Even more interesting, though, is Experian’s finding that Bing’s success rate–the number of searches that result in a visit to a Web site–is better than Google’s. Significantly better. Bing’s success rate: 81.68 percent. Google’s: 65.57 percent.

Must have been all those searches on hiybbprqag and torsorapy screwing things up for you–right, Google?

It was a complaint that Sunny Gupta heard often around the time that the company he was working for, Opsware, was being acquired by Hewlett-Packard. “CIOs kept pulling me aside and telling me their jobs were changing,” he said. “A job that used to be about managing technology was quickly becoming one of managing costs.”

It was a rare opportunity to launch a service that numerous big companies were clamoring for. His response is Apptio, a cloud-based service that tracks IT costs and other metrics for CIOs who are constantly under pressure to justify their budgets to CEOs. Backed by $41 million in venture capital funding from Greylock Partners, Madrona Venture Group, Shasta Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz–the venture firm run buy Gupta’s former Opsware colleagues Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It’s growing like crazy, and customers include Cisco Systems, Starbucks, Facebook and J.P. Morgan Chase. Cisco liked it so much it joined with the venture firms in a $16.5 $20 million Series C round of funding that closed last November, and it also resells Apptio to its customers.

I caught up with Gupta by phone while he was on a trip to London to talk about Apptio’s business and how it’s shaping up.

NewEnterprise: Sunny, let’s start at the top. What does Apptio do?

Sunny Gupta: IT has a lot of raw materials like labor, hardware and software. A lot of these things are tracked at the company level. But the CIO’s job is managing the IT products. We aim to help the CIO really understand the cost structure of all their IT assets. We do this by producing what we call a Bill of IT. It captures the supply and demand of IT resources to the business. It helps the CIO show what the levels of demand and spending really are. We also help them with planning and budgeting and forecasting. And then we help them make cost-reduction decisions and benchmark their performance against other companies in their industry.

How many customers do you have?

We have about 60 customers, and we are managing more than $50 billion in IT spending.

So every company does a return-on-investment analysis on its IT spending. This sounds like it’s a lot more detailed than that.

You can think about it as a detailed ROI, but the way our customers think about it is as an ongoing management system that tracks the fully loaded cost structure of the products and services they provide to their businesses on a month-to-month basis. It tracks costs, but also utilization, so you can see how the resources are being used, and whether or not it makes sense to, say, consolidate a data center.

You said Facebook is a customer. Can you tell me a little about how it’s used there?

The CIO there uses Apptio to track monthly telecom expenses, and to help understand costs and to make decisions around getting the most out of what they spend.

A lot of companies are struggling with decisions about moving their IT to the cloud or keeping it on-premise, or some mix of the two. How does Apptio fit in a situation like that?

We’re seeing a lot of hybrids. At the large companies, the biggest portion of their costs are still in-house. Without naming names, some of our largest customers have 50,000 or 100,000 servers. These are systems that have been in use for a long time and they’re critical to the business. But we also see large enterprises adopting external cloud services. It may be Amazon Web Services or something from Rackspace, or they may be using a software-as-service like Salesforce.com. The trick is to get a handle on what the costs are and if you think it might be time to move something to an external provider so you can make an objective decision.

A lot of the time a CIO has to decide between something that’s really good and really expensive or something that’s good enough and less expensive. Can you help in cases like that?

That’s one of our prime use cases. If you talk to Rebecca Jacoby, the CIO at Cisco, she says she’s stopped asking “Why not IT?” and started asking “Why IT?” If what you have is good enough based on the cost structure and utilization, you get the granular visibility into all those metrics so you can make decisions. For example, it may be that you don’t need as much storage as you think you do, and so the best move isn’t to switch to the cloud but to stop paying for some of the storage that you’re not using. For the first time, executives are able to make business decisions around technology based on true business metrics. We find on average that customers are able to save 5 to 6 percent of their spend, and over 12 to 18 months they can reduce it by 10 to 15 percent.

What’s involved? If it’s a cloud based service, I presume there’s nothing to install at the customer site.

