In the latter parts of the study, the company looked specifically at social network membership data for users of the AOL, Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo webmail services. Not surprisingly, the study found that Facebook was the most popular network across the board. What's more interesting is how well MySpace fared in some cases. On both the Hotmail and Yahoo webmail services, Facebook only had a small lead. Here, around 20% of all Hotmail and Yahoo webmail users were found to be on Facebook and MySpace. What does this reveal about the Hotmail and Yahoo user base? That they're a little more behind the times? Or that they've been around on the net longer and at one time had created (and possibly now abandoned) their MySpace pages? Unfortunately, the study can't provide us with these sorts of answers.

The study also showed that Twitter is far more popular among Gmail users than anyone else. In fact, on the other services, it's 4-5 times less popular than Facebook. We would like to think that's because Gmail users are just more web-savvy and cool, but it's possible that it's because they're just younger than everyone else.

Not surprisingly, LinkedIn is the least popular social network, but as Rapleaf points out, many LinkedIn users may have registered with their business email instead.

Participation Levels - Hotmail Users have Most Profiles, Gmail Users Better-Connected

When it comes to how the webmail users participate on social networks, Rapleaf found that the majority of the users have only one social media profile. But the service where the average number of profiles is the highest might surprise you - it's Hotmail. There the average is 2.5 profiles per user. Hotmail is followed by Yahoo, then AOL, and it's Gmail users who have the least number of social media profiles. That finding seems odd considering that Gmail users are younger and more likely to use Twitter in addition to Facebook. In fact, it almost seems like this data doesn't even fit with the rest of the study.

However, the discovery that Gmail users are better-connected than the other users makes more sense. On average, Gmail users have the most friends on social networks with 46.2 friends while Yahoo users have the least with 40.0.

Since again, Gmail users tend to be younger than the rest, it goes to reason that they would be in a demographic where their peers are more likely to have social membership profiles. Older webmail users, meanwhile, are still signing up for these sites. Although baby boomers and other middle-aged folks are joining sites like Facebook in droves these days, social networks are still dominated by the young.

Methodology

For the Rapleaf study, the company sampled 120,000 webmail accounts from users with @aol.com, @gmail.com, @hotmail.com and @yahoo.com email addresses. They then looked into the users' age, gender and social networking data by collecting information from public social media profiles. Obviously, in doing so, they've skewed their findings a bit, as the company notes in their original blog post. However, the sample size is large enough to form some conclusions about the members of these services, even if it relied on a particular subset of users.

Has Oxford Dictionary made the right selection? ReadWriteWeb's Founder Richard MacManus thinks not. I disagree with him; I think this is a very valid Word of the Year. We make our cases below and invite you to cast your vote in a poll.

"I think that's an odd choice for word of the year, as all the trends indicate there has been more social networking activity this past year - not less, as 'unfriend' implies. Facebook and Twitter have both rocketed in popularity in 2009. I'd suggest that more people have left MySpace and migrated to Facebook, than unfriended people on Facebook.

"I also think that 'unfriend' is an ugly word, so for that reason it shouldn't be Word of the Year. What's more, I don't think my Mum or Dad would be familiar with the term 'unfriend.' Perhaps my father will pop into the comments and tell us for certain. But I look forward to the results of the poll!"

I think "unfriend" is a very appropriate word for the year as it fits with the way people are becoming more sophisticated in their social networking. People are deciding to do some editing of the friends lists they rushed naively into.

7 out of the top 10 searches performed on the Facebook Help Center page are about getting rid of your own social network profiles or your friends. Admittedly "unfriend" isn't one of those words, but you get the idea.

It's easy in this new web to sign up for things, getting overwhelmed and ignoring streams of information is par for the course. But choosing to cancel receipt of a person's updates? That's a meaningful move.

People fall for those "see who's searching for you" ads on social networks all the time. You'd better believe they appreciate the control that unfriending gives them. I'll bet that just about anyone online, no matter their level of technical knowledge, could tell you these days what it means to "unfriend someone."

What do you think?

