People around the world are looking back at what happened in 2008 and looking forward to 2009 and offering their reflections. I thought I would do it in terms of my online presence.

Back in May, 2007, I did an inventory of some of the social networks that I was active in. Today, I’ve done a similar inventory. Back then, it terms of connections, I was probably most active in Facebook. My number of connections has grown 346% since then. The network with the second highest number of connections was LinkedIn. My number of connections there has grown 189%. Yet both of these have been passed by what had been my third most connected network, Twitter.

The people following me on Twitter has grown 1624%, as Twitter has passed Facebook as the network with the most connections. I have nearly twice as many followers on Twitter as I do on Facebook now.

Other networks that have grown substantially have been MyBlogLog which has climbed past LinkedIn to be my third post connected network, and BlogCatalog, which is similar to MyBlogLog. The other network that has grown substantially has been Flickr which now ranks fourth. Two other sites that I suspect might have some growth over the coming days is StumbleUpon and del.icio.us, both of which people list in their MyBlogLog profiles, and I’m going through the MyBlogLog profiles of friends to see if I should add them on other networks. This gets to the issue of needing a social network relationship management program, but that is more than big enough to require a post of its own.

A few networks that I’m on have seen a decrease in connections. These include Orkut, Friendster and Ryze. None of these were networks that I was very active on, and the decrease isn’t a surprise. In fact, it helps illustrate an important point about social networks, while the number of nodes or connections in a social network may have some importance, what is much more important is the traffic on the network.

All of the social networks are interconnected in one way or another, and from that starting point, I looked at some of the statistics I have about my online activity. During 2008, I received well over 50,000 emails. This does not include spam emails or other emails that have no value and were deleted immediately. It also under counts because many emails that I receive from mailing lists are bundled into digests so I often receive one email that has up to fifteen emails inside of it.

Granted, it is hard to read that many emails and about a third of these emails never were opened. In response, I sent about 3100 emails.

On my blog, I’ve written about 650 blog posts this year, working out to be around 400,000 words. I also sent about 900 pictures to Flickr, 100 videos to blip.tv and over 2300 messages to Twitter, although some of them were automated messages from my blogs RSS feed.

I write about a wide variety of topics and I was interested in seeing which search terms brought the most traffic and which posts people found most interesting. In my case, 70% of the top searches were on peoples’ names. This was also reflected in the most read blog post of the year, which was about Victoria Lindsay, Erin Markes and Avery Doninger.

My second most popular post was about my role in the collapse of Lehman. Beyond that, the posts that got the most traffic, and also ended up having the highest Google Page Ranks were posts about my experiments with various forms of technology such as laconica, FriendFeed, OpenSim, SecondLife and the MyBlogLog API.

What does all of this tell us? I’m not sure, but it does seem like I should do some experimenting with establishing a Social Media Relationship Management (SMRM) system.

I hope you find this interesting. Let me know your social media experiences for 2008 and your thoughts about social media for the coming year.