It’s fully cloud-based, so there’s nothing to install. It takes the financial data from enterprise resource planning software, like SAP or Oracle, and it also takes IT operational data, support tickets and other data. It combines them with the financial data. Once you have all that data you can start working on what-if scenarios and make decisions about what to do–or not do–next. If you want to control or reduce costs, having that detailed visibility is the first step.

The street is looking for revenue to jump more than 20 percent, and profits to grow at just a slightly smaller pace. If you’re a bottom-line person, the consensus calls for net revenue of $6.05 billion and earnings of $8.07 a share (or more–some “consensus” numbers I’ve seen go as high as $6.06 billion and $8.09 a share).

Those numbers reflect the strength of Google’s core search business, but as usual, Wall Street would also like to hear about mobile, video and display ads.

And, as usual, it shouldn’t expect much: Last quarter Google made a big point about unveiling a few limited metrics for those businesses. But they were…limited.

Still, it’s always worth listening to Google’s call, which I’ll be doing this afternoon. Check back then for a link to live coverage.

And who knows, the Google guys might tip their hand! Last quarter, analysts asked what the company thought about daily deal sites like Groupon, and product SVP Jonathan Rosenberg allowed that the industry was “a very exciting and hot space.” Turns out it was $6 billion–but not more–worth of exciting!

And as always, here’s the helpful “cheat sheet” that Citigroup’s Mark Mahaney thoughtfully provides. Click to enlarge:

Think of it as the equivalent of iTunes for Android.

Developers will be able to upload apps–including games and other digital content–to Amazon, which in turn will promote and distribute them on Amazon.com and also on mobile phones. (I can hear the promotions now: “If you liked that app…what about this one?”)

In a blog post aimed at developers, Amazon writes that it’s trying hard to get developers recognized among the hundreds of thousands of apps out there: “Amazon’s innovative marketing and merchandising features are designed to help customers find and discover relevant products from our vast selection, and we’re excited to apply those capabilities to the apps market segment.”

For the past few months, Amazon employees have been reaching out to developers to find out pain points and drum up support for this day.

So far, it looks like Amazon has listened to concerns. The developer portal looks insanely easy to use–anyone with a regular Amazon username and password can access it. Right now, the annual fee of $99 has been waived, and once you agree to a seven-page app-store distribution agreement, you can start uploading applications to the network, and eventually see metrics on how well they are performing.

Much of it sounds like iTunes.

Amazon will share 70 percent of revenues with developers, and the distribution agreement hints it will go worldwide. For now, it will be limited to the U.S. Amazon will handle all the bill processing, which is complex, especially on a global basis. Google learned this the hard way, and continues to support only paid apps in some countries. Amazon will also have some sort of approval process, but it’s unclear how rigorous that will be.

Launching an app store is not a stretch for Amazon. It’s been selling MP3s on phones for some time and has a large digital catalog, spanning books and videos. It also has a built-in payment system and access to tens of millions of Amazon customers, many of whom have their credit card information on file, as with iTunes or PayPal.

The one question is whether the business will provide enough scale for an e-commerce company of its size. After all, most applications today are free, or really cheap. And at least for now, Amazon is limited to the Android operating system.

True, Android is quickly gaining on Apple, especially in the U.S. According to Nielsen’s latest figures, the iPhone’s market share is 28.6 percent vs. RIM’s BlackBerry and Google’s Android platforms, which are essentially tied in second place with 26.1 percent and 25.8 percent, respectively.

There are two potential scenarios that will help pencil this out: The app store could help drive more sales of other content or products on the phone for Amazon. A more farfetched scenario is that Amazon does such a good job that other platforms or handset makers, like BlackBerry, Windows Phone, HTC or Samsung, will choose to outsource or adopt Amazon’s platform for a cut of the revenues.

SMS GupShup (a Hindi word that translates to “chitchat” in English) is a 200-person start-up that has created a host of SMS-based services that, all told, account for more than 1.5 billion text messages a month.

The company’s biggest service is a text-message-based social network that lets individuals or companies send text messages to large groups of followers that want the updates. The service has taken off with 100 of the most popular feeds topping 100,000 subscribers to things like jokes, religious messages, sports scores and other information. Smaller groups might have as few as 10 or 20 followers. The service is somewhat similar to GroupMe, a U.S.-based group messaging service.