One of the main new features of the revamped LinkedIn is the global navigation bar at the top of the page which links to all the site's features including profile, contacts, groups, jobs, your inbox, and more. Click on any of these items and a drop-down menu will appear providing you with further options. This gives the most important navigational aspect to the site a more modern look than it had before when each section was displayed in clickable tabs of different shades of blue.

The company also touts how the new look and feel also makes room for more page content with less scrolling needed in order to see everything on the page. This is also true to some extent. However, on your homepage where network updates and group updates are featured, the amount of scrolling depends on the size of your network and how active the network members are. For example, under the "group updates" section, updates for the past seven days were posted followed by a section that included updates from the prior week. That actually led to quite a bit of scrolling to see them all. It's not necessarily a bad feature, though. After all, LinkedIn isn't the sort of site we're logging into on a daily basis so it's nice to be able to catch up when we're there... even if that means the homepage screen extends downward forever.

Also new on the homepage are moveable, collapsible sidebar modules which can display things like who's been viewing your profile, events, job listings, applications you've added, and more.

Cleaner Look Highlights Ads

One downside of the site's "cleaner" look is how much more noticeable the ads are now. Of course, to LinkedIn this may be an upside. Although the ad placements are no different than before, the new look makes them really stand out. Since everything is now black or blue text on a white background, the full-colored ad at the top of the screen is the first thing to draw your eye upon login. There's also a text link ad directly below the global navigation that demands your attention. It's in the exact place where a company message would normally appear and the font used is a darker, bolder blue than anything else on the site. Both of these elements are somewhat distracting, but we suppose there's nothing that you can really do about ads. Still, we wish that the network had taken a page from Facebook's book when it came to ad placement - when you log into Facebook, the first thing you notice is the content and the updates, not the ads.

LinkedIn says the updated design was based on years of data from usability research but what you're seeing now isn't necessarily the final product. They're still iterating and, based on user feedback about the new look, they may make some additional changes in this and other areas.

Still Needs Improvement: the LinkedIn Inbox

One thing that still hasn't improved, sadly, is the LinkedIn inbox. Although the homepage view of the inbox provides a handy "take action" button which lets you quickly accept, reject, or archive requests, the full inbox view still forces you to click each message to accept or reject requests - there are no bulk actions you can take from the inbox screen besides archiving or marking messages as read or unread. Even worse, after accepting or rejecting a request, the message remains in your inbox until you manually archive it, necessitating quite a bit of additional work if you've let those invites pile up.

What Do You Think?

Are you impressed with the new look for LinkedIn? Or did you prefer the old tabbed interface better? LinkedIn obviously hopes that by simplifying the navigation and site elements which help to better engage users that they will spend more time exploring and interacting with the various site elements. Do you think that will be the case? Or do the underlying features of LinkedIn need improvement as well?

Internet Use and Social Media

That's not to say that there aren't some technology addicts that aren't social isolated - around 6% of the adult online population would fit in this category, having no one with whom they can talk about those important matters and who say they don't have anyone "especially significant" in their life. However, this figure (the 6%) has not grown as access to technology has grown over the years - it has remained virtually unchanged since 1985. This points to the fact that perhaps those who are socially isolated individuals would be so anyway, regardless of what sorts of tools are provided to them, be those mobile phones, PCs with internet access, etc.

For the majority of the online population, technology - and especially social media - has led to more diverse networks than we've ever had before. The report notes that those who participate in social networking services such as Facebook for example, are more likely to interact with people from different backgrounds, different races, different political parties, etc. Specifically, blogging and general internet use was tied to having more racially diverse networks while online photo sharing was tied to having more diverse political discussion partners.

Those who use the internet tend to have 15% more network ties who aren't family members and those who use instant messaging services have 19% more non-kin members in their core networks.

Mobile Phone Use

Along these same lines, the ubiquity of mobile phones hasn't led to decreased face time with family and friends, but just the opposite. On average, a person spends 195 days of the year having mobile phone contact with others, but face-to-face interactions occur on about 210 days per year. In addition, mobile users have around 15% more family members with whom they can discuss important matters and tend to have 25% more core network members who are not family members. Overall, those who use mobile phones have core networks that are 12% larger than those who don't.

