Turns out that according to Shareaholic, Facebook is the number one source of referral traffic with 25.6% of the market share in December and 26.4% of the market share in January. Other sites such as StumbleUpon, Google and Twitter also contribute to the numbers.

Newcomer Pinterest is generating a good amount of referral traffic. According to a report from Shareaholic, this site is generating more traffic than sites like Google Plus, LinkedIn and YouTube put together.

In December, Pinterest had 2.5% of the market share while in January they contributed 3.6% of the referrals. This growth is especially impressive when you consider that in July last year they sent only a miniscular 0.17% of referrals.

StumbleUpon, which holds the second position for referral traffic had 6.5% of the market share in December, but has fallen to 5.07% in January.

Facebook and StumbleUpon’s relatively large share of traffic referrals has been corroborated by reports from StatCounter in the past.

Although Google Plus contributes a very small amount of the total share of referrals – just 0.22% – other Google sites such as Google news, Google Images and Gmail continue to be major sources of traffic.

Nearly 1 in every 5 minutes (20%) of the time spent online was for social networking in the month of October 2011. Further, this activity is indulged by 82% of the world’s online population.

Social networking has grown in popularity over the past few years, and has provided a new way for people to build more contacts, as well as making it easier for people to remain in touch with their existing friends and family who may be spread out across the globe.

The Rise of the Global Social Networking Audience
Source: comScore Media Metrix, Worldwide, March 2007 – October 2011

One of the major factors fueling the continued growth of social networks is the increased use of the Web through mobile phones, which help people to communicate even when they are on the go or in regions where they cannot access a wired connection.

Only five years ago, in March 2007, social networking was used by less than 500 million people, while email was the primary online activity, with 528.7 million users. By October 2011, the graph has changed drastically and social networking now accounts for 1,179.4 million users while email has only 916.8 million users. The social network graph continues to grow parallel to the growth of Internet usage.

Worldwide Regional Popularity

Asia-Pacific regional users constitute one-third of the world’s social networking population. However, Latin America accounts for the largest amount of time spent on social networks.

Percentage of Online Population Using Social Networking around the World
Source: comScore Media Metrix, October 2011

Another interesting finding of the report is that women are more social across the globe.

Facebook is of course the most popular social network, and has 55% penetration. Three-fourths of the time spent on social networks is on Facebook, and one in seven minutes spent online are on Facebook. Google+ is a fast growing social network, and it is the only network to have signed up 25 million new users in less than one month.

Inevitably, micro-blogging has also gained in popularity. Twitter is, of course, the most popular micro-blogging site – in October 2011, it was used by about 10% of Internet users worldwide.

Interestingly, these social networks are growing in popularity across all age groups. In fact, males and those above 55 years of age are the fastest growing group.

Revenue Lagging Growth

Social networks deliver the most online display ad impressions, but they do not generate the largest revenue. 25% of ads are displayed on social networks but they generate only 15% of the revenue.

U.K. Social Statististics

Snapshot of social networking in the United Kingdom
Source: comScore Media Metrix

According to this report, the list is similar to the one they had released last year. However, there has been a significant increase in the number of unique visitors to most of the top sites.

It is no surprise that search, social networking and video remain at the top of the reasons for mobile browsing with Google, Facebook and YouTube scoring the top three rankings respectively.

The world’s 10 most popular mobile websites are:

1. google.com
2. facebook.com
3. youtube.com
4. vkontakte.ru
5. odnoklassniki.ru
6. yandex.ru
7. wikipedia.org
8. my.opera.com
9. yahoo.com
10. twitter.com

The report has compared the findings between November 2011 and November 2010. Apart from seeing rapid growth in Asia, Opera Mini has also found a substantial increase in mobile Web usage in Latin America, Africa and South East Asia.

The Prince in question Alwaleed bin Talal is a majority share holder of the company Kingdom Holding through which the investment in Twitter has been made. This holding now gives the Prince a strategic stake in the network, which means that he owns more than 3% of the shares.

As a result of this investment Twitter will now have a valuation in excess of $10 Billion.

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal has recently been voted as the richest Arab businessman by the magazine ‘Arabian Business’. He is also the largest individual investor in Citigroup Inc. and also holds a stake in News Corp. He has also invested in Apple and General Motors.

This infusion of $300 million will enable Twitter to go ahead with their plans of a redesign in order to make the network faster and simpler. This should also attract more advertisers to the site.

While Twitter has confirmed the investment, they have not given any further details so far.

Twitter had also received $800 million in August from Russian billionaire Yuri Milner who has also invested in Facebook. At that time twitter had a valuation of $8 billion.

Considering the fact hat Twitter had played a significant role in the Arab Spring protests earlier this year, it may seem quite surprising that an Arab Prince has decided to invest in it. It could however be attributed to his good business acumen.

Knol, Google Wave, Renewable Energy cheaper than Coal (RE<C), Google Friend Connect, Google Gears, Google Search Timeline and Google Bookmarks Lists will be shut down permanently over the next three months.

The products didn’t quite take off as Google had hoped and are therefore being shut down, in Google’s own words, with the aim “to build a simpler, more intuitive, truly beautiful Google user experience.”

A lot of the engineering resources at Google seem to be redirected towards making Plus a hit. A host of new features are seemingly added to the new social network each month. One of these new features is an advanced search option, allowing users to filter search results by author and to browse through the currently trending topics at that point in time.

Similar to Twitter, the trending topics on Google+ show users what are the most popular topics at the moment, and allow them to dive into conversations related tot hose topics.

Google+ search along with trending topics

Now, when a user carries out a search, the trending topics will be displayed in a column on the right side of the page. Users click on any of the trending topics to conduct a search for that topic, which again is very similar to the functionality in Twitter.

Users can also narrow down the search results by using the filters provided at the top of the page, to narrow the content by type – everything, Google+ posts, people and pages or Sparks – and the content source – everyone, circles or self. At present, these tools are available only after a search has been conducted. However, it has been reported by The Next Web that users are asking for the trends results to be added to the main page on Google+.

Another interesting feature that has been spotted recently is the integration of Google+ with Google Places. A number of local searches now show the listing accompanied by the profile image that has been pulled from Google+. When users click on this logo, they are taken to a Google search results page that lists the Google+ Page and provides the user the option to directly add that Page directly to their Circles.

Google+ profiles featured in Google Places search results

This is yet another service that the search giant has integrated with Google+. Even though the network has been criticized for its lack of activity, the developers seems to be determined to make it succeed by placing it in front of users of all other Google services till they eventually wear down and decide to use it!

It has been found that the following of a candidate on Twitter, can give a very good idea about how he will eventually fare.

When the number of Twitter followers of a candidate gains momentum, it has been found that his poll results follow suit. On the other hand, when the number of Twitter followers falls or stops gaining ground, his poll results are also negatively affected.

This trend had been predicted a while ago by Zach Green, CEO of Twitter election research 140elect. Now he has proven his theory based on the performance of the candidates.

He says that Newt Gingrich got a lot of new followers after he announced his candidacy on May 11 and then again after a good debate performance on September 7. At the same time his overall standing in the polls has also improved.

In comparison, Rick Perry received a boost following the announcement of his candidacy on August 13, but he has lost ground since then, in the polls. Concurrently it was found that a lot of people on Twitter have been mocking him rather than following him.

Other candidates such as Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann have followed similar trends. When the number of their followers rises, they also make good gains in the polls, but when the number of followers falls, they lose ground.

Herman Cain too has lost Twitter followers as well as poll points following allegations of sexual harassment leveled against him.

Do these signals indicate that Twitter will be able to accurately predict the results of the GOP poll results? Or is it just a coincidence?

