What emerged is a view of Twitter usage that is more nuanced than a social network, where it’s clear what being a “user” means, or a media site, where it’s obvious who is the content creator and who is the content consumer.

After a very long time of withholding active user numbers, Twitter disclosed that 100 million people log into its service at least once per month and 400 million people visited its Web site in the past month.

But there’s still a massive amount of Twitter activity that goes uncounted, both through widgets and clients built on the Twitter API and through mass distribution of tweets in other news media like television.

Here’s my attempt at describing those users:

The Tweeters: Some 60 million registered Twitter users have logged in at least once in the last month and tweeted. That includes real people, corporate accounts, parody accounts, group accounts and bots.

Active tweeters generate 230 million tweets a day, up 110 percent from the beginning of the year.

The Voyeurs: An additional 40 million people have gone to the trouble of logging into Twitter in the last month but haven’t composed anything themselves. These are often people who find value in getting a real-time and more personal perspective on sports stars, celebrities and other news makers. Twitter said today that 75 percent of NBA players and 85 percent of U.S. senators have Twitter accounts.

In a way, curating other Twitter users is a form of content creation, as Jeffrey Kalmikoff, VP of product at SimpleGeo, pointed out to me on Twitter. This may be increasingly true with new Twitter activity stream tools, where users can more easily see which accounts their contacts are following and which tweets they are favoriting.

Twitter lumped its logged-in active users together for some of the growth stats. Active users are up 82 percent since January 1 to 100 million. That’s up from just 26 million at the end of 2009.

Half of that 100 million logs in every single day, up 105 percent since the beginning of this year. Fifty-five percent of active users are mobile users.

The Readers: Another way to measure Twitter users is to go to Google Analytics, which says 400 million people have visited Twitter.com in the past month. That number is mostly inclusive of the 100 million in the past two categories (though some active users might use only Twitter mobile or desktop clients).

Visitors to Twitter.com can view almost all Twitter content without logging in, and there are many people who drop by on a tweet-by-tweet basis or go directly to the pages of tweeters they are interested in.

Twitter said its monthly visitor count has grown 70 percent since the beginning of the year.

The Uncounted Masses: Many, many more people read tweets than visit Twitter.com, but it’s hard to measure them. Twitter offers its own clients for various platforms and other developers make them too. There are also lots more tweets displayed using applications built with the Twitter API — for instance, a tweet widget on a news site might show the latest messages from its writers, or a stream of tweets could be displayed at an event using a common hashtag.

Beyond that, tweets are an excellent source of breaking news and popular sentiment, so they’re syndicated all over the place. I dare you to watch an hour of television news without hearing a mention of the latest on Twitter.

Twitter doesn’t even seem to be attempting to measure this number, though it would be nice to see the company take a stab at it by asking API users to report back user numbers or maybe even assigning an intern to watch for tweets on TV.

Twitter in the past had offered a dramatically unhelpful metric: The number of people (hundreds of millions, at this point) who had ever registered for an account. Not only does that not include people who view Twitter content while logged out, it also ignores the many dormant accounts that are bound to accumulate on a five-year-old service.

So altogether, the balance of Twitter activity tilts toward people consuming content — which could be a very good thing for Twitter to emphasize. Twitter sales marketing director Shane Steele pointed out after Costolo’s address that what advertisers care about is the potential reach of their content, not how many people are creating tweets. These tiers of public usage make Twitter’s business much different from social networks like Facebook and Google+, where much of users’ activity is personal and private.

This is perhaps the oddest video in honor of the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, in which James Bond–played by actor Daniel Craig–puts on a dress.

No, really.

It’s worthwhile to note all the dire statistics for women today, although I am not sure this is the best way to illustrate the issue.

Well, you only live twice:

The funding comes from Bessemer Venture Partners, Columbia Capital, Charles River Ventures and New Enterprise Associates (NEA).

To date, the Baltimore-based company has raised $65 million. But that hardly seems sufficient when fighting Goliaths like Apple and Google, which both made multimillion-dollar acquisitions last year in the space.