One tribe based in Northeast India uses the service to allow its 65,000 members–some of whom live far away from the area–to keep tabs on tribal goings-on.

“If someone has a child, someone gets married, someone dies, it all goes up there,” said CEO Beerud Sheth, who recently moved to Bombay after spending many years in Silicon Valley. His past work includes launching Elance, a company that matches freelance talent from around the world with people who need to hire for projects.

SMS GupShup has become a significant player in the text message market in India, accounting for roughly 5 to 10 percent of all SMS traffic, Sheth said.

But, while there is money to be made in text messages, SMS GupShup is not exactly raking it in. Some standard industry metrics on how much a company could make off text messages would suggest that the company is on pace to bring in about $10 million a year in revenue.

“That’s in the right range,” Sheth said.

Nor is the company yet profitable, but Sheth said the company hopes to turn the corner sometime in the first half of next year. Among the company’s costs is buying the bandwidth needed for all of the text messages sent by its users. Although it pays anywhere from a quarter to a tenth of what consumers pay for text messages, that still adds up. Fortunately, India is one of the cheapest places in the world to send text messages, with consumers typically paying anywhere from half a cent to a penny per message and bulk users paying far less.

To help recoup the costs, the company limits message length so that the last little bit of space can be used for sponsorship or advertising.

While SMS GupShup is the largest purely SMS-based service in India, Sheth said he does find himself competing with Facebook and Twitter in India and elsewhere, but said the strength of his service is that it is built around SMS, rather than using text messages only as a basic option for status updates.

“For them, SMS is sort of a stepchild experience,” he said.

Sheth said the company isn’t limiting itself to the social networking service. Among its other products are bulk SMS services for businesses. Companies can use the service for everything from messaging to customers to managing inventory. A text-message-based CRM application is in the works as well.

The company is also working directly with carriers in several countries to create a “reply all” feature that would allow people not only to send bulk text messages, but also to reply to a group of anywhere from 7 to 10 people, depending on the country. That’s particularly useful in small groups that may want to schedule events or do other tasks via text message, Sheth said.

“One way to think about text messaging is it is the Internet in the developing world,” Sheth said. “In this part of the world, that is a big part of how people communicate.”

According to Goodman, who obtains his data from independent wireless retailers, 80 percent of smartphone sales at Verizon in November were Android devices (46 percent of those were Droids). Which is astonishing for two reasons. 1.) That’s a huge percentage for a relatively new mobile OS in a very competitive market. 2.) In December of 2008, RIM was touting the BlackBerry as Verizon’s best-selling device. In two years, it’s gone from a flagship to a johnboat.

And with Android continuing to lead smartphone sales growth at Verizon, it seems increasingly unlikely that the BlackBerry will ever reclaim its lost title. With sales of the Tour/Bold series dwindling and no Storm refresh in sight, BlackBerry sales at Verizon are in serious decline. They dropped 45 percent year-over-year in the third quarter of this year, and Goodman sees them trending down 49 percent YOY in the fourth.

An ugly and humiliating decline, and worrisome. Because if the BlackBerry is faring this poorly against Android at Verizon, how will it fare against Android and the iPhone, which is widely expected to debut on the carrier’s network next year?

No wonder Verizon doesn’t think the upcoming launch of BlackBerry 6 devices on its network will have a “material impact” on sales. Why would it?

Incidentally, if you haven’t yet checked out our coverage of RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis’s appearance at D:Mobile earlier this week, you should.

Presenting at the webinar will be Myspace CEO Mike Jones–-who has been pitching Myspace as “a social entertainment destination” rather than a social network–-and Dan Rose, VP of Partnerships and Platform Marketing for Facebook.

Here are my live notes:

Mike Jones says the launch today is called “Mashup with Facebook.” Users can share a stream of entertainment content with one-click setup.

One million users engaged so far with Myspace Facebook through initial partnership of “Sync with Facebook,” which was launched in August to push user streams on Myspace to Facebook. Adding Facebook Like button soon.

Image to the right is Myspace’s special branding of its integration with Facebook Connect: “Mashup.”

