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ANALYSIS THE NEXT BIG THING You've hf'^vd ^ < Facebook. Twitter and MySpace. .'ling up; Oiggiî - bíiarec] bookmarks ol interesting websites befween peers Farkit- Twitter length reviews of quirky news arlicles from around the world Flickr - Phot' "- '^h^ rinp i^'tp ih;it doubles as a Stumble - Social L¡Oü!s.[Tijrk,rig Secrettweet - Afionvmous tweets of innerr ;v.i Meebo - A one-stte log on for Yahoo! AIM, My^oace. GTalk. ICQ. Jabbor. MSN and other Skype - Voice over internet .. iH) telephone service .^v.d insî^:i Match.com - D ^ travel tip? Friendster Tripadvisor real pfopic Goi^le Latitude (formerly Dodgebalt) - A Inratio aware mobile phone application that allov."' members to find friends, irïteresting wenues an d potenhal love m-iii^iir^í i,f'.^ri)y eatability - Rest -J S by real people - totaltrave! ~ H •••f'\ reviews by real people geocachint. -ch treas ure hu nting game played throughoui U IÜ world b y adventure seeker s equipped witt i GPS devi ces piazes.com - Your mobile phone i- id s ï;ir ' Jon't have • Friday 11.09.0 9 I Travel W eekly CHEEP T H RILLS Social networking sites aie exploding in popularity as user driven content comes to the fore. Justin Wastnage looks at their application for the travel industry I n the US satirical video podcast Onion News Network, worried mothers of uni students are given tips by a social media expert un how to keep labs on their offspring by stalking them on Facebook and creating fake profiles on Tw itter, "Just choose a very common name and add the year of your child's birth at the end and ifyou spell everything wrong and swear a lot, they'll think you're someone they graduated with and you can read their every thought," the 'e-Mom' Gloria Bianco tells Jim and Tracy, the earnest hosts of the network's parody daytime television chat show. Today Now! That Facebook and Twitter have become as ubiquitous as to be satirised is a mark of their sudden jump in popularity. By December last year, four million Australians had profiles on the social networking site Facebook, or more per capita than any other country except Hong Kong and Singapore. Meanwhile Twitter, a micro-blogging service where 140-character status updates lei your friends know what you are doing, has surged in popularity in the past three months. "In Australia the growth of Twitter has been nothing short of phenomenal," said Alan Long, research director, Asia Pacific at internet analysts Hitwise in his blog. In April it recorded 49.9% growth and a staggeri ng 1067.3% growth has been recorded since the start of 2009. Both are great tools for communicating wiih friends, but how do you actually make any money from them? TV av el companies in Australia are starting to play around at the edges of social media, but individual travel agencies have largely not yet made the leap. But according to one future trends expert, Daniel Levine, executive director of the New York-based Avani Guide Institute, social media Trav Biweekly, com. au