Previously, CEO Paul Palmieri said it was Millennial’s intention to stay an independent company, and therefore aim for an IPO. Is $65 million enough?

The funds will be used for acquisitions in 2011, and to invest in the company’s international business, which is considered smaller than its competitors’, such as Google’s. So far, it has built a team in London, and has begun to expand to the Asia-Pacific region.

Market share statistics are notoriously poor in the space, but in December, IDC estimated that Millennial was the largest independent mobile ad network at 15.4 percent, trailing behind Apple with 18.8 percent share and Google/AdMob with 19 percent share. Millennial’s share was estimated to be larger than Yahoo’s 10.1 percent share.

Millennial declined to give specific numbers, but said it achieved “operational profitability” in 2010, and tripled its revenues during the year.

Apple can tout that it remains in the lead in the U.S. market with more than 28 percent share as of November. Android, meanwhile, continues to gain and now has 25.8 percent of the market.

RIM has been losing share, but remains in second place with 26.1 percent and is still in a statistical tie with the other two given that Apple’s lead is within the survey’s margin of error.

But those numbers tell only part of the story, since they focus on what phones are currently out in the market overall. More indicative of the future (and less rosy for RIM) are the stats on recent phone purchasers.

Those figures show Android attracting more than 40 percent of new smartphone buyers, with 26.9 percent opting for an iPhone and 19.2 percent choosing a BlackBerry. Consider how that has changed since June 2010, when BlackBerry was garnering 35 percent of new smartphone buyers and Android accounted for 27.5 percent.

Also of note were findings released by Nielsen last month that showed Android more popular among men and Apple’s iOS more popular among women.

The good news for all involved is that proverbial rising tide is lifting all the top smartphone boats. In November, 45 percent of recent phone buyers chose a smartphone over a feature phone, Nielsen said. In June 2010, only
slightly more than a third of phone buyers scooped up a smartphone.

In all, smartphones now account for 31 percent of the consumer market, as compared to 24 percent as of last June, Nielsen said.

Unsurprisingly, Symbian is the leading mobile OS worldwide. It’s dominant in some 100 countries and accounts for more that half of all mobile Web usage in 75 of them. It essentially owns the Mideast and most of the developing world, thanks to those regions’ affinity for Nokia’s cheap mobile phones.

Apple’s iOS is the second most used mobile OS worldwide, with its iPhone and iPod touch claiming the most mobile Web traffic in 30 countries. In 21 of them, those devices accounted for more than half of all mobile Web traffic. IOS appears most popular in Canada, Cuba (!), Switzerland and Australia, where it claims over 70 percent of all mobile Web traffic. Interestingly, it’s quite a bit less popular in the United States, where it garnered a little over 35 percent.

Research in Motion’s BlackBerry OS leads four countries, with one–the Dominican Republic–where OS usage is over 50 percent. Shockingly, in its home country of Canada, it accounts for a paltry 3.6 percent of mobile Web traffic.

And Android?

It leads just one country, South Korea, with a 78.3 percent share of all mobile Web traffic. Presumably, that’s thanks to Samsung, which is based in the country and sells a number of Android phones. So while Android is surging ahead, thanks to Google’s strategy of flooding the market with multiple handsets on multiple carriers at a wide range of price points, there’s still a hell of a lot of market share that it hasn’t even come close to touching.

[Image credit: Chart and data courtesy Royal Pingdom]

It’s designed to get me to mention today’s Windows Phone 7 launch (Katy Perry! Maroon 5!), and I’m totally fine with that. Because in return, Microsoft has provided us with a series of great statistics about “Bad Mobile Phone Behavior,” gleaned from a poll conducted by Harris Interactive.