Last week, Facebook spokesperson, Annie Ta said, “Starting on Monday, we are continuing to slowly roll out Sponsored Stories in [the] ticker across Facebook. Sponsored Stories help people see more relevant marketing on Facebook and they can be twice as engaging as ads on Facebook.”

Facebook launched the Sponsored Stories feature in January this year and the ticker was launched in August. The ticker is placed on the top right of the Facebook homepage.

Sponsored Stories are similar to the Promoted Tweets on Twitter. They show an ad relevant to a status update posted by a user. The Sponsored Story will then be relayed to the contacts of that user, making the target audience feel that they are seeing an ad that has been endorsed by one of their friends and is connected to the status update.

Even though the ticker has received a lukewarm response at best, Facebook says that Sponsored Stories are twice as engaging as normal advertisements. Statistics from Nielsen also indicate that such ads are more likely to be remembered. Our own advertising has also found that click-through rates and connection rates on Sponsored Stories are consistently higher than on regular Facebook ads.

According to documentation on Facebook, the Ticker only displays information to others who are already able to see elsewhere on Facebook. Page Like, App Share and App Used Sponsored Stories are eligible to appear in ticker for others to see, but only if they could have already seen them in News Feed.

It will be a while before advertisers can decide whether end users like the idea of Sponsored Stories running in the ticker, or whether they will consider it to be more of a nuisance.

Facebook subscribe buttons

This button will allow people to decide from whom they wish to receive news feed updates. In other words, Facebook users can now not only get news feeds and status updates from friends, but they can also receive the ‘Public’ updates of people who they do not know personally but are interested in.

Conversely, the user can also decide whether they want to receive all updates from all their friends or only selected updates.
Effectively, the Subscribe button allows people to:

• Choose what they see from people in their News Feed.
• Hear from people, even if they are not friends
• Let people hear from them, even if the subscribers are not friends

By using the subscribe button, a user can decide whether to receive all updates from a particular friend, most updates, or just important ones. Users can also decide to see only photos from a particular contact or blank-out another one altogether.

Like Google+ Circles and Twitter Follow buttons, the Facebook Subscribe button allows users to get updates from individuals they do not know, such as a politician, actor or singer, provided these people have decided to allow Subscriptions to their personal Facebook streams rather than their Facebook business / brand pages and they make at least some of their updates public.

Ordinary users may also be followed by others who do not know them personally, if they have selected to allow subscribers.

For once, Facebook has taken the sensible route and required users to specifically opt in to allow subscribers rather than enabling it by default. Subscribers are blocked by default and to opt in a user must go to the Subscriptions Page via the menu on the left-hand side of their profile and then click the “Allow Subscribers” button. It is an entirely optional feature and the power rests with the user.

The study, incidentally, was conducted to show the importance of clean drinking water. While drinking water was ranked third, above Facebook, the results were not quite what one would expect.

Facebook was ranked fifth in the list. Clean and flushing toilets were ranked ninth!

Similarly, an Internet connection was ranked at number two, just after sunshine, which of course most Britishers are known to be quite starved of.

Ironically, another survey conducted earlier this year found that nearly 50% of men accessed the Internet on their mobile while in the toilet.

Technological advances and social networks have been given predominance over other requirements such as washing machines, showers, fresh fruit and vegetables, pain killers and even shoes. However, to give them more importance than food, clothing and the basic sanitary facility of flushing toilets, seems rather extreme.

The study polled 3,000 British residents, many of whom could possibly have been young adults, who tend to dramatise the importance of trivial things and have never had to live without the ‘comforts’ of clean toilets being available to them.

The top 10 items in the list were as follows.

1. Sunshine
2. Internet connection
3. Clean drinking water
4. Fridge
5. Facebook
6. NHS
7. Cooker
8. Email
9. Flushing toilet
10. Mobile phone / smartphone

In fact, 4 out of the 10 most important things the respondents said they couldn’t live without are completely unrelated to the sustenance of life. Even more ridiculous is the fact that 15 out of the 50 “essentials” were items such as eBay, iPods and Twitter, which didn’t even exist 20 years ago!

Are the British public really such a nation of airheads or was this just another survey with a poorly chosen sample showing “stats” that are far from reality?

The prime minister has justified his stance by saying that the riots had been “organised via social media” He further says , “When people are using social media for violence, we need to stop them.”

While it is indeed certain that misuse of the social media should not be allowed, the idea to ban the social media seems rather simplistic.

It can be argued that when social media did not exist, riots still occurred. In the olden days, people got together in small groups to discuss their strategy and then disseminated the plans in person. Later when the print media came into being, the use of news letters and pamphlets to propagate ideologies and plans was widely used.

In light of this, a blanket ban on the use of social media would be equivalent to ‘shooting the messenger’.

Also such an act would also prevent those with good intentions. There are many people who are using the same platforms to propagate peace and to help those affected by the riots.

It has now been decided that representatives of Facebook, Twitter and RIM are to meet with the home secretary Theresa May to discuss the steps they can take to prevent the anti-social elements from spreading further arson, as well as to discuss how these websites can be of use to detect those who are responsible for the mayhem caused.

These sites have gladly agreed to meet with the authorities and extend full cooperation to deal with the current crisis.

On the other hand, groups that advocate that people have the freedom to use all media to interact with each other have opposed the idea of banning the social media, and have even compared the move to what governments in places like China and Saudi Arabia may do.

The riots first broke out on the 6th of August in retaliation to police shooting a 29-year-old man named Mark Duggan in Tottenham (North-East London) on the 4th of August.

Local residents started to protest outside the Tottenham police station, but the protest then spread to a much larger area, involving about 20 neighbourhoods. The protest quickly turned into a violent riot.

A lot of the rioters resorted to using the Internet as a means of coordinating their “protests”. Possibly the most popular means here has been Blackberry Messenger, which allows people to communicate through its instant messaging technology in-built on all Blackberry handsets.

Other services such as Facebook and Twitter were also used, of course.

Not only were people instigated to take part in the riots through the use of these services, but photos and videos of arson were also uploaded and circulated widely. This further instigated otherwise casual observers to join in on the rioting and looting.

The other side to this story is the fact that the very technology that helped spread the violence is now being used to identify and locate the perpetrators of the violence.

Metropolitan Police using Flickr to catch London looters

Blackberry’s instant messaging service RIM will now be used by the police to find those who instigated the public to eventually led to so much of damage and destruction.

It is believed that the police are already making use of the data provided by RIM, and working within the guidelines of the Data Protection Act they will be able to make use of this information to nab the culprits.

Some civilians are also helping the police with this investigation. A group of people from Google have formed London Riots Facial Recognition. This is a group that requires membership and will make use of technology to help identify the arsonists.

Even more admirably, a number of civilian groups also used social media to band together and fight off looters as well as to organise clean-up groups to rectify the damage in their neighbourhoods without waiting for the government to act on it.

While London is quickly recovering from the shock and remedying the damage already done, most have been remind that while technology can be harmful in the hands of the wrong people, it can be extremely helpful when used by the right people with the right intentions.

The first such report provides an analysis of the use of plugins for social networks.

The report shows that Facebook is easily the most popular as far as the number of links to various sites is concerned.

The report compared the data between the month of June 2011 and July2011.

It was found that Facebook is the leader of the pack with links to 47.4 percent of the top 10,000 websites. This includes a direct link to the Facebook homepage. In comparison Twitter has 41.8 percent, YouTube has 16.75 percent, and LinkedIn has 3.7 percent.

The change experienced by these sites in the two consecutive months has been almost negligible. YouTube is the only site which experienced a slight drop in usage from 16.77% to 16.75%.
As far as adoption of social plugins is concerned, the rate is much lower than expected.

Facebook is the number one here too, with four plugin services. They are Facebook Like button (10.8 percent), Facebook Like box (6.1 percent), Facebook Connect (1.9 percent), and Facebook Recommendations (1.2 percent).