Dan Rose: Every day 10,000 Web sites integrate with Facebook Connect, but this one is special. Adding users into the experience works when it’s naturally social in the offline world, and entertainment is social.

Rose says Facebook users will be able to take their Likes to Facebook as well.

Jones says this feature will be rolling out to the full Myspace audience today.

Rose says, “There’s nothing different about this implementation than any other Facebook Connect implementation or any other implementation of the Facebook Like button across the Web.”

Jones says, “We think this is a complementary offering to Facebook and other social platforms.”

Rose says it’s good that Myspace is focused on entertainment and Facebook is focused on being a social platform, and those things are different.

In the last couple of days (since the Facebook Connect option was rolled out on the Myspace signup page), metrics for people connecting with Facebook look good, says Jones, but he doesn’t specify. (He keeps saying things are good questions, and then not really answering them.)

There is no financial component to the relationship.

And that’s it! Pretty mellow.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

• 13.7 million Macs sold in FY 2010
• That’s 3 times the number of Macs Apple sold just five years ago
• The Mac’s installed base is 50 million
• Mac sales accounted for $22 billion in revenue in FY 2010
• That’s 33 percent of Apple’s revenue
• And it’s enough to make the company’s Mac business No. 110 on the Fortune 500–if it were a standalone business
• Quarterly Mac sales grew 2.5 times faster than the rest of the industry (according to IDC)
• The Mac has outgrown the PC market for 18 straight quarters
• The Mac claims 20.7 percent of the U.S. retail market (according to NPD)
• There are 600,000 Mac developers
• The above number is growing by 30,000 per month
• Mac customer satisfaction is the highest in the industry
• It’s No. 1 in customer satisfaction (according to ACSI)
• It’s No. 1 in tech support for the last seven years (according to Consumer Reports)
• It’s No. 1 in customer support (according to PC World)
• There are 318 Apple retail stores in 11 countries
• Apple retail stores sold 2.8 million Macs last year
• 50 percent of them were sold to first-time Mac buyers
• Apple sold 2 million iPhoto photo books in the past year
• There are 5 million GarageBand users

For the four weeks ended Oct. 2, 2010, Bing accounted for 10.10 percent of U.S. searches, up from 9.87 percent in August, while Yahoo accounted for 13.54 percent, down from 14.28 percent. Taken together, those two metrics mean that 23.64 percent of the U.S. search market is Bing-powered. That’s nearly a quarter of the market claimed during the first full month of Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo’s (YHOO) fledgling search partnership, which kicked into gear in mid-August when Microsoft’s Bing back end officially began handling Yahoo’s U.S. search results

Sadly, that’s less than the combined 24.2 percent the companies had last month (thanks, Yahoo!) and pales beside the 72.15 percent share controlled by rival Google (GOOG), which doesn’t seem to be suffering much at the hands of Bing-powered search at all. According to Hitwise, its share in August was 71.59 percent, which means it saw 1 percent month-over-month growth from August to September.

• 300 Apple Stores in 10 countries (soon to be 11)
• More than 1 million visitors to those stores on some days
• 120 million iOS devices sold since the first iPhone debuted
• 230,000 iOS devices activated each day
• 6.5 billion apps downloaded from the App Store to date
• 200 apps downloaded from the App Store each second
• 1.5 billion games and entertainment downloads to the iPod touch alone
• 250,000 apps currently available in the App Store
• 25,000 of those are iPad apps
• 275 million iPods sold to date
• 160 million active iTunes accounts
• 12 million songs in the iTunes store
• 11.7 billion songs downloaded from iTunes
• 450 million TV episodes downloaded via iTunes
• 100 million movies downloaded via iTunes
• 35 million books downloaded via iTunes
• The iPod touch is the No. 1 mobile gaming device worldwide, outselling the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP combined
• Apple’s share of the portable gaming market: 50 percent

Impressive, to say the least, though what’s more striking is how that growth breaks down. In desktops, CAGR is expected to be just 2.4 percent through 2014. But in laptops and netbooks, it’s expected to hit 22 percent and 15 percent, respectively.

What about tablets? In tablets, CAGR should range between 73 percent and 88 percent between now and 2014.