If you like bathroom humor, you’ll enjoy these stats (via TechFlash):

• 48 percent of adults think that it’s bad to talk on the phone in a public restroom.
• 43 percent of adults think it’s not okay to text, email or Web surf in a public potty.
• Which means, presumably, that the majority of adults think it’s just fine to talk, text and type away while you’re in the stalls.
• Unless that means you drop your phone in the toilet, which 19 percent of adults 18-24 say they’ve done. (Me too, though I was well out of the demo by that point.)

Still reading? You can get the press release, which has a link to the survey itself (via a Word document–go figure) here. Oh. And here is that clever Windows Phone 7 Ad*.

*Here’s why these ads are really great, by the way. Not because they’re funny–they’re funny, but more grin funny than laugh funny. And not because they sell cell phones, because who knows? They’re great because they’re inadvertently but fundamentally honest about something uncomfortable: Many times, often times, in some cases all the time, we want to be distracted by our phones. We want them to take us away from the place we’re at or the person we’re with. No one wants to say this out loud, so Microsoft deals with it by pretending that we’re all dying to get back off our phones and into the real world. But we’re in on the joke, us and Microsoft, so we just nod and grin. Truth-telling = great ad.

In contrast to its success elsewhere, Facebook has so far failed to establish itself as Japan’s most popular social-networking site. The company, with headquarters in Palo Alto, California, has thus decided to launch a cross-platform feature that will allow users of Facebook and Mixi, a popular Japanese social-networking site, to link to each other’s profiles. This also allows users to share links, videos and photos.

“We built this application using Mixi’s standard APIs available for all developers. Through this application, we hope to simplify connecting and sharing with friends across different social platforms,” said Facebook spokeswoman Kumiko Hidaka, adding that Facebook has similar applications in place with other internet services, including Twitter.

This is not an official partnership between the two companies. Instead Facebook has taken advantage of a new platform developed by Mixi last month that would allow its users to share information with other internet services. However, this new feature could raise Facebook’s profile in Japan where it has struggled to win over users from local rivals like Mixi and Gree. There are currently about 21 million registered users on Mixi while Facebook boasts over 500 million members world-wide. Facebook, which launched its Japan version in 2008, declined to disclose user statistics by country.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

And it appears Apple already is. According to some statistics trotted out at its annual September music event, Apple’s developed quite a hold on the portable gaming market. The company claims a 50 percent share of the portable gaming market and says the iPod touch is the No. 1 mobile gaming device worldwide, outselling the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP combined. And that hold will only strengthen with the recent launch of Apple’s Game Center–a new interactive gaming service included in iPhone OS 4–and the proliferation of cheap and increasingly more sophisticated games for the platform (seen Epic Citadel, yet?).

It’s said that Nintendo views Apple as the “enemy of the future.” And it clearly is that. But it’s also very much an enemy of the present and the recent past as well. As Phil Schiller, Apple’s SVP of worldwide product marketing, said over a year ago: “People are starting to see what a great gaming device [the iPod touch is]. When you think about the companies that came before us…when you played those other systems, they seemed so cool, but now when you look at them, they don’t stack up against the iPod touch….No Multi-Touch user experience, Games are expensive, No App Store, No iPod, Expensive Games and uncomfortable retail buying experiences.”

This wasn’t the case when e-books first appeared a decade ago. But Amazon (AMZN) has made a point of selling its Kindle titles at a discount compared with physical editions, even if it means losing money.

And then there are the titles that Kindle owners really, really love–the ones they get for nothing. As the Washington Post noted earlier this week, the list of best-selling Kindle titles is dominated by free books:

Amazon’s customers have made it clear that $9.99 is still too high for their taste. Most titles in the company’s list of top 100 Kindle bestsellers are priced below $9.99, and the most popular price point is $0.00.

The good folks at MediaBistro have gone ahead and counted, so you don’t have to. As of a day ago, 64 of Amazon’s top 100 Kindle titles cost nada.

How exactly does that work? I understand why Amazon is able to hand out public domain works like “The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes” and “Pride and Prejudice” for free. But I’m not sure what’s going on with titles like Noel Hynd’s “Midnight In Madrid” (No. 1 on the Kindle charts) or Beth Hensperger’s “Not Your Mother’s Slow Cooker Recipes for Entertaining” (No. 9). Anyone want to weigh in?