The Google +1 button has been doing well for itself, and is currently placed at number two. At 4.5% it is ahead of Twitter which has two services. The Twitter Tweet button (2.1 percent) and the Twitter Follow button (1.3 percent).

Jim Yu CEO of BrightEdge says “Fewer than half the largest sites on the Web offer any kind of social link at all on their front page and these sites represent a massive slice of Internet traffic on any given day. We would expect to see a land grab effort this year as plugins vie for placement on this very valuable Web real estate.”

Recent reports from Inside Facebook had projected that the Facebook graph is on a downward slide, following a substantial loss in the number of users in the United States, U.K. and several other countries, between the months of May and June 2011.

In partial contrast to this, the study by UKOM/Nielsen has found that irrespective of actual user numbers, visits to  Facebook have increased and the popular social network has overtaken Microsoft in the U.K. for the first time ever, in the month of May. Facebook is now the second most popular site in the U.K.

According to this report, Facebook had 26.8 million visitors from the U.K. in May 2011, compared to 26.2 million visitors to the various sites on the Microsoft network in the same month.

While visits to Facebook increased slightly from 26.5 million, visits to Microsoft fell from 30 million in April 2011. In some ways, one could argue that Facebook doesn’t seem to have grown more popular, but instead Microsoft has lost popularity.

The same report also shows that the number of visits to Twitter in the U.K. has also gone up significantly during the same time period. The number of users for Twitter went up significantly following the episode about the super injunction pertaining to footballer Ryan Giggs.

Analysts at Nielsen indicate that the growth of users on both Facebook and Twitter is largely due to the growth of the number of users over 50 years of age taking an interest in these social networks.

While the interest by the over-50 population could be a good thing for advertisers, if the youngsters who have so far been the main users of these social networks decide to stay away from them because of the invasion by the elders, it could eventually have disastrous consequences for both sites.

A study conducted by the Language, Interaction and Computation Laboratory at the University of Trento in Italy looked at the daily patterns of life in Twitter messages (tweets), and was presented on Tweetolife.com via graphs highlighting the differences in the contents of tweets according to the gender of the users and time of the day.

The said study was conducted between November 2009 and February 2010. Over 1 million tweets were taken into consideration while carrying out the study. The tweets were then classified into two sections male and female, based on the first name of the user.

When the tweets were analysed to find out which words or phrases were used more frequently by males and which were used more frequently by females, the analysts found some interesting trends.

Both men and women talked equally about marriage, but women spoke a bit more about divorce. Dinner and movies were other topics that were discussed more by women than by men. Of these two subjects, men spoke about movies more than they did about dinner.

Surprisingly, it was the women who also spoke much more about love and sex than the men. The number of women who spoke about love was higher than the number of women who spoke about sex.

Not surprisingly, the topics that men spoke about more than women were found to be football and money, and if percentages are anything to go by, it seems men are more interested in football than in money!

Where it comes to technology, men were almost always found to be much more enthusiastic about it. Topics such as ipad, iphone, android and tablet pcs were all tweeted by far more men than women. Women, however, did seem more keen on the iPod than men.

Search engines are also talked about a lot more by men than by women. However, women do seem to tweet more about Yahoo! than they do about Google or Microsoft.

Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have seen almost equal adoption by both sexes, which is reflected in the almost equal numbers of tweets about each of these networks by both men and women. Not surprisingly, Digg is much more tweeted about by men, as it does seem to cater much more to men than women.

On the humourous side, tweets about Justin Bieber seem to peak round the time teenagers come out of school up till the time they go to bed.

When are most tweets about Justing Bieber posted?

While these figures might seem mildly interesting or amusing, they actually could help marketers decide how and where to target audiences based on interest and demographics.

The ruling indicates that the media can still talk about these sites without actually naming them.  In other words, they can use general terms such as ‘social networks’ but not the actual names of the network concerned.

This has been done with a view to prevent the unfair promotion of these sites as it results in indirect advertising of the more popular networks and leaves behind the lesser known sites that are struggling to gain a foothold. It also prevents French broadcasters from promoting American businesses rather than local sites.

A lot of presenters and media personalities are now in the habit of saying “look me up on Facebook/Twitter”. In future, they will only be able to say “look me up on the social networks”.

This ruling has quite expectedly caused a lot of resentment in certain sections of the media as an unnecessary interference on the part of the government. Critics have gone so far as to claim that such interference will stifle future innovation, though it’s not quite clear how.

On the other hand, there are those who feel that this ruling is quite fair as it will indirectly help the other lesser-known social networking sites to gain some sort of foothold in the market.

The ruling, which has been passed in accordance with a law from 1992, is also being seen to be in defiance of the EU ruling on free access to the Internet and in a manner of speaking, a restriction on the freedom of choice.

Christine Kelly, spokeswoman for the Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel (CSA), the government broadcasting authority, reportedly said: “Why give preference to Facebook, which is worth billions of dollars, when there are other social networks that are struggling for recognition.

On the one hand Twitter is believed to be in the process of acquiring AdGrok, which is a Y Combinator-backed keyword bidding platform that enables the automated bidding of contextual keywords on Google AdWords. This deal is expected to cost Twitter less than $10 million and may be helpful to them in future monetisation of Promoted Trends or Promoted Tweets.

Twitter is also supposedly ready to launch its own photosharing site, possibly within the next day or two. The launch of a photosharing site will be an economically viable and sensible move on the part of Twitter as it is likely to help them generate a lot more revenue through additional ad views and clicks.

In addition to these speculated developments, Twitter has already acquired TweetDeck just a few days ago. TweetDeck is a dashboard that allows brands, publishers and marketers to keep track of their important conversations. The acquisition cost Twitter $40 million, and will likely pay rich dividends in future.

An entire ecosystem of sites and apps that were built on the Twitter platform could be affected in the near future. Sites such as Twitpic and yfrog will have to change their core business if they hope to survive the launch of an official Twitter image platform. Similarly, apps such as Twhirl, Twitterrific and Seesmic could lose users to a Twitter-backed TweetDeck.

All of these near-simultaneous changes indicate that Twitter is indeed gearing up to make some major changes in the way they will do business or deal with third parties in the future. A lot of their changes seem to indicate a desire to keep users on their platform, thereby allowing them to maximise ad revenues.

This particular user has been using the pseudonym ‘Mr. Monkey’ and publishing unsavoury and slanderous material about councilors of the South Tyneside council.

Twitter has given in to the pressure and has released information regarding the user to its lawyers, according to Paul Robinson the council spokesman. This information includes the users name, address, telephone number, email address, and geographic location of the user. The information is being analysed by technical experts.

It is believed that the blogger is Ahmed Khan who is an independent councilor with the council. He is believed to have been using five different accounts on Twitter.

Mr. Khan has, however, denied the allegations of being the person in question. He says, “I’m the kind of person who will tell you face-to-face what I think. I have no need to use an anonymous blog.” He has, however, admitted that he did not approve of some of the policies of other councilors. He has also criticized the amount of money the council is believed to have spent on this legal action.

This is believed to be the first legal action of its kind in the U.K. and its success may give rise to a spate of other such litigations.

Just a few days ago, there had been a hue and cry regarding the revelation of the identity of a footballer who allegedly had an affair. His name was revealed on Twitter, in spite of a gagging order. The footballer whose privacy was publicly flounted could follow South Tyneside council’s example and he too may now pressurize Twitter to identify the user who disclosed his identity.

The footballer in question, a Premier League player, has recently been in the news for his alleged involvement with former Miss Wales and Big Brother contestant, Imogen Thomas. The concerned player has brought an injunction against his name being published by the regular tabloid publications.

However, the story has been among the trending topics on the social networking site Twitter, where his name was revealed and discussed widely. This only means that even though the newspapers are being restrained from publishing his name with regards to the story, his involvement in it is common knowledge.