That’s a pretty staggering metric, though I suppose it’s to be expected in a nascent category that’s been picking up quite a bit of traction recently. That said, the Intel (INTC) chief expects tablets to remain niche devices for the next few years, with sales hitting 50 to 60 million units a year by 2014.

“In terms of the scale of the PC industry, the tablet is relatively insignificant,” he said. “Tablets like netbooks are additive. They’re a new usage model for computing and they are probably good for Intel long-term, but I don’t believe they’ll take market share away from other devices.” (Click on charts below to enlarge.)

That puts it within two percentage points of Yahoo (YHOO), whose share fell to 14.1 percent from 14.5 percent and, heh-heh, within 52.7 percentage points of Google (GOOG), which also saw a decline from January to February. The company ended the month with 65.2 percent share, down from 66.3 percent in January.

It’s slow going, but Bing is clearly whittling away at both Google and Yahoo’s search market share. Of course, the flip side is that with Yahoo in decline, the search side of the Microsoft-Yahoo partnership isn’t showing all that much growth.

Industry analysts, at least in the case of the Altimeter Group, are ultimately becoming market catalysts.

With today’s news, this is of course, only fortified.

The Altimeter Group released a new report on social customer relationship management, and while analysts release reports all the time, this is different. The report is free to read and share under creative commons, and this is a big disruptor, one that reflects the socialization of information and the spirit of social media. By giving away insight, Altimeter ignites change and thus brings its report to life.

As such, the Altimeter Group is demonstrating how new models are needed to thrive in the social economy and concurrently putting into practice the ingredients of an effective social CRM framework.

The New Rules of Relationship Management

The essence of the new report by Altimeter’s R “Ray” Wang and Jeremiah Owyang is putting the customer first. While that seems like a simple principle, it’s easier said then done. The case the duo make is rooted, of course, in social media and the self-actualization of personal influence.

As the report notes in the beginning:

“Rapid adoption of social networking enables users to connect with individuals and communities who share mutual interests, increasingly leaving organizations out of the conversation.

Simply hiring more people to keep up with social marketing, sales, and support will not be sufficient, as consumers and their new channels will always outnumber employees. As a result, companies need an organized approach using enterprise software that connects business units to the social web–giving them the opportunity to respond in near-real time, and in a coordinated fashion.”

And indeed, they’re right.

Social media didn’t invent conversations, it simply amplified and connected them to audiences and the actions that are triggered as a result. With the right tools, and more important, mindset and resolve, we can now uncover these incredibly valuable, insightful and prominent conversations where and when they happen. Listening is only the beginning however. As in anything, we need a little less conversation and a little more action.

As the report notes, social CRM does not replace existing CRM efforts, it complements them with an outbound extension to connect with the very social beacons that shape and steer perception–those previously untouched with inbound-only infrastructures. Essentially the “s” in sCRM should be viewed as a verb…as in socialize. Actions speak louder than words and thus, sCRM transforms words and intent into action.

As the “godfather of CRM,” Paul Greenberg, notes, “We’ve moved from the transaction to the interaction with customers, though we haven’t eliminated the transaction–or the data associated with it….Social CRM focuses on engaging the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. Social CRM is the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.”

The Socialization of an Entire Organization

The social customer is only one part of the equation. As any listening program will reveal, conversations map specifically to departments within an organization and as such, all units affected by outside activity will socialize over time. This is why I believe that over time, we should focus less on the “C” of sCRM and focus our attention, energy and ingenuity on the aspects of SRM–social relationship management.

The social Web is distributing influence beyond the customer landscape, allocating authority among stakeholders, prospects, advocates, decision-makers, and peers. SRM recognizes that whether someone recommended a product, purchased a product, or simply recognized it publicly, in the end, each makes an impact on behavior at varying levels. Therefore customers are now merely part of a larger equation that also balances vendors, experts, partners, and other authorities. In the realm of SRM, influence is distributed and it is recognizes wherever and however it takes shape.

“SRM is a doctrine aligned with a humanized business strategy and supporting technology infrastructure and platform. SRM recognizes that all people, no matter what system they use, are equal. It represents a wider scope of active listening and participation across the full spectrum of influence mapped to specific department representatives within the organization using various lenses for which to identify individuals where and how they interact.”