Despite all this good news about how technology leads to having larger, more diverse networks, the researchers also found that our networks' size has actually shrunk over the years. Since 1985, there has been a decrease of about 1/3 in their size. The researchers don't suggest any specific reasons for this shrinkage, but they do point out that they can now rule out one possibility for sure: technology.

The new Twitter links, however, are a whole new story. If an Amazon Associates member takes the time to re-write the text into their own words, there's virtually no way to know by looking at the post that the Twitter update is actually an ad.

Is Amazon Spamming Twitter?

In the past, several legitimate companies have diluted the Twitter stream with promotions and contests encouraging Twitter users to "tweet to win" so to speak, by pasting in some sort of marketing message into the "What are you doing?" box or by appending a promotional hashtag to their everyday messages. But unlike these company-run Twitter promotions, there's not a hashtag to use or any specific wording that has to be tweeted in order to participate in the Amazon Affiliate program. All anyone has to do is tweet links along with the message of their choosing.

Because Amazon's marketplace is extensive in terms of the products it sells, there's a wide variety of things which can be promoted. No matter what a Twitterer's particular interest is: music, politics, technology, etc., there's bound to be hundreds of things that could be mentioned in their Twitter stream without the posts appearing to be an ad. In fact, there's a good possibility that they would have been talking about these products anyway throughout the course of the day...they just couldn't have made any money off of them until now.

Hidden Advertisements

The problem with this sort of "hidden" advertising, though, is exactly that: it's hidden. This is the internet's version of "product placement" - subtle advertising in plain sight yet never clearly identified as such. Was your favorite TV star using a Macbook? Was he drinking a Coke? Already commonplace in Hollywood, these almost subliminal advertising messages permeate our consciousness every time we turn on the TV. Now that same sort of hidden ad will soon show up in the Twitter streams of your favorite tweeters.

Soon they'll start promoting a great book they just read, a DVD they liked, or one of a million other things pulled out of Amazon's vast inventory. None of it will sound out of place given the types of informal conversations that take place on Twitter every day. You won't even know that they're advertising to you until you click through on the link and find yourself on an Amazon.com webpage - and even then, you may not be sure. Was that a referral or were they genuinely just linking to the Amazon website to be helpful?

Will the FTC Step In?

Another question this raises, at least here in the U.S., is whether or not the FTC will get involved. Having recently taken steps to make sure that bloggers were properly disclosing freebies or payments received by companies whose products were being reviewed on their sites, one has to wonder if they'll now be tempted to monitor the undisclosed advertising that's about to explode on Twitter.

Amazon could have avoided the potential threat of government involvement (not to mention the accusations that they're "spamming Twitter") by generating their links using their own proprietary URL-shortening system, something like amzn.com or amz.com for example. That would clearly identify the tweets' purpose. But instead, they opted to make their links with the URL shortener bit.ly, the one that Twitter itself uses by default. This makes the Amazon links indistinguishable at a glance from any other shortened link posted to Twitter. There's no way to tell if a tweet is an ad unless the Twitter user left Amazon's auto-generated text in place. Of course, no one is going to use that text except the laziest of Twitter spammers - people you're probably already avoiding.

Tell Amazon What You Think with #AMZNSOT

Today, many Twitter users are coming out against this new type of Twitter-fueled advertising, registering their complaints via tweets marked with the #AMZNSOT hashtag, the official tag used to give Amazon feedback about the system. These users are already branding this new effort "spam," saying things like: "Amazon now gives you cash for spamming on Twitter? Oh, swell," as Twitter user TwitBin says. "Does this just mean more Twitter spam as people try to make money?" asks NickHerbert. But there are just as many Twitter users saying nice things about the new system too, calling it "cool," "awesome," "sweet," and even claiming it "rocks."

You can give Amazon your two cents as well by updating Twitter with your thoughts and including the #AMZNSOT hashtag along with your message.

Whether you think the new Amazon Twitter integration is good or bad, there's no doubt that it will be a major game changer for Twitter. As it blurs the lines between conversation and ads, people seem to think that Amazon has either created something of genius or has ruined Twitter as we know it. Few seem to be undecided when it comes to their feelings about this issue. The question is now: which side will end up being in the majority?