A Scottish newspaper, the Sunday Herald has taken the liberty of publishing his name. They have also displayed his photo with a black bar across his face and the word “Censored” written across.

While this could be seen as willful opposition to the injunction, they have explained in their editorial that it is “unsustainable” for newspapers to be prevented from publishing this hot piece of news while the individual’s name is being openly discussed on Twitter, and therefore known to everyone who has access to the Internet.

They have further said that “The issue is one of freedom of information and of a growing argument in favour of more restrictive privacy laws.”

The British prime Minister, David Cameron has expressed general agreement with these sentiments. He has said, “It’s not fair on the newspapers if all the social media can report this and the newspapers can’t, and so the law and the practice has got to catch up with how people consume media today.

Mr. Cameron has further indicated that it may be time to take a fresh look at this aspect of the law, and make some appropriate changes regarding privacy laws in keeping with the times.

So far, the attorney general’s office has not brought any charges against the newspaper or Twitter. However, the judges ruling on the case have continued to rebuff attempts by the newspapers to bring this case to trial, mainly due to the fact that overturning the rules would only serve to benefit the newspapers and not the general public and definitely not the individual whose privacy is being encroached upon.

On the other hand, even if the courts choose to sue Twitter for the breach of the injunction the question being asked by many is whether it is possible for the British courts to sue Twitter which is an American company and has no culpability in the U.K. courts.

They have selected Accenture PLC to build their official website, and Accenture in turn has decided that Google and their Video site YouTube are best equipped to handle the event.

It is estimated that about 400 million people will watch the event online. While this is a huge figure, nearly 2 billion are expected to watch on TV.

The official Google website will be the main source through which all authorised information will be relayed.

The revelation of the bride’s wedding dress is expected to generate much curiosity as also the kiss on the balcony of Buckingham Palace.

Live feeds will also be posted on Twitter and Facebook.  Other broadcasters like BBC and CNN will also be relaying the events and it is hoped that the internet will not collapse under the pressure.

In the past events such as the death of Michael Jackson and the inauguration of Barack Obama have generated a lot of interest but this event is expected to be bigger.

While experts believe that the internet will be able to hold out, it is hoped that the mobile networks, which will also see a lot of pressure will not collapse.

Prince William’s spokeswoman has said, ‘We can’t predict what is going to happen with the Internet, but we are doing this with Google and YouTube — and if anyone has the experience to do this, it’s Google and YouTube.”

The prison is located in St. Petersburg which is the second largest Russian city. The prison is known as Kresty prison.

While it can easily be understood that the companies which have joined Twitter, would have done so in order to remain conspicuous and thus indirectly help monetization, the idea of a jail joining the social network is not quite so easy to understand. In fact it seems quite strange at first.

The first few tweets which were sent out from here were about the history of the jail, which had been built in 1892, and where Leon Trotsky the exiled communist leader had been held captive after the Bolshevik revolution.

The latest tweet received from Kresty prison has advertised job vacancies, which is quite a novel idea under the circumstances.

Those who wish to follow the tweets from Kresty prison can check out http://twitter.com/sizo_kresty.

Eventbrite, an event registration company recently conducted a study on the effects of social media on social commerce. When activity such as a ‘Like’ on Facebook or a tweet on Twitter generates money for the company or event concerned, it is known as social commerce.

Analysts at eventbrite have been tracking the sharing behaviour that occurs on social networks, with a view to help event organizers improve their business.

They have found that it is no longer essential for event organisers to have a very large budget in order to reach a large target audience, as they can do this almost free of cost through the various social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Users were found to be more likely to share information about an event that they care about or are committed to. Thus, people who have bought a ticket to an event are more likely to inform their friends about it than people who have not bought a ticket.

Conversely, people are more likely to buy a ticket to an event if they are informed about it by someone who has already bought a ticket than when they are informed by someone who has not bought a ticket.

The study conducted last October found that the average value of a social share, measured as dollars per share through all social platforms was $1.78, while the dollars per share from Facebook was $2.53.

Over the last six months, the sharing activity on Facebook was found to be almost four times that on Twitter. This could be due in part to the larger user base that Facebook enjoys and in part due to the fact that relationships on Facebook are more like real-world relationships.

Networking events had a higher share rate than business events, conferences and seminars. Musical events and concerts also generated a much higher dollars per share value than fund raisers and social events.

Dollars per social share by event type

To conduct this study, Eventbrite used a set of in-house social analytic tools that provide tracking and analysis of each share that occurs.

Users can access Twitter through TweetDeck, Seesmic, HootSuite, Twhirl and many other similar applications that were built for PCs as well as Macs. These applications have also been responsible, at least in part, for the growth of Twitter from 48 million tweets per day to 140 million tweets per day over the last year.

While most people would consider this growth to be good, the authorities at Twitter do not seem to think so.

Ryan Sarver, head of API and platform at Twitter, says that they want all Twitter users to be able to access the service in the same way. To enable this, Twitter has developed its own app to allow users to access Twitter from different platforms like the iPhone, iPad, Android, Mac and RIM Blackberry.

While this ensures that 90% of their users access Twitter through the official method, there is still a segment of users who use Twitter through unofficial apps. Twitter wants to stop this.

Official reasoning by Twitter for such a move is that if there are too many means to access their service, it leads to inconsistency and confusion among users. It has also been found that some of the client apps violate Twitter’s terms of service and privacy policy. Due to this Twitter has to revoke several API’s and apps every week. They also say that they’d like tweets and actions to be represented in standardised formats, such as ‘follow’, ‘favorites’ etc.

However, many industry insiders believe that the real reason behind such a move is purely monetary. Twitter wants to ensure that they are the ones who reap the benefits of their service, and so they want to ensure that Twitter ads are the only way to advertise on tweets.

At the same time Twitter has clarified that they have no intention of thwarting the development of services such as publisher tools and realtime data signals.

Expectedly, this decision has come under fire from a lot of developers. They too claim that Twitter is doing this to gain control of the service and increase their revenue generation through ads.

In other words, developers feel cheated, as Twitter has taken advantage of their apps and now that their purpose has been served the developers are being shown the door.

The new service is a social news product and it was officially launched yesterday, shortly after an ex-employee of LinkedIn, Mrinal Desai, blogged about it on TechCrunch.

According to Desai, this new feature could help to turn LinkedIn into the Wall Street Journal of the social world. While Twitter and Facebook have been competing with each other to be the most popular social network for some time now, this new feature on LinkedIn could give LinkedIn an edge over the two, especially in the business world.

Mrinal Desai reportedly also recently received an email from the URL ‘news@linkedin.com’. This could well be a precursor to the formal launch of what he called “LinkedIn Headlines”. This email contained all the most-shared news on his network.

LinkedIn Headlines news via email

So far, it has been observed that LinkedIn is used mainly by sales personnel and people who recruit new staff for their companies. If this new feature is publicised well, it could make LinkedIn a far more popular and well-used social network.

LinkedIn has also recently added a new feature called Skills, which allows users to learn more about any skills that they are interested in.

Skills, in conjunction with LinkedIn Today will allow users to collect more information on topics ranging from the highly technical to general, which is something that sites like Facebook and Twitter would find difficult.

Update: Screenshot of LinkedIn Today

Some agencies in the USA have already been invited to test Twitter’s ad serving platforms, and their clients have seen an encouraging results. This could, of course, be due to the relative novelty of the advertising medium.

Some of the products that have been marketed through Twitter include health supplements and books. In the short period since the advertisers started using Twitter as a medium to advertise, they have found that the money spent is less than what they do on Google and Facebook, and at the same time they have received mare orders from Twitter than from Google and Facebook.

Targeting small and medium businesses seems like a good move on the part of Twitter, especially in light of the fact that Google owes its popularity in large part to this sector of the market.