But we must begin somewhere and for many businesses, the evolution from CRM to sCRM is in fact, revolutionary.

After months of study and interviews with over 100 organizations, Altimeter Group identified 18 use cases for Social CRM to help businesses assess, adapt, and create new programs and processes to socialize their brands.

As the report notes, social CRM programs start at the departmental level, but require corporate support to transform fiefdoms into united efforts. The challenge lies in mobilizing and organizing resources around distributed conversations and building the connectors that link CRM systems to social networks. And, organizations must set priorities based on market demand and technology maturity.

Customers have already migrated toward new channels and in the process, companies that are not in pursuit are quickly falling behind. Relationships between organizations and customers might be better defined simply as “relations” as the existing framework was traditionally optimized around the organization and not the customer.

“Traditional CRM projects have failed to grasp the complexities of the customer-company relationship. Though these CRM programs started out with the goal of providing a single customer view and 1:1 relationship management, early efforts quickly refocused on automation of front-office tasks and improving management visibility across marketing, sales, service and support. Because these programs have often failed to support the front-office worker’s needs to manage relationships, internal adoption halted as users grew to resent, and in some cases revolt, against CRM.”

To begin at the beginning, businesses must deploy social CRM for business value and not get caught up in the hype of Twitter and Facebook. We have to go where our customers seek, discover, and share information. Alitimeter suggests focusing on bite-sized entry points as today’s tight budgets, limited resources, and little time will ensure that companies get the most bang for the buck initially. (Click graph below to enlarge.)

In the report, each one of the 18 use cases brings definable metrics that should be incorporated in each Social CRM program.

- Begin with the end in mind

- Metrics should be aligned with an organization’s entry points

- Quantify the baseline and determine the effort

- Adjust ROI targets to align resources with efforts to move the needle

- The goal–drive business value

The 18 recommended use cases are organized in seven categories and in order of operations. As observed, most organizations start their initiatives by building out the “5 M’s” and deploying a customer insight program that matures with experience and earned intelligence. I previously discussed the maturation of social media infrastructure in business usually evolves in at least 10 stages. (Click table below to enlarge.)

Social Customer Insights form the Foundation for All Social CRM Use Cases–Everything begins with listening

1. Social Customers Insights

Social Marketing Seeks to Achieve Customer Advocacy

2. Social Marketing Insights

3. Rapid Social Marketing Response

4. Social Campaign Tracking

5. Social Event Management

Social Sales Enables Seamless Lead Opportunities

6. Social Sales Insights

7. Rapid Social Sales Response

8. Proactive Social Lead Generation

Social Support and Service Drives Sustainable Customer Satisfaction

9. Social Support Insights

10. Rapid Social Responses

11. Peer-2-Peer (P2P) Unpaid Armies

Social Innovation Streamlines Complex Ideation

12. Innovation Insights

13. Crowd-sourced R&D

Collaboration Reduced Organizational Friction and Stimulates Ecosystem

14. Collaboration Insights

15. Enterprise Collaboration

16. Extended Collaboration

Seamless Customer Experience Sustains Advocacy Programs

17. Seamless Customer Experience

18. VIP Experience

The Customer (R)evolution
The methodologies, systems, and people that entwine CRM are unquestionably forcing a historical (r)evolution from the outside in. As customers earn prominence online and ultimately in the marketplaces they define, CRM is far more consequential to the prosperity and relevance of businesses, than perhaps ever before.

This is about earning a prestigious position in the hearts, minds, and ultimately, decisions of customers, prospects and those who affect their actions, today and tomorrow. Essentially, with the socialization of media and the redistribution of authority and influence, we are competing for the future simply by listening, responding, learning and adapting.

Social customers are disrupting the balance of power and actively exerting their new found eminence within every social network and community that thrives off of shared experiences. The socialization of CRM is effectively measured by the dedication of resources and resolution the organization commits not just to social media, but to all existing channels where customers, influencers and prospects seek help.

Divided we share…united we change.

Among Palm (PALM) device owners, the ratio was lower: One in nine. And among people who own smartphones running Google’s (GOOG) Android OS, it was lower still: One in 17 (see chart; click to enlarge).