I’m also not sure what conclusions we can draw from the dominance of freebies on the Kindle charts. I’m tempted to say that Kindle buyers are rabid but indiscriminate readers, and they’ll lap up whatever you put in front of them.

But without a real sense of the numbers, which Amazon is never going to cough up, it’s hard to tell what the sales patterns really look like.

I suspect, for instance, that a lot of the freebies are picked up by readers in the first few weeks they own a Kindle when they’re looking to download something simply for the sake of downloading something.

I also assume that the Kindle charts are skewed by hardcore early adopters’ reading habits. And that the patterns will start changing now that more casual users are picking up the Kindle for the first time.

And in case you were wondering–because I was–Amazon says it is not counting free book downloads when it releases sales statistics like the one it put out on Saturday, when it said more customers had purchased Kindle titles than physical books on Christmas day.

[Image credit: lordcolus]

(For the youth-challenged, “LMK” is the texting shorthand for “let me know.”)

LMK joins a crowded field of aggregation sites, which cull news and information from across the Web and organize them by topic or in other user-friendly ways. Other aggregators include Topix, Newser and Daylife, and sites like the Daily Beast that combine aggregation with their own content.

LMK will be nearly entirely automated, with just one full-time employee. Initially, the most developed part of the site is about college football, with news, blog posts, photos and statistics. It will roll out new topics every few weeks.

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Today’s example: Shashi Seth, the one-time “monetization” boss at YouTube, who was most recently running sales at Cooliris, the video Web wall start-up. His new job: Senior vice president of global advertising products, reporting to Armstrong’s lieutenant (and Google vet, natch), Jeff Levick.

I thought Seth’s job title sounded a whole lot like that of Senior Vice President of Global Sales Development Erin Clift, whom AOL brought out to meet with reporters last week. But AOL folks tell me Clift is still there and has a much different role: She’s the “agency and market guru” and he’s a product guy.

Seth will be working out of AOL’s Silicon Valley outpost with new hire Brad Garlinghouse, who comes to AOL not from Google but via Yahoo (YHOO).

Here’s the release.

NEW YORK, NY – September 29, 2009 – AOL announced that Shashi Seth has joined the company as Senior Vice President of Global Advertising Products, responsible for building and scaling AOL’s advertising platform and developing industry-leading products. Seth comes to AOL from Cooliris, where he served as Chief Revenue Officer. Prior to that he was with Google, where he served most recently as head of monetization for YouTube.

“Shashi is unmatched in the industry as an innovator with an outstanding track record of developing new and better ways to serve advertisers on the Web,” said Jeff Levick, President of Global Advertising and Strategy at AOL. “As we move forward on our strategy of becoming the world’s largest provider of display advertising, Shashi will play a critical role in creating the best products in the business for our advertising partners.”

“I’m grateful to have the opportunity to come to AOL as it moves toward becoming an independent company,” said Seth. “The company already has an incredible combination of scale and a suite of great advertising products and technology, and I’m looking forward to working with AOL’s talented team to build on this strong foundation.”

Seth will report directly to Levick from AOL’s expanding Mountain View offices, joining Brad Garlinghouse, who was recently appointed to lead AOL’s Communications efforts and lead the company’s West Coast AOL Ventures efforts.

Prior to coming to AOL, Seth was with Cooliris, where he was responsible for revenue generation and business development. At Google, Seth was responsible for building advertising products, exploring all monetization opportunities, and defining business models for YouTube. Before that, Seth was the Product Lead for Web Search at Google. Prior to Google, Seth was with eBay, where he was responsible for building and managing eBay’s successful APIs & Platform. He has also worked for the Gap, where he launched their online stores, and co-founded two startups. Seth started his career at NASA Langley Research Center, where he built flight simulators and avionics equipment. Seth holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Kanpur, India, a Masters in Computer Applications from the University of Pune, India, and a M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Miami.