Twitter has started efforts to develop a self-service platform since last December, and they hope that their 200 million users will respond favourably to their advertising initiatives.

The micro-blogging site started advertising as a means of monetisation only last year. They generated $45 million in revenue through this means last year. They hope to be able to generate $150 million through ads this year.

Twitter is also likely to introduce location-based targeting in the near future, as the service is often accessed on mobile phones.

The largest spending was seen in November ($14.5 billion) and December ($18.1 billion). Cyber Monday – the first Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday – broke all records with $1.028 billion being spent in a single day.

Among electronic items, flat panel TVs and mobile devices were the fastest selling, followed by computer hardware.

Online Consumers

Group buying through sites such as Groupon and Living Social gained tremendous popularity during the year. Social networks also continued to grow. Facebook became the number 1 site in August 2010, for time spent online, beating sites like Google and Yahoo! It now accounts for 12.3% of the total time spent online in The U.S.

The amount of time spent on leisure activities online also grew in 2010. Portals represented 20.2% of the share of time spent online, while social networks accounted for 14.4% and entertainment sites for 12.6%.

Social Networks

The growth of social media caused web-based email usage to reduce from 12.5% to 11.0%, especially among the younger generation. Social networking accounts for 14.4% of all time spent online, but its share much higher for youngsters. Women also tend to spend more time on social networks than men.

Facebook also now accounts for 10% of the U.S. page views and has gained millions of new users. MySpace, on the other hand, has seen a sharp decline, losing 27% of its users. LinkedIn, Twitter and several new social sites continue to grow gradually. While it has lost some users in the 35-54 years demographic, the number of users below 18 years and above 55 years have grown significantly. On the other hand, Twitter saw maximum gain in the 18-34 years demographic.

Search Marketing

The search market has also seen innovation with the introduction of instant search by Google. Google continues to be the market leader in the States, with over 60% of the market share, while Yahoo! had 16% and Microsoft had 12% in December 2010. ‘Facebook’ was the most searched term, with 1.9 billion queries in 2010, followed by ‘YouTube’ with 790.7 million searches.

Online advertising has grown by 23% between December 2009 and 2010. Leading brands have now started reallocating a larger share of their ad spend to online advertising. Over 1 trillion display ads were shown on Facebook and 529.4 billion ads on Yahoo! The strategies being used for display as have also improved resulting in better user response especially through retargeting. The online video and TV market are also growing, which is a fact that advertisers should take note of.

Data collected for the report shows that the number of U.S. adults paying at least 1 visit per month to Twitter.com has gone down from 9.54 million in November 2009 to 8.25 million in November 2010.

While this figure alone would indicate a decline in usage, the average number of visits per month has gone up by 37% in the same period. In November 2009, the average number of visits was 7.3. In November 2010, that figure rose to 10.

Average time per session & Average visits to Twitter in the USA

However, the duration of each visit has gone down slightly during this period, from 15 minutes and 12 seconds to 13 minutes and 12 seconds. This shows that users now prefer to make more frequent but shorter visits to Twitter, rather than fewer but longer visits as they were doing earlier.

The report shows that the average time being spent for by Americans on Twitter is now 2 hours and 12 minutes per month, compared to 1 hour and 51 minutes a year ago.

These findings collectively show that while Twitter might not be growing in popularity as spectacularly as it did in 2009, its users are finding new and more interesting ways to use the site, thereby increasing its net usage.

The Egyptian protests, which started last Tuesday, have been gaining ground. The opposition in Egypt declared January 25 as a “Day of Rage” to end the 30 year rule of President Hosni Mubarak.

People with varying ideologies ranging from Islamist to Communists and Secularists have come together for this protest. They have been gathering in huge numbers on streets and squares. They have been shouting and burning symbols of the dictatorial government.

The government, for its part, is doing all it can to subdue the protestors. They have set out the secret police as well as the riot police. They have resorted to using water cannons and even assaulting the public.

Egyptian government officials have also tried to deactivate the mobile towers and block sites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, which are being used for propaganda.

While they have succeeded in blocking communication channels to an extent, they have not been entirely successful in doing so. Users are still able to access Twitter in English, Arabic and French. Mobile phones are also partially functional. Photographs and videos of the protests which have been uploaded are being sent around the world by supporters of the uprising.

A curfew was imposed in the country on Friday, but it was defied. The riots have reached such proportions that the police were eventually forced to retreat and the army had to be called out to control the situation for the first time in 25 years.

Update: Google has joined in on the fray by enabling Egyptians to call a local number in order to tweet about the uprising. The new service has been introduced via SayNow, a company that Google bought just last week.

When a user makes use of a Facebook App such as check ins via Places or Likes, the new ad feature turns that user’s activity into an ad.

For example, when a user checks into a particular restaurant, the news feed for that user would automatically show a posts saying that the user has been to that place. If the restaurant wishes to, they can turn that news feed item into an ad for that restaurant, via Sponsored Stories.

User checking into a Facebook Place

Friends of the user will see the ad for that place on Facebook as an endorsement by that user.

Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Levi’s and Playfish are some of the organisations that have already partnered with Facebook to advertiser using this new feature. A few non-profit organisations such as Amnesty International, Women for Women and Donors Choose have also agreed to partnership with Facebook and trial this feature.

Sponsored stories can be set up on a pay-per-impression or pay-per-click basis. The new ad unit will initially be available on the home page and user profile pages. Later, it will be made available as a self-serve performance advertising tool for display across the entire site.

The Sponsored Stories will be shown in a special right-sidebar module. The name and profile photo of the user will also be shown. Comments by the user will be shown along with the ad – at present it is not clear whether Facebook will provide a mechanism for advertisers to prevent negative comments from being advertised.

Facebook expects that these ads will have more perceived value than the regular ads, as an endorsement from a friend should have more value.

Sponsored Stories are quite similar in concept to Promoted Tweets. The major difference is that with Sponsored Stories, the user decides the content of the ad whereas with Promoted Tweets the advertiser decides the content.

While uses do not have the option to opt-out of Sponsored Stories, their privacy settings will be respected. In other words, the ad will only be seen by those people whom the original feed item was meant for.

These figures show a steady increase from the 160 million registered accounts in September 2010, and 95 million tweets per day in December 2010. The latest figures from this week claim that Twitter has 240 million registered accounts.

Source: DoubleClick Ad Planner

While these figures clearly indicate that Twitter is continuing to grow at a fairly steady pace, they do not say anything about the quality of the information being tweeted and how much of that information is actually ever read.

Quality of tweets is obviously not a concern for executives at Twitter, who have now decided to focus on global expansion.

With this in mind, they have recently launched their service in Korean, which is the seventh language that Twitter is available in. Other languages that Twitter is available in are German, French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese and English.

Twitter has made deals with the local carriers LG and Uplus and local search engine, Daum, to encourage more users to sign on to Twitter in the Korean language.

The micro-blogging platform probably chose Korean as the latest language for their site, because the use of Twitter went up ten-fold among Koreans in the last year. iPhone and Android apps are also available in Korean.

The majority of Twitter users access the English language version of the site. However, the number of tweets in English has gone down by about 25% during the last year. This is sufficient reason for Twitter to try and expand to other languages.

While Twitter is now available in 7 languages, their biggest competitor, Facebook, is already available in 70 languages. Facebook managed to achieve this feat by crowd-sourcing the translation process by providing their users with a dedicated translation app.

If Twitter copied Facebook for once, instead of Facebook always copying Twitter, the micro-blogging platform could grow faster globally.

Enterprising young job seekers have tried various means to attract the attention of potential employers. Some advertised their portfolio pages and personal websites for relevant keywords and even for particular brand and key executive names, so that their job application would show up alongside organic results on Google.

