Morgan Stanley Reports on Internet Trends – Social Media Taking Over

Morgan Stanley issued a recent report on internet trends with particular emphasis on the impact of social media (among other factors like mobile, emerging markets, and video). No big surprises, however, it’s interesting how quickly the landscape is changing — currently, 6 of the top 10 websites (according to Alexa traffic rankings) are social sites:

Although, I think there is a mistake in this slide — since when is live.com considered a social site?

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Design and Branding Inspiration

Need some creative inspiration? Here is a list of my favorite resources on the web…

Faveup provides design inspiration in four different flavors: Logos, Business Cards, CSS Websites, and Flash Websites.
Update: Faveup is now Creattica
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Webcreme is a very simple website gallery showing some of the newest and best CSS websites.
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DesignFlavr is a graphic art gallery showcasing some of the latest art and design trends categorized into several different galleries including Illustrations, Vector Art, CG Art, CSS Websites, etc.
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Logopond is a really great source for branding and identity inspiration. It features a gallery of some of the best logos designs using the latest in design trends.
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Most Inspired aggregates several of the most popular CSS galleries.
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Are you launching a website anytime soon? If so, you might want to check out Launch Soon – a gallery of ‘launching soon’ pages.

Mahalo: Search Powered By Humans

Recently there’s been some buzz about Mahalo (something about rolling out microformats) so I decided to take a closer look at this site and I am, for the most part, impressed.
Mahalo is basically a new breed of search engine wiki-based search directory that relies on humans to power it. The idea is that users provide and submit links which should provide better search results by filtering out a lot of the spammy, irrelevant content that are indexed by the traditional search engines.
What I like most about it is that search results are presented in a very organized, intuitive way along with a lot of great complimentary information. All of this with a very usable and clean UI and very few paid ads to detract you from the results.
For example, I recently did a search for boston celtics and received a page segmented into relevant information and vital stats [...]

3 Reasons Why Facebook Will Die Soon

It’s just a matter of time before Facebook’s honeymoon is over. Although, it seems that social network juggernaut is indestructible, I don’t think the fairytale will last for too much longer. Here is why it fails:
1. Too much clutter — what turned me on Facebook from the beginning was the simple, clean user interface which Myspace drastically lacked. This has all changed since mid 2007 when they launched the Facebook platform allowing 3rd party apps on the site. Great idea at the time, but now the site has become a cluster f**k of useless widgets that, for the most part, don’t provide much value and are quickly forgotten. This will come back to haunt them.
On the part of Facebook, I think this was a strategic mistake. Instead of throwing up all of these apps in a 3rd party free-for-all (there are currently 22,408 apps), [...]

Google Is Still Master of the F**king Universe

With no surprise, Google has retained it’s title as the most powerful global brand (back-to-back wins) with a valuation of $86 Billion — just two years ago they were in 7th place while MSFT held top position.
According to Millward Brown’s BrandZ Top 100 Ranking, this years top 10 look like this:
1. Google ($86 Billion)
2. General Electric ($71 Billion)
3. Microsoft ($70 Billion)
4. Coca-Cola ($58 Billion)
5. China Mobile ($57 Billion)
6. IBM ($55 Billion)
7. Apple ($55 Billion)
8. McDonalds ($49 Billion)
9. Nokia ($43 Billion)
10. Marlboro ($37 Billion)
and…
62. Yahoo ($11.5 Billion)
Does this mean that even if Microsoft ($70 B) acquires Yahoo ($11.5 B), the combined brand value will still not match up to the search goliath?