The perennial, and obvious, solution is to incorporate ads into the service, but so far Twitter hasn’t tried it, except for very limited experiments.

The good news for Twitter and its investors is that the service’s user base is pretty receptive to advertising, in general terms, because it’s pretty receptive to just about everything on the Web.

So says research group Interpret LLC, which has a new study out today, conveniently enough. From the release:

Twitter users are twice as likely to review or rate products online (24% vs. 12%), visit company profiles (20% vs. 11%) and click on advertisements or sponsors (20% vs.9%) as those who only belong to traditional social networking websites like Facebook and MySpace. The data suggests that Twitter users uniquely demonstrate higher engagement with brands, not just with “tweets” they post.

These statistics are self-reported, and Interpret doesn’t say how big a sample its survey used, so take them with as much salt as you like. But they seem intuitively and directionally correct: Anyone willing to plug into the waves of information that Twitter pumps out is likely engaged all over the Web.

Note what the Interpret report doesn’t say: That Twitter users are eager to have ads inserted into the service itself.

Doesn’t matter. At some point, they’re unlikely to have a choice about that because it seems hard to imagine that Twitter can ever deliver on its investors’ sky-high expectations without generating some kind of money, somehow, from Madison avenue.

Which is exactly why Biz Stone and crew, who once made a point of expressing their derision for ads, now make a point of saying that ads may not be such a terrible thing, after all.

But there’s a new, free Web site that, while overseen by paid editors, is built on lively content submitted by current students at the colleges. The information isn’t just words and numbers, but includes numerous photos and videos for most schools. You also can create a small social network of people interested in the same schools or who share other common traits.

In other words, this is a college-information resource built for the age of YouTube and Facebook.

The site, Unigo.com, costs nothing to use and supports itself with ads. Although it’s only a few months old, it already covers about 250 colleges and universities, and claims to average dozens of student-created reviews, photos and videos for each college. Its sophisticated search engine lets applicants comb all this material to find just what applies to them. For example, Unigo would let you see all content relevant to an Asian-American female applicant with conservative political views.

I’ve been testing Unigo, and I like it. In the sampling of college profiles I read, the site seems to have struck a good balance between the immediacy and candor of student submissions, and the professionalism needed to weed out wildly biased or inaccurate claims.

The site, founded by a 26-year-old who formerly created printed college guides, says it employs 19 full-time editors. This team uses information from a nationwide network of 300 representatives on campuses to create each college’s profile. Each representative rounds up contributions from others on campus, so that the site claims that over 15,000 students contributed to the profiles of the first 250 colleges.

Reviews, photos and videos can also be submitted out of the blue, and these are also eventually reviewed by the editors.

Each profile starts with a fairly long editor-written overview, liberally sprinkled with comments from students and accompanied by basic information, statistics and rankings.

But the heart of Unigo’s look at each college is student-created, in multiple forms. For instance, the site’s section on the University of Michigan includes 92 written student reviews, some running to thousands of words; 35 photos; 36 videos; and 10 student-written “documents.” The latter are often by campus journalists and cover things like athletics or critiques of nearby restaurants.

The videos are the most interesting part of Unigo, because they provide a look at current students and at the campus that isn’t often captured in standard guides. Most of the videos are fairly short, some only containing the answer to a single question like “What’s the best or worst thing about this school?” But others include opinions on issues like what kinds of students fit in best or worst on campus, or minitours of the campus or of typical dorms.

One student video I watched was a walk down the main street of the college town. Others are reflections on the school’s reputation, or on why the student chose one school over another. Another was about a student’s biggest freshman-year mistake (he took Classical Mythology, found it boring, didn’t do the work and flunked the course.)

I stumbled on a rap video submitted by a student from Clarkson University, which doesn’t yet have a review on Unigo, in which the rapper comments on the alumni, the architecture and the weather at the Potsdam, New York, school.

