iDiz Incorporated

I saw a few interesting trend tidbits in my online travels lately:

Email is fading.
While annual email volume is in the trillions, 80% of it is commercial or unsolicited. Meanwhile, personal email has declined by 40% since 2003, and millions of teens do not even have email — but instead rely on cells, texting and social networks.

Facebook is bigger than 221 countries.
At 500 million, Facebook is 8% of the world’s population. According to Wikipedia, only India and China have more people/a higher percentage of the world population.

Researchers may be listening in online.
Instead of focus groups and email reviews, researchers are starting to monitor threaded conversations online, rather than using moderated discussion topics or listservs, which also helps to eliminate any potential bias.

People are going where they share the same interests.
• Foodspotting lets people connect through their favorite dishes
• Gotryiton will give you an honest opinion on how you look in that new outfit before you go out
• Howaboutwe is a dating service that matches people by what they like to do
• Hunch will build a list of recommended people, places and things around you, based on a 20 question taste profile

Barcodes are even becoming social.
• Bakodo will let you scan QR codes and barcodes with your iPhone, then search for product data and reviews on Amazon, Google, eBay, Best Buy, etc., plus find out what your friends think of the product through their reviews. Think of it as a social community based around products. Bakodo is currently adding 60,000 grocery items to their database.

The bar for the press release has been raised.
Rather than just emailing a press release, PR agencies are now sending links to custom landing pages with embedded multimedia, and tweeting their YouTube videos of announcements.

Sources: Survey magazine, Mashable, Wikipedia,