Let's operate under the assumption that Twitter's own implementation of lists will be overshadowed by more useful implementations of the lists API. In order to help you get ready for that future, here are ten lists we think particularly worth following.

Here are some of our favorite curated lists we've found so far. We offer some description of these lists based on what we know about their creators and the short titles the lists have been given. The fact that Twitter doesn't offer a field to describe lists makes me wonder who they talked to when building the feature. (Turns out this is coming next week.) A lot of things make me wonder that, in fact.

We've said before that groups are the secret weapon of the social web and we're excited to see this feature go live. Hopefully it will become more awesome with time.

Here are 10 cool lists we suggest you follow. We found most of these lists by thinking of awesome people on Twitter, then seeing what lists they are on.

• Patrick LaForge's "Linkers"
  LaForge is an Editor at the New York Times and finds great links to share all the time. These are some of the people he finds them from.
• Josh Elman's Awesome Social
  Josh Elman recently jumped ship from working at Facebook to working at Twitter. Silicon Valley super-geeks took notice, because Elman is a smart and connected guy. Here's a nice big list of people he created that you should know if you're interested in the social web.

• Robert Scoble's Founders
  You want to see curation taken seriously? Watch Robert Scoble, any day of the week. Scoble has built out more great lists than you can shake a stick at and this one is a favorite of ours. It's a list of company founders on Twitter. Strange beasts, these are, but good to pay attention to.
• Rebecca Leaman's Nonprofit Geeks
  Rebecca Leaman works at WildApricot and she's created a great list of geeks focused on social good, nonprofit tech folks. These people should be on your radar.
• Chris Grayson's Augmented Reality Peeps
  We like Augmented Reality and so does Chris Grayson, a New York City mobile marketing consultant. He's put together a nice long list of people working in AR. If you get to know these people now, you'll probably be glad you did later.
• Mike Taylor's XMPP List
  Mike Taylor, also known as Bear, does XMPP work at Seesmic. His XMPP list is a nice collection of real-time web developers, without bandwagon-jumping marketing types. Looking for early hints about where the real-time web is going? This list is one place we're watching.
• Raven Zachary's iPhone List
  Raven Zachary is the founder of Small Society, an absurdly hot iPhone dev shop in Portland, Oregon. Raven is curating a giant list of all the people working on the iPhone that he can find. We'd love to see his list of just must-read iPhone folks, but this list is pretty cool too.
• Christina Braden's Disability List
  Christina Braden goes by the handle @advocate4all and her bio reads: "There will never be justice in the world until those who are not harmed are as indignant as those who are." Hell, yeah. If you want to read biting, insightful critiques of social injustices, a list of disability rights activists is a great place to find them.
• Ben Turner's Anthropology List
  Ben Turner is a renaissance man with a pretentious Twitter handle (@xeus) but his Anthropology list is an awesome collection of people studying digital culture.
• The ReadWriteWeb Team List
  Charming, intelligent, attractive and humble - the ReadWriteWeb team is a great source of news and analysis about bleeding edge trends and developments online. We'd love it if you'd follow us on Twitter and engage with us in conversation.

Those are some of our favorite lists. Have you spotted (or built) any red-hot lists we should be sure to know about as well? Let us know in comments. Listorious is a directory of lists, but isn't it more fun to see lists of lists from people you know and trust? Both have their place - hopefully this is just the beginning of a new period of Twitter fun.

Traffic to Twitter is declining, Hitwise General Manager of Global Research Bill Tancer writes, while Facebook's growth continues to go through the roof. Facebook is approaching ubiquity, while Twitter's appeal is narrow and its average registered user is totally unengaged. "That being said," Tancer writes, "I still plan to tweet this entry."

Facebook feels more secure though, it's got clearer social hooks and it's easier to start using. As a result, Facebook is probably ten or more times the size of Twitter. As Twitter user Justin Houk put it today, "Twitter is a cult classic in the making - not a blockbuster."

The Hitwise data doesn't take into account the use of 3rd party Twitter clients, but the Twitter website is a more common way to interact with the service and its traffic is a good proxy for overall Twitter use.