Unigo also contains articles on general topics, such as how to decide what size of college is best for you, and how to get the most out of a college tour.

While the editors ban personal attacks and nudity, they don’t bar negative comments. Unigo deliberately seeks out pro and con opinions. Many of the student submissions are enthusiastically positive, but plenty are negative comments on campus social life, the costs, the food, the faculty, the dorms and other topics.

The site feels surprisingly full for such a young venture, but it has some quirks and issues. Coverage is uneven. For instance, Vassar College in New York boasts 117 reviews and 42 videos, while the much larger University of Kansas has only 45 reviews and three videos. Finding the detailed search feature can be clumsy, because it’s not obvious on the home page. You can’t generate a quick comparison among colleges, and the site lacks any parent-oriented sections, although parents are free to use it.

Finally, there are just loads of colleges that aren’t yet included. The first 250 schools were “seeded,” with months of research and solicitation of student content. Unigo is confident it can get more schools, but only time will tell.

Still, Unigo is a good example of how user-generated content can do a lot to enhance an important topic, and still keep editorial standards.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090218/unigocom-gives-everyone-a-say-about-college-picks/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081121/were-doomed/ http://allthingsd.com/20081121/were-doomed/#comments Fri, 21 Nov 2008 10:34:26 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=8793 What an abundance of ugly statistics we’ve seen this past week. An increase in tech sector layoffs and people talking about them. A decrease in chip sales. A decrease in online spending. And now a decrease in corporate IT spending as well.

Forty-five percent of respondents to ChangeWave’s November survey of corporate IT spending expect their companies to spend less money or nothing at all on IT during the next 90 days.

And given the tech sector’s continued desanguination, who can blame them? If your stock’s trading at a 12- or 13-year low, you’re probably not thinking a lot about future IT purchases. “U.S. corporate IT spending is in the midst of a huge nose-dive, the likes of which hasn’t been seen before in a ChangeWave survey dating back to 2001,” said ChangeWave research director Paul Carton. “In short, the current ChangeWave survey findings virtually guarantee that we’ll be seeing the technology sector get hammered with pre-announcements before the January earnings season gets underway.”

Wonderful. Something to look forward to.

One last point worth noting here: According to ChangeWave, Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone is now the No. 2 smartphone in enterprise. And while RIM’s (RIMM) BlackBerry continues to be the focus of planned corporate smartphone purchases, the iPhone is gaining traction. Twenty-two percent of future enterprise smartphone buyers say they plan to iPhones; 78 percent say they plan to buy BlackBerrys.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081121/were-doomed/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20081121/were-doomed-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20081121/were-doomed-2/#comments Fri, 21 Nov 2008 10:34:26 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=8793 What an abundance of ugly statistics we’ve seen this past week. An increase in tech sector layoffs and people talking about them. A decrease in chip sales. A decrease in online spending. And now a decrease in corporate IT spending as well.

Forty-five percent of respondents to ChangeWave’s November survey of corporate IT spending expect their companies to spend less money or nothing at all on IT during the next 90 days.

And given the tech sector’s continued desanguination, who can blame them? If your stock’s trading at a 12- or 13-year low, you’re probably not thinking a lot about future IT purchases. “U.S. corporate IT spending is in the midst of a huge nose-dive, the likes of which hasn’t been seen before in a ChangeWave survey dating back to 2001,” said ChangeWave research director Paul Carton. “In short, the current ChangeWave survey findings virtually guarantee that we’ll be seeing the technology sector get hammered with pre-announcements before the January earnings season gets underway.”

Wonderful. Something to look forward to.

One last point worth noting here: According to ChangeWave, Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone is now the No. 2 smartphone in enterprise. And while RIM’s (RIMM) BlackBerry continues to be the focus of planned corporate smartphone purchases, the iPhone is gaining traction. Twenty-two percent of future enterprise smartphone buyers say they plan to iPhones; 78 percent say they plan to buy BlackBerrys.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081121/were-doomed-2/feed/ 0