So iPhone owners appear far more likely to purchase an iPad. Not much of a revelation, really. But it does lend a bit of credence to Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s claim that the iPad, though a brand new category of device, already has a market in the millions of iPhone and iPod touch users.

Other findings of note from Admob’s report:

• iPod touch users download an average of 12 apps a month–37 percent more than their iPhone and Android counterparts. They spend far more time using them, too: 100 minutes a day–25 percent more than iPhone and Android users.
• 91 percent of iPhone users and 88 percent of iPod touch users said they would recommend their device to a friend, compared with 84 percent of Android users and 69 percent of Palm webOS users. Interestingly, AdMob found that owners of webOS smartphones are more than three times more likely not to recommend their devices relative to iPhone OS users.

In a TPS report filed today (TPS here referring to “tweets per second” and not “Test Program Set” from the movie “Office Space.” Ha ha, what a funny coincidence.) Kevin Weil of the Twitter analytics team points out that tweets grew 1,400 percent last year. He also notes that the 50-million-tweets-per-day figure does not include posts generated by accounts that have been identified as sources of spam.

Further evidence that the microblogging service has pushed through the growth ceiling it hit last fall. As I noted last week, the latest metrics from comScore (SCOR), show Twitter.com with 73.5 million unique visitors in January, up eight percent from the 65.2 million who visited in December 2009.

That’s an impressive spike and one that continues a three-month streak of gains that began last November after a worrisome period of stagnation between September and October (click on chart and table below to enlarge).

Hard to believe that comScore’s measurements for January 2009 showed Twitter.com with an estimated six million visitors. With 67.5 million more just a year later, the site’s annual growth rate is a jaw-dropping 1,107 percent.

[Image Credits: comScore, Scarletbits]

Google (GOOG) continues to insist that it will start making money from its Web video site soon. But for now, YouTube’s finances are a black box. From the outside, though, we can see indications that the site is at least becoming more serious about getting more ad dollars out of more videos.

Take this new study from TubeMogul, the Web video-tracking service. It says that 44.7 percent of YouTube’s most viewed videos are professionally produced and/or products of YouTube’s “partner” program, meaning that YouTube has the ability to shove ads on them. That’s up from 36.3 percent six months ago.

Here’s the full breakdown:

And for comparison, here’s what that looked like six months ago:

These charts don’t break it out, but TubeMogul reports that 41.93 percent of the 100 most popular videos on YouTube on a given day actually carry some kind of advertising, up from 36.72 percent.

If you want to be glass-half-empty about it, you could argue that six out of 10 of YouTube’s most popular clips still don’t carry ads, which is a problem. But that would be grouchy of you! Progress is still progress.

No comment from YouTube. But I imagine that if executives there did have something to say, they’d argue that 1) outsiders like TubeMogul really don’t have a good grip on their metrics, and that 2) focusing on the top videos at the site is misleading, since the site has been working hard to monetize the mid- and long “tail” of its clips.

Of course, the best way to respond to this sort of educated guessing would be to open YouTube’s books. But I’m not holding my breath on that one.

Meanwhile, here’s an ad-free clip YouTube recommended that I watch:

Underwhelmed

The majority of TV ad buyers say they think their spots are less useful than they used to be. At least according to a new study from Forrester-ANA, which surveys top advertisers: 62 percent feel TV ads “are not as effective” as they were two years ago.

The Forrester (FORR) study is full of nuggets that will cheer those who want to radically transform the TV ad model. For instance:

• Ad buyers have reduced the amount they are spending on TV and are now allotting just 41 percent of their budgets to the boob tube, compared with 58 percent in 2008.
• 66 percent think DVRs “will destroy or reduce the effectiveness” of the 30-second ad.
• They overwhelmingly hate the existing metrics used to measure TV programming.
• 63 percent think Google (GOOG) will dominate “tomorrow’s big advertising winners,” ahead of cable operators (53 percent), cable networks (47 percent) and broadcast networks (nine percent).

So when can we declare traditional TV ads DOA? No time soon. Even in decline, TV ads are a $70 billion business, give or take a billion, and it’s going to take a lot effort to move an industry that size–even mighty Google has had no luck to date.