What are the relative business prospects for both, long term? It's hard to say, but charts like these from Hitwise have got to make Twitter HQ feel uneasy.

See also: Facebook Has Twitter Envy - But Why? and Twitter and Facebook Investment Terms and Game Plans

According to Experian, nearly 59% of all the social networking visits were visits to Facebook while only 30% were to MySpace - a 55% decrease in market share over the past year in terms of visits for the one-time king of social networks.

Looking at just the year-over-year percent change may give you the impression that Twitter's popularity is through the roof. After all, they posted an increase of over 1000 percentage points. But the truth is, their percentage of visits still remains relatively low. Only 1.84% of visits to social networking sites in September were to Twitter, bringing them in at #4 on the chart.

What? Tagged Beats Twitter?

Facebook and MySpace beat Twitter out for the top two spots, but you may be surprised to see who came in at #3: Tagged. Yes, Tagged, the social networking site that's best known for getting busted in an email invite scam is beating out Twitter.

Although we like to think that spammy marketing tactics don't pay off, it seems that for Tagged they have. Their aggressive methods in the past involved having new registrants add their contact lists to the service which Tagged then used to send out "invites" to everyone in the user's address book. The worst part is that the invites looked as if they came from the individual users when really, most were completely unaware anything had been sent out. Tagged has also been known to send out emails that force users to sign up for accounts in order to see shared photos from other users, even going so far as to guilt-trip recipients into signing up with messages that read: "If you don't click, [the person] may think you said no :(".

As despicable as these tactics are, they've helped Tagged grow and remain profitable. ComScore reported the site had 32 million visitors in April of this year, up from 14 million the prior year. And once there, the visitors are staying engaged, generating over 5 billion pageviews during that month.

Believe it or not, the company is still growing according to the Hitwise data, albeit at a slower rate than it did a couple of years ago when it was adding more users per day than MySpace. In September of 2008, the site received 1.62% of social networking visits and this September, they received 2.38%. Although those numbers are small, they're still larger than Twitter's who came in at 0.15% last year and 1.84% this past month.

Even worse, when calculating the time spent on the social networking sites, Tagged has shown an increase there as well. They're up from 23 minutes in September of 2008 to 25 minutes in September 2009. Meanwhile, Twitter is showing a decrease from 36 minutes to just under 16 minutes year-over-year, a loss of 56%.

Although Hitwise focuses on U.S. traffic only, these findings go against everything we've heard about Twitter and its popularity - in fact, they seem to confirm that there may be more media hype surrounding the microblogging network than there is actual engagement among its users.

It would be interesting to compare the number of users each network has with the visits, but that would be hard to do since Twitter refuses to release those sorts of statistics. Meanwhile, we're left wondering if Hitwise has had some sort of massive system glitch in their system or if we've just seen proof of how Twitter's supposed popularity is just all talk.

Facebook and the Persuasive (no, not pervasive, persuasive) Technology Lab at Stanford launched what they call the "dot peace" campaign today. There's reason to pause before enthusiastically supporting the effort. There are other ways that Facebook could make the world a better place and there are some reasons why the company deserves caution more than trust when it comes to its political agenda.

Sometimes that means working to change peoples' expectations of privacy. All's fair in love, war and social networking, perhaps, so more power to Facebook for seeking to tilt the balance towards sharing and away from privacy. Users could vote with their feet, or their browsers in this case - but that's complicated by the fact that Facebook keeps all the social capital users build up locked into its system if they want to leave.

That's big picture background, but here are three reasons why Facebook's role in a movement to foster world peace deserves to be questioned.

Set the Data Free, Already

The new Peace.Facebook page has some really interesting data displayed on it, showing how many people from opposite sides of historical conflicts have become friends on Facebook over the last 24 hours, surveys about the viability of peace and other information.

This is an ongoing part of the story and one we'll have a lot more to say about in coming weeks and months - but for now we'll just say that if Facebook really wants to change the world for good it should open up its unique birds-eye view of our behavior and interactions.