Recently, an innovative PR executive took things one step further, potentially changing the age-old system forever.

Graeme Anthony was on the lookout for a new jobwhen he changed his residence from Manchester to London. He created a video, using his skills and talents and then uploaded the video on YouTube. The video not only contained an introduction to himself, but also contained sections such as ‘Skills’, ‘Portfolio’ and ‘Contact’. Viewers could decide which section to view first.

Apart from being live and interactive, rather than a dull representation on paper, the video is also interspersed with a healthy doze of humour, which could rarely have come across well on a CV document.

The video, which was uploaded last September, has certainly got a lot of attention. It received 2,000 views within the first hour of being uploaded. Anthony’s Twitter account was also mentioned a number of times with comments regarding the video.

More importantly, the video also drew the attention of potential employers, some of whom even commented on their corporate blogs, calling it “the best job application ever.”

On his part, Graeme says, “It brings me to life in a completely new way. It shows off my personality in a way a paper CV can’t. It’s got the wow factor.”

Recently, Frank PR, an agency based in London, saw the video and after interviewing him, gave him the job.

At the 68th Annual Golden Globe Awards, which were held last Sunday night, the movie, “The Social Network” won 4 top awards.

The film was nominated in 6 different categories, of which it won four. These are, Best Picture, Best Director for David Fincher, Best Screenplay for Aaron Sorkin and Best Score for Trent Reznor. The movie was also nominated for the Best Supporting Actor and Best Actor (Drama) awards, where it failed to make it to the top spot.

The Social Network was based on an unauthorised book about the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. It was reported that Mark Zuckerberg had some differences of opinion with the movie regarding the way they had portrayed the formative years of Facebook. However, it cannot be denied that the unprecedented success of the movie has can only help Facebook to become even more popular.

Golden Globe Awards are decided by members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, an organisation composed of working journalists who cover the United States film industry for a variety of outlets, including newspapers and magazines in Europe, Asia, Australia and Latin America. Today, the 90 members of the HFPA represent at least 55 countries and have a combined readership of more than 250 million.

Now that The Social Network has won so many Golden Globe Awards, expectations have been raised that it will also do very well at the Oscars, the nominations for which are due to be announced on the 25th of January.

All this celebrity exposure will only help Facebook grow further worldwide, not unlike the way Twitter started growing really quickly once a few celebrities hopped on board and started tweeting.

Research from the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers indicates that Facebook is now used to procure evidence for 1 in 5 divorce cases in the U.S.A. 81% of lawyers admit that evidence from social networks has been used more and more frequently over the past five years.

People often get in touch with old friends and flames over social networks and can end up rekindling old relationships, often exchanging inappropriate or sexual conversations with each other. They might tag themselves in photographs documenting happenings contrary to what they state in court and they might post status updates that contradict their testimonies.

Of all the social networks, Facebook was used most often as a source of evidence, by as many as 66% of divorce lawyers. MySpace was used by 15%, Twitter by 5% and 14% said they use other social media sources.

Marlene Eskind Moses, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers says, “As everyone continues to share more and more aspects of their lives on social networking sites, they leave themselves open to much greater examinations of both their public and private lives in these sensitive situations.”

It is ironic in some ways that the same networks that help to rekindle past relationships are being used as evidence in court proceedings on the breakdown of current relationships.

One of the largest U.S. retailers, Target, has already made use of Twitter’s Promoted Trends service to advertise their deals. Other large department stores such as BestBuy and Walmart are making use of Twitter to tweet about deals.

BestBuy, a popular electronic equipment retailer has the largest number of followers on Twitter among all the retailers. Kate Kaye from Clickz reports that BestBuy posted 70 tweets on the 26th of November (Black Friday) highlighting the various deals they were offering clients. They also posted their Cyber Monday deals on Sunday itself to entice buyers earlier. This is an interesting move, as reports from comScore suggest that Cyber Monday was the second largest spending day last year, with sales of $887 million taking place on that day alone.

$1 Billion Sales Record

This year too, an estimated 88% of U.S. online retailers took part in Cyber Monday sales and some of them even offered week-long deals. The efforts seem to have paid off well, as comScore reports that Cyber Monday sales for this year hit an all-time record, surpassing the $1 Billion mark!

Among other retailers, Walmart, which has over 90,000 followers on Twitter had 49 posts on Black Friday, with several deals being offered. Home Depot also had 41 posts fro Black Friday advertising items ranging from ornaments and tiles to appliances. Other U.S. retailers who made use of Twitter for Black Friday included Staples, Sears, Macy’s, Lowe’s, J C Penney and Kohl’s.

Kohl’s promotes shopping deals on their Twitter account

Target is believed to have spent thousands of dollars to sponsor their Promoted Tweets a week before Black Friday.

These figures indicate that Twitter in particular, and social media in general, are becoming extremely popular advertising channels and small businesses should also start taking advantage of them in order to reach a larger audience.

Promoted Tweets are a form of advertising on Twitter, in which an advertiser pays Twitter to display tweets at the top of a Twitter search results page or even within a user’s tweet stream.

These ads will now also appear at the top of the relevant Google real time search results page – when a user filters searches to show only “Latest” results.  However, these ads or Promoted Tweets as they are called, will not show up on a regular Google search results page.

Google realtime search results showing Promoted Tweets

While this is the first time that Google has ever displayed ads from another network on their search results page, it may not be the last. According to Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land, who first blogged about these ads, Google has issued a statement saying, “Twitter is pioneering advertising against short-form content, so it was a natural starting place for us. We’re certainly open to continue exploring other advertising models and systems, including those we might develop in-house.”

The revenue generated by these ads will be split between Google and Twitter on a 50/50 basis, according to sources at Twitter.

Other Social Networks To Follow Suit?

If Google is true to its word and starts allowing ads from other networks, could we soon see more real time ads from Twitter, and then maybe Facebook ads and even promoted stories through Digg Ads?

While such initiatives would see a short-term increase in revenue by monetising products that previously weren’t monetised, they’re rather unlikely to really happen except in situations where Google AdWords has failed to monetise a service.

The appearance of Promoted Tweets on real time search results is probably a result of the original deal that Twitter forged with Google. When the deal was forged, Google was in a race against Microsoft to launch a real time search product. Twitter most likely used their favourable bargaining position to require Google to only show ads from Twitter alongside real time search results that were pulled from the social news site. The absence of regular AdWords ads on these pages, when compared to Google search results pages for all other time-range searches corroborates that this was the most likely scenario.

Twitter ads on real time search / AdWords ads on past 24 hours filter

From 05:00 British Standard Time on Thursday to 05:00 today, three Twitter accounts fed information about each and every call that was dealt with by the Greater Manchester Police force.

Their main Twitter account, @gmpolice, interfaced with the public and retweeted information from the other Twitter accounts that had been set up for the purpose. Calls that were tweeted ranged from mundane complaints being logged for domestic and neighbourhood disputes to more serious matters such as rape, murder and theft.

Follower numbers of the GM Police Twitter account shot up from 3,135 last Friday to over 15,000 today. What caught a lot of people’s attention was the number of ridiculous calls that the police seemed to deal with.

Callers complained about televisions that didn’t work, horses that wouldn’t go where their owners wanted them to and builders showing up two months late!

3,205 incident reports were tweeted during the 24 hour period. 341 arrests were made and 126 people were taken into custody during the same period.

Police forces have used Twitter in the past to monitor and clamp down on criminal activity. This is the first time that a police force has successfully used an online social  medium to raise awareness of the work they do and gotten so many members of the public keenly interested.

A study conducted by Sysomos, a company that specialises in monitoring and analyzing social media, has arrived at this conclusion. The study, which was conducted over the last two months, analysed 1.2 billion tweets that were posted during that time frame.