But here’s a data set that seems to belie that: New statistics from Nielsen that seem to show that people are spending less time on their browsers than they did a year ago.

If you believe Nielsen’s stats, Web users are heading to their PCs a little less often (sessions per person–down 11 percent)  and doing less once they get there (domains visited per person–down 20 percent). Except when it comes to clicking, which they’re happy to do (Web pages per person–up 11 percent).

I can understand the boost in Web pages, since many publishers are getting more strident about demanding extra clicks from their visitors, in the form of slideshows and other tricks. Everything else, though, leaves me puzzled.

Note that in addition to the usual salt you want to consume alongside Web-use metrics like these, there’s a bonus variable here. Nielsen changed its reporting process in last June, which makes year-over-year comparisons even trickier.

But Nielsen says this stuff should at least be directionally correct, so take a look for yourself (click image to enlarge):

“As an independent company with a recognized global Internet brand, we will be competing for the future of content, communications and advertising and that is a very exciting and significant opportunity,” CEO Tim Armstrong enthused in a statement this morning.

Sadly, investors didn’t quite see it that way. AOL’s (AOL) shares dipped around 2.5 percent in morning trading, rose a bit in the afternoon and then finished the day in the red at $23.52.

That said, the share price has risen a bit after hours, though it’s anyone’s guess if that trend will continue on Friday. As UBS analysts Brian Pitz and Brian Fitzgerald said in a research note today, it’s likely to be a while before AOL wins investor confidence.

“We believe AOL is in the early stages of a turnaround and though we like management’s vision for the aspects of the business it can control (advertising), we expect the strategy to take at least a year before it begins to translate into sustained positive user and advertiser metrics,” the analysts wrote. “In the short term, we expect shares to trade down due to technical issues.”

ComScore data on the search market are widely considered the industry standard and therefore more closely watched by Wall Street. Still, the big picture is clear: Google is not the competition, it’s the environment in which you compete. The IT industry used to say that about IBM (IBM), but today, the adage seems equally applicable to Google, which dominates the search market just as IBM once dominated the computer industry.

Troubling news for Microsoft (MSFT). Hitwise’s latest numbers are the second set of metrics from a Web analytics firm showing Bing’s market share in decline. Last week, StatCounter claimed Bing’s share of the U.S. search market in September had slipped to 8.5 percent from 9.6 percent in August.

As I noted then, while a month of slight decline might herald the beginning of a trend, it certainly doesn’t guarantee one–especially in search, where surges and lulls in market share are quite common. That said, this is the second set of data suggesting that Bing’s traffic may be leveling out. Whether this reflects the end of the big Bing marketing campaign or falling consumer interest remains to be seen.

Incidentally, Microsoft’s new search partner, Yahoo (YHOO), also saw its search share slip for the month, according to Hitwise. Yahoo claimed 16.96 percent in August. In September, it claimed 16.38 percent. Meanwhile, Google (GOOG) took 71.08 percent share for the month, up from 70.24 percent in August.

New metrics from Web analytics firm StatCounter show Bing’s share of the U.S. search market in September falling to 8.5 percent from 9.6 percent in August. Its share of the global market declined as well, slipping to 3.25 percent from 3.58 percent.

Microsoft’s (MSFT) new search partner, Yahoo (YHOO), also suffered a decline. Its market share fell to 9.4 percent from 10.50 percent in the U.S. and to 4.37 percent from 4.84 abroad. Meanwhile, Google’s (GOOG) September share rose to 80 percent from 77.8 percent in the U.S. and to 90.54 percent from 90 percent globally. (See chart below; click to enlarge.)

“The trend has been downwards for Bing since mid August,” StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen said in a statement. “The wheels haven’t fallen off but the underlying trend must be a little worrying for Microsoft.”

Mmm, I doubt it. While a month of slight decline might herald the beginning of a trend, it certainly doesn’t guarantee one, especially in search, where surges and declines in market share are quite common. Furthermore, we haven’t yet seen search metrics from Nielsen, comScore (SCOR), and Hitwise. And all three showed Bing gaining share in August, a month that Statcounter claimed shows the beginning of a downward trend.