In the 1960's anti-racist activists were able to prove that banks were systematically denying mortgage loans to African Americans. Redlining, as it was called, was exposed through analysis of data. When data is opened to analysis, patterns can be discovered - some of them unjust acts of systematic violence. The world is an unjust place and the social activity of 300 million people on Facebook will inevitably be useful in exposing some of those patterns of injustice.

Shallow Political Analysis

The first example of peace-through-Facebook you'll find highlighted on the new Peace.Facebook page is a march organized in the nation of Colombia against the leftist insurgent group FARC.

As writer Eric Eldon put it a year ago on VentureBeat: "Thing is, right-wing Colombian guerrillas with close ties to the country's U.S.-backed government have also been implicated in numerous terrorist activities. That topic seems to have been covered in much greater detail by European media than their counterparts here in the U.S... If I were Facebook... I'd think hard about using that example."

The group protested against, the FARC, is one side of the longest-running civil war in the world. They may be a violent, authoritarian, drug-corrupted bunch of thugs but their opponents are a shadowy paramilitary group made up in part of Colombian police who remove their uniforms at night and chainsaw off the heads of civilians in towns suspected of offering FARC support. The US is deeply implicated, in bad ways, and it's a seriously ugly situation. It's among the worst in Latin America and there are some pretty gruesome stories about Latin America in the 80's in particular.

Facebook wants to pick sides in that fight? People may argue that it was a march against violence that was organized on Facebook, but that's one of the most violent countries on earth and Facebook refers to the march as anti-FARC. Since when is organizing street protests against one party in a brutal, decades-old fight a means of helping "people better understand each other?"

That looks like a dangerously shallow understanding of how the world works and what the obstacles to peace are.

Peter Thiel

Facebook's first and most important investor is PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. Thiel is a big believer in what's called The Singularity, defined by the Singularity Institute as "the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence." Thiel believes that investing in the Singularity means thinking ahead about how humanity can benefit from our relationships with these smarter-than-human machines instead of being hurt by them. He says that the Singularity will either lead to the biggest economic boom in human history or it will lead to an apocalypse. Literally.

Facebook's machine intelligence is very real; its system is learning quickly about how humans interact and how different people respond to different events, for example. Let's hope that the very wealthy Thiel, the very young Zuckerberg and the rest of the company's insular brain-trust can steer that machine towards truly helping humanity and not making an even worse mess of things.

Given this dodgy philosophical background, it would be easier to trust Facebook as a humble servant of a global movement for world peace - doing its part by facilitating communication and opening its data to observation by the world at large. Instead we get very selective data interpretation done behind closed doors and presented to hundreds of millions of people as a way to take action.

I can't help but feel uneasy about all this, as much as I enjoy using Facebook.

Mix-ins Add Social Networking Sites and More to Your Contacts

The AddressBook application isn't just one app - it's a combination of the core application and additional, optional apps called "mix-ins." Depending on your own personal preferences, you can download and install any of these mix-ins to integrate the social networking services of your choosing with the main AddressBook. After adding a mix-in, the app also helpfully auto-matches your phone's contacts to your friends on the social networking site you selected. The option to manually match your friends is available as well.

For the most part, this feature worked as advertised, but with Twitter there were some issues. The mix-in didn't pull in my complete friends list and when viewing the mix-in itself, contacts were listed as "null" instead of by their Twitter username. It's hard to say if this was an issue with the AddressBook itself or something that was going on with Twitter at the time, but it could point to a few kinks that need to be worked out.

Each social network has its own mix-in, but you can also find other mix-ins for social games like "AngelChess" for example. And because anyone can develop these mix-ins, the company hopes that developers will create even more to choose from in the future.

In addition, updates from your social networks will appear along with your other standard notifications in Android like new voicemails, new emails, new text messages, etc. You can finely control which networks and friend groups you receive notifications for, too, so you don't get overloaded with updates.

Similarities to Other Social Contacts Apps

At first the AddressBook application may bring to mind another mobile contacts app for iPhone - the newly launched Gist. However, although Gist's app also lets you keep tabs on what your contacts are up to through social networking integrations, Asurion's app is more of a consumer offering. There's currently no focus on integrating with CRM systems like Salesforce or even the business-focused social network LinkedIn.com.