It was found that only 29% of tweets received any kind of reaction, either in the form of a reply or a retweet. Of this figure, 19.3% of the responses were in the form of a retweet, and the rest were replies.

It was also found that 92.4% of all retweets occurred in the first hour after the tweet was posted, and similarly 96.9% of replies were also delivered in the same time frame. This phenomenon is quite understandable as Twitter is all about staying up to date. Mark Evans, an employee of Sysomos says, “This means that if a tweet is not retweeted in the first hour, it is not likely to be retweeted at all.”

A number of automated accounts retweet based on tags or even all tweets from certain popular account. This automated process of retweeting could account for a sizeable percentage of the total number of responses.

Nevertheless, 29% of tweets receiving a response is actually quite a good rate and is actually quite a useful metric for businesses to keep in mind when initiating a conversation with potential clients.

It is also important to realise that good content and appropriate timing of a tweet can generate a better response.

With the number of Twitter accounts reaching 145 million, and continuing to grow, it would be difficult for users to decide which accounts they would like to follow and also to know whether or not the account they are following is genuine or not.

Bing recommending “influential” and “popular” Twitter users

Bing social will help these users by now recommending people who they think the user would be interested in following, based on the search he conducts.

When a user types a particular query, Bing will recommend three people related to the query, who would be most influential or popular with regard to that query.

Representatives of Bing have said that this facility has been “developed, to help consumers identify the most influential people to watch on Twitter based on their interests.”

The list of these recommended people is available on in the right hand panel of the Bing Social page.

The service also lets users know, whether or not the account they are following is genuine, by means of a blue and white check mark next to the name.

A similar suggestion feature has already been available on Twitter for a while now.

This interface will now provide more detailed information about the tweet and its origins. When a user clicks on a particular tweet, a details pane will slide out to the right hand side of the tweet.

Thanks to the new design of the interface, users can now just keep scrolling down the page to see more tweets, rather than having to click ‘more’ every time.

Twitter has also got partnerships with media sites such as YouTube, Justin.tv, Flickr, TwitPic and several others due to which users can now embed photos and videos on Twitter which can then be seen by other users.

The details pane also provides related content about the author or subject of the tweet. Details such as other tweets by the same author, the replies received and geotagging of the location are also available. When a username is clicked, a mini profile of that user is seen.

This new interface has been built on Twitter’s own API and is still being gradually rolled out to users.

More about the new Twitter interface

The service which was launched in March 2009, took more than 1 year to reach 1 million users. The next million came in, just 3 months later and the third million was reached just one and a half months after that.

While it was initially assumed that location based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla would receive stiff competition from the launch of Facebook Places, that does not seem to have happened as yet. In fact, co-founder Dennis Crowley said that foursquare received that largest number of sign in one day, the very day after Facebook Places was launched. He also says that Foursquare is receiving about 18,000 new users per day.

Other location based services such as My Town and Loopt have already amassed over 3 million users before Foursquare, but one of the main attractions for users to sign up with Foursquare seems to be their practice of rewarding users with badges and points.

However if they hope to compete successfully with the 500 million users of Facebook in the long run, they will have to diversify and improve their services.

They have recently managed to raise $20 million in funding, which they will use to employ more staff and also to get new premises and spread to San Francisco.

51% of 1,654 people surveyed by online coupon site MyVoucherCodes say they see the Google search engine logo more than 50 times a day. Considering a typical working day to be 8 hours or 480 minutes long, this means that users see the Google logo approximately every 9 minutes.

According to the same study, Microsoft is the next most popular logo and 15% users say that they see its logo most often, while 11% say that Facebook is the most seen logo.

“Which logo do you see the most during an average day?”

About 47% of users say that Google is their homepage or they navigate to the Google page first. 53% users use the site to check spellings and 52% say that they access Google Search between 10 and 20 times daily.

Data from Hitwise indicates that Facebook accounted for 17% of page views in the U.K. in June 2010. It was found that 1 in 6 page views in the U.K. were served by Facebook, which means that Facebook is undeniably one of the most important websites for online advertisers to focus on.

According to Hitwise data, while Facebook accounted for 7.14% of all internet visits in U.K. in June 2010, Google accounted for 9.59% in the same month.

Among social networks alone, Facebook held 54.5% of the market share in that month.

While it is a very well known fact that social media is growing very fast worldwide, the study shows that in the U.K. 85% of the population is already highly connected to the Internet.

The findings show that users spend over 6 hours a month on social media sites, and while 25% of them write their own blog, 60% read blogs. 64% of users have their profile on at least 1 social network.

About 33% of them have downloaded a video sharing site, and 85% watch video clips online.

Over 25% of adults are known to access the internet through their mobile phones and 29.4 million people visit social networks at least once a month.

While the population in the U.K. is 61 million, Germany 81 million, Japan 127 million, Russia 141 million and in the U.S. 308 million, the number of people in the world connected to Facebook has crossed 500 million.

Over the last year, the number of people watching television programmes online has grown by 600% and about 20% of adults in the U.K. prefer surfing the internet than watching TV programmes.

Social networks have now become the single largest activity to pass the time and nearly 33% of adults in the U.K. express the sentiment that they ‘cannot live without the internet’.

78% to 80% of Internet users in the U.K. use the internet to check information about products and services, thus allowing marketers to reach a large number of users.

33% of users trust online banners and while 90% of users trust the online recommendation of friends, 70% even trust the online recommendation of strangers.

20% of tweets contain references to some brand or product, and online visitors from some social media site are far more likely to make an online purchase, than other online visitors. (71% compared to 7%)

Social media sites allow us to create online content and they also help to connect people with each other and also with brands products and services.

The ACSI has been conducting yearly studies about the performance of various online media brands of portals, search engines, news and information sites etc. This year for the first time they have included social media sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Wikipedia in their study.

Much to everyone’s surprise, the popular social media sites have not been ranked too highly on the customer satisfaction index.

On a scale of 0-100 Facebook has scored just 64, MySpace 63 and YouTube 73 points. The less popular but steady, Wikipedia has scored 77 points.

Larry Freed Chief Executive of Foresee Results says, “Customer satisfaction is a combination of what you get and what you expect [from a website]. The business model of starting out free and ad-free, then turning your site into something else over time works somewhere in tech, but from the average consumer standpoint it doesn’t work.”

Facebook which has faced several changes over the years, and which includes a lot of ads and gaming services has not satisfied its customers very well. Users also have some reservations about some of Facebook’s policies regarding privacy issues.

Wikipedia on the other hand, which is not a commercial site has maintained a steady format, thus allowing customers to achieve a certain level of comfort while accessing it.

One glaring omission in the study is Twitter. The reason for this is the fact that most users access it through third party apps rather than through Twitter.com, thus making it difficult to to collect accurate results. However it is likely to be included in the study from next year.

Facebook with a score of 64 ranks even lower than the IRS, and is in the bottom 5% of private companies studied along with airlines and cable companies. According to Larry Freed, one reason why users keep going back to Facebook in spite of low satisfaction, is that they do not have a better alternative at present.

Among other online categories studied, Google is at the top of the search engines with 80 points, but it has fallen 7 points since the previous study. While Bing which has been satudied for the first time, has 77 points followed by Yahoo! with 76 points, AOL with 74 points and Ask.com with 73 points.

Among the news categry Fox News was at the top with 82 points while MSNBC.com had 74 points and CNN.com had 73 points.

During a developer conference last April, the figure had been estimated at 600 million search queries per day.

A few days ago, at the Aspen Ideas festival, Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter announced that the number of search queries had gone up to 800 million per day.

That is a growth of 33% in a very short span of time, making it the fastest growing search engine at present.

Last year, Nielsen reported that Bing was the fastest growing search engine, with a growth rate of 22%. Twitter’s figures obviously appear to be much bigger than those of Bing.

