July 2010

While MySpace was once the most widely used social networking site, it's now on the decline, losing ground to both Facebook and Twitter. A new study shows one reason for the platform's low activity rates: poor customer satisfaction.

ForeSee Results, in conjunction with the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, recently found that MySpace ranked the lowest in customer satisfaction rates among social networking sites. The social media industry overall scored 70 points, while MySpace was scored 63 points.

The site was only one point behind Facebook, which ranked fourth in customer satisfaction with 64 points. Common issues with the site Facebook or MySpace included privacy concerns, navigation troubles, annoying applications and unintuitive news feed controls. Despite low satisfaction rates, Facebook can be used as a huge marketing tool by many businesses - 16 percent of consumers use the site to seek out product recommendations.

Meanwhile, Wikipedia was the most popular, scoring 77 points. Of the respondents, 15 percent used the site for product research.

The product-pushing potential of social media was also observed in a study conducted by Chadwick Martin Bailey. According to the report, more than 50 percent of Facebook users have bought a product recommended to them through the site.

A number of applications running on Android smartphones are reportedly capable of aggregating a user’s personal information and transmitting it to a website based in China. Among the information included in the transmissions are phone numbers, passwords and data related to the subscriber’s mobile phone account and contract.

Web security firm Lookout reported the data theft at the ongoing Black Hat 2010 conference in Las Vegas. Most of the applications responsible for the attacks were created by Jackeey Wallpapers. Lookout is unclear whether or not the data-stealing capability is intentional or not; however, it has advised Android users to avoid downloading any of these applications.

“Even good apps can be modified to turn bad after a lot of people download it,” Lookout's chief technology officer, Kevin MaHaffey, told PC Magazine. “Users absolutely have to pay attention to what they download. And developers have to be responsible about the data that they collect and how they use it.”

The attacks are especially troublesome for security professionals as phones running on the Android operating system have quickly become some of the most popular, according to a report recently released by ChangeWave Research. With more than 16 percent of Americans planning to purchase a smartphone in the next 90 days, developers are planning security improvements to avoid potential issues and lost customers.

Despite its popularity, Twitter recently learned few - if any - of its more than 80 million users are willing to pay to use the service. A survey conducted by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Journalism found none of the people it surveyed would pay for the service even if it became required for use of the popular social media website.

While Twitter has no plans to charge anyone for its services, the Annenberg report believes its survey results represent a trend in internet use - even people who rely heavily on the web are unwilling to pay for almost anything.

“Such an extreme finding that produced a zero response underscores the difficulty of getting internet users to pay for anything that they already receive for free,” said Jeffrey Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at Annenberg. “Twitter has no plans to charge its users, but this result illustrates, beyond any doubt, the tremendous problem of transforming free users into paying users. Online providers face major challenges to get customers to pay for services they now receive for free.”

Since first arriving in 2008, Twitter has become an integral aspect of the enterprise world due to the free marketing it provides companies looking to expand their customer base.

A study recently published by InformationWeek found 56 percent of companies plan to implement security protocol in hopes of eliminating risks related to their use of Web 2.0 applications. As items such as widgets and more advanced source code become commonplace in web design, cyber criminals will continue to target these items to carry out targeted attacks.

The study found 61 percent of companies have standardized certain processes to alleviate concern regarding security breaches. By automating library calls, organizations can remove the threat of human error negatively impacting their network. InformationWeek believes the remaining 39 percent should adopt similar steps to avoid issues with widgets for social media applications or other items appearing on their websites.

“The ease with which the author was able to penetrate our sample Web 2.0 employee management application is possible because developers of web apps often forget to protect against legitimate users,” Lorna Garey, content director of InformationWeek analytics, said.

Sixty-four percent of the participants reported privacy breaches as the biggest threat to their company. For any organizations with compliance responsibilities, a vulnerability in a third-party application can lead to the type of breach that can draw the ire of regulators. A number of new laws adopted by states and countries require extensive security measures to protect their residents’ data.