still leads

Much as we may love to hate Facebook, everyone continues to use it. Accessing Facebook via the mobile phone is something that, as Facebook themselves say, is on the rise, as 1/4th of their 400 million+ users visit the site via their phones. Twitter is right up there with Facebook, and Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube, LiveJournal and Delicious also found a mention.

Gaming sites are an advertising opportunity being missed

Eurogamer and Gamepro, sites which I’ve never heard of as a female not too much into gaming, emerged as two sites mentioned by a few of the respondents whom I know to be young British males. I thought that was quite an interesting piece of information, and having taken a look at the sites in question, I noticed that the only products being advertised are more games. I can’t help thinking that there’s an opportunity completely being missed by brands whose target audience is this demographic, such as Lynx or Axe, or even consumer electronics brands. As Gamepro clearly states, of their primarily young male audience 80%  plan to buy a laptop and 60% plan to buy other consumer electronics in the next 6 months.

Google continues to rule the Search domain

Literally and figuratively, that is. There was absolutely no other search engine mentioned. Sorry Yahoo!, sorry Microsoft. I wasn’t very surprised, because have Yahoo! or Microsoft given us the sheer joy of being able to play Pacman lately? No, they have not :)

Other (not as remarkable) conclusions include Tweet Deck and Tweetie being the most commonly used Twitter apps and Google Reader being the feed reader of choice.

Of course these conclusions are based on a very limited pool of respondents, but I find it helpful to do this every now and then to have a reality check. Much as I like Diaspora, for example, I don’t really think Facebook is in too much danger yet, and as I found with the gaming example, sometimes we overlook simple things.