However there is a catch here: Search queries on Twitter are counted quite differently from those on other search engines such as Google and Bing.

On the traditional search engines, a user actually goes to the search bar and then types in a query.

On the other hand, on Twitter, the ‘search’ mostly takes place on apps such as TweetDeck and Seesmic, where users create columns, on a topic which they need information about.

As the Twitter API receives more and more tweets containing the search query under consideration, the column gets automatically updated, every few seconds and each update is counted as a search query at Twitter. Thus the actual number of search queries is grossly over-inflated.

While CEO Evan Williams has clarified that the search queries on Twitter do vary from those on other search engines, the figures being mentioned can by themselves be quite misleading to those who do not know of the way the search queries at Twitter are counted.

According to ‘All Things Digital’ it has been suggested by sources who are likely to have some inside information, that Twitter is planning to lay out a new feature to help monetize their site.

According to sources, Twitter could be in the process of setting up something like ‘Promoted Tweets’. This feature may highlight certain user accounts, and thus increase their follower base.

While it seems a little different from Twitter’s earlier policy, it is likely that they may create a system by which users could pay to promote their tweets and profiles in order to achieve a larger fan following. Twitter in turn may charge the users based on the number of new followers gained or on the extent of exposure achieved.

A new site, ‘TweetUp’ has already got a similar system, which allows users to build up their follower base.

Since Twitter has refused to confirm or deny any such plans, the available information is very sketchy. However, it is believed that the feature would eventually be web and third party application compatible.

Twitter spokesperson, Sean Garett only says “eventually (the company would) have full suites of both promoted and commercial products.”

For some time now, it had been indicated that Twitter would change their system for storage of tweets from the current MySQL system to Cassandra. However, they have now made it clear that they will continue to store tweets on the MySQL based system, at least for now.

One of the probable reasons they do not want to make this change at present could be the fact that they are trying to sort out the problems they are having with uptime, possibly due to the unexpectedly high traffic volumes they continue to have to deal with.

They will, however, make use of Cassandra for several other purposes. Their geo team has already started using it to store and make queries about places of interest. Their research team is using it to store data mining results for their entire user base. These results can then be used to provide information to @toptweets and local trends.

While it has often been assumed that Twitter would use analytics for monetisation, they have never confirmed this in the past. Now, however, Ryan King of Twitter has said that the analytics operations and infrastructure teams are trying out ways in which Cassandra can be used for large-scale realtime analytics internally as well as externally. He further said that Cassandra will be a part of many new large scale projects from Twitter and they will continue to grow it for a long time to come.

In the entire Asia pacific region, social media has started affecting the buying decisions of users in a significant manner.

Online product reviews have become very popular and are next in line only to recommendations by family and friends. Products such as consumer electronics, cosmetics and cars are frequently reviewed here.

Interestingly however, different countries vary greatly in the way they share reviews. While the Koreans are most likely to post positive reviews the Chinese are most likely to post negative reviews of any product.

The report also shows that blogging is most popular in Japan, with over 1 million blogs being posted there every month. Twitter which had only about 200,000 users in Japan last year now has over 10 million users, which is 16% of the Japanese Internet population.

In China more than 80% of social media content is through bulletin boards, and new comers indulge in social gaming while the more experienced tend to share content. Virtual product placement in social gaming is very popular and social media celebrities like Sister Phoenix and Mr. Yuan are more popular than real celebrities.

Though Orkut is the most popular social network in India, Facebook is fast gaining in popularity. Twitter is also growing very fast and over 57% OF Twitter users in India, have joined in during the last year. Online product reviews are also very popular here.

In Korea, 95% of the Internet population accesses their social site Naver every month. The elections in June also saw the growth of mobile social media.

Australia has the highest global average for time spent on social media with users spending over 7 hours per month. Activities relating to sports and parenting are frequently discussed here. LinkedIn has also grown in popularity by 99% in the last year.

In order to promote themselves through this feature, the NBA has sponsored the topic ‘LeBron James’.

When users click on the player’s name, they are directed to tweets about the basketball star from regular users as well as a promoted tweet from the NBA, which is highlighted as a promoted tweet within a yellow box background.

Users who click on the promoted tweet, are directed to a section of NBA.com, giving the NBA more exposure through this feature.

The reason this move is likely to be very effective in the short term is the timing. The basketball star is due to announce any time now which team he will be playing for next season. Basketball fans are literally waiting with bated breath.

The extent of his popularity and the anxiety of the football fans can be judged by the fact that he collected 1,50,000 followers on Twitter within just seven hours of joining the site. The number of tweets and stories regarding him have literally flooded the site.

While it was speculated that he would announce his decision on Twitter itself, his publicist has already rejected this suggestion.

The previous holder of the fastest growing fan following was none other than the founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates. He had collected 1,00,000 followers in eight hours. With the help of trending topics LeBron James’ popularity on Twitter has soared much faster.

Other well known brands that have used Sponsored Trending Topics are Pixar and Coca Cola.

The confirmation came during a Facebook Developers Garage event in London. Zuckerberg said, “We are finishing designing our application soon and hope to offer it soon.”

Ever since Twitter talked about delivering location-based services, there has been speculation about Facebook following their lead and launching some location-based features.

The New York Times was probably the first to report, in March, that Facebook would allow users to share their location details by April. When that did not happen, Advertising Age said in May, that the features would be launched by June.

Facebook reportedly had to put aside several projects that were in the developmental stages, including the location feature, in order to sort out the problems that arose from their new privacy interface.

Now that Twitter has already gone live with Places, the Facebook team has made the time to concentrate on building location awareness. However, there is still no clarity about how the features will function and how they will affect the user as well as the market. If history is anything to go by, it will most likely be very similar to Twitter Places!

Facebook location features will probably link to Facebook Community Pages such as this one.

The new service has been incorporated in their trending topics feature and is known as ‘Promoted Trending Topics’.

The first such promoted topic is for Disney / Pixar’s movie, Toy Story 3.

Promoted trending topics are clearly highlighted with a yellow box that says “promoted”. When a user clicks on that topic, a search results page is shown with the advertiser’s promoted tweet at the top, followed by “Top Tweets” that Twitter selects based on the number of retweets and then other users’ tweets about the topic.

The promoted tweet in the search results could contain link to pages with more information, just like any other tweet.

Even though promoted trending topics are placed near the bottom of the page at present, the yellow box is bound to attract some attention, especially while it’s new. Twitter might have to bump up the promoted topic ads in the future, once users get used to seeing it and start ignoring it.

Promoted trending topics will appear irrespective of the location to which the trending topics are set. One condition that has been set for the continuation of the promoted trending topics is that they must resonate with Twitter’s user base. If they do not attract sufficient attention, they will disappear just like any other trending topic.

Promoted tweet from Disney for Toy Story 3

While Twitter continues to claim that promoted tweets and promoted topics are not “advertisements”, it is rumoured that promoted topics are being sold for tens of thousands of dollars!

A study conducted by the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) has found that several people over 50 years of age in the USA are not only using the Internet very comfortably but are also adept users of Facebook and the latest gadgets such as the iPad.

AARP interviewed 1,360 adults over the phone last month and found that 27% of Americans over 50 years of age use social networks. They also found that Facebook was the most popular social site for this age group, ahead of other sites like MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn. eMarketer had also conducted a similar study a while ago and found similar results.

49% of those between 50 and 64 years of age and 40% of all above 50 years said they were very comfortable with the Internet and frequently used it as a means of communication.

It was also found that 47% of these users heard about the social networks from family members and 70% of them did so through their children or grandchildren. Most of these senior citizens use the networks to keep in touch with their children (62%) and grandchildren (36%) and not to spy on the youngsters as some might suppose.

83% of the respondents had also heard about the iPad and while only 2% of them had already bought one, 11-14% of them were planning to do so.