Another great feature in the AddressBook app is "Smart Contacts." These are location-based business listings which provide quick access to maps, addresses, store hours, phone numbers and more. With these unique contacts added to your address book, you're able to find that company's nearest location with just a few taps. This feature somewhat resembles the "RingPages" feature in the upcoming iPhone app CallSpark. Those, too, are location-aware business listings which can be added to the main contact application.

Business Plan: App to be Free, Affiliate Model in the Future

For now, the company isn't as focused on their business model as they are on just increasing the adoption and the app's user base. However, they do say that the AddressBook app will remain a free download and will never include in-app ads. Instead, the company may eventually be able to generate revenue by sending traffic to the businesses included in the Smart Contacts section. Though the details of this affiliate model still need to be sketched out, it's clear that the company's goals don't involve having app owners pay for its services.

If you're an Android owner looking to try the AddressBook beta, you can download it here.

Update: The company now reports that the Twitter bug described above has been fixed.

According to eMarkter's report, 56.8% of online retailers maintain a Facebook presence, 41.4% are on YouTube and 28.6% use MySpace. Twitter comes in at #4, as only 20.4% of all online merchants actively maintain a Twitter account. As eMarkteter points out, Twitter is a 'hotbed for experimentation,' where companies can promote deals and interact directly with their customers.

For the majority of companies, however, Facebook is the most lucrative place to meet current and potential customers. Facebook's platforms give retailers ranging from 1-800-Flowers to Papa John's Pizza the ability to create e-commerce applications and provide users with services right on Facebook.

According to an earlier eMarkter report, almost 99% of all US Online Retailers plan to have a Facebook fan site within the next year (up from 86% today), and 85% plan to use Twitter within the next 12 months.

Consumers Want Online Retailers to be on Social Networks

This trend, of course, isn't new, but it's also clear that online retailers will have to continue to follow their customers to where they are - and today, that means social networks like Twitter and Facebook. We also know that consumers want to interact with brands and online retailers through social networks, so any company that isn't using these tools is bound to miss out on potential sales.

These customers are also highly likely to spread the word about a product - good or bad - on these social networks, so smart retailers will not just have a presence on these networks, but also use them to reach out directly to their customers.

In September 2006 the News Feed was a radical idea; thousands of Facebook users revolted against the idea that all their friends would be shown every photo they uploaded, when their relationship status changed and other information as soon as it was available. Today we live in a different world. Almost everything is social and the new challenge is tackling information overload. That's what Facebook just did today and it's going to be very important for the future.

Everyone's trying to solve this problem. There are inbox filtering services like ReMail, Threadsy and the experimental new Mozilla Raindrop. There are column filters in stream readers like Tweetdeck and Seesmic. Google Reader yesterday introduced a "magic" filter view for the most popular items across the whole network. FriendFeed, a small but innovative social aggregator started by one of the creators of GMail and acquired by Facebook for $50 million this summer, offers a "best of day" view of any stream of updates you're looking at.

That FriendFeed view is the closest thing to the new Facebook News Feed, but a Facebook spokesperson told us that the two products are unrelated.

Everyone's trying to tackle information overload. Step one, get more people sharing information. Step two, figure out how to create a personalized, high-value view of all that information by surfacing the most important updates for each user. Step three, profit!

How It Works

The new News Feed view is based on an algorithm that scores every update coming in through what's now called the Live Feed. That scoring is based on the number of "likes" and comments an item has received and how much you personally have interacted with the update's author in the past.

A related algorithm was used in the past to create the "highlights" section on the right-hand side of the Facebook home page. That section was getting too little interaction and didn't include things like important status updates, the company says. If your sister posted a status update saying that she's pregnant, a Facebook spokesperson told us today, that wouldn't show up in the old highlights view. It should show up in your News Feed now.

So three big changes: 1. The new Live Feed is linked-to at the top of the page and shows a number of new items since your last visit. 2. Highlights plus hot status updates are now the default, the new News Feed. 3. Birthdays and other important events have taken the place of the old Highlights section; they are of particular interest to users and will now be easier to see.

What It Means

Facebook says that after viewing your new News Feed, you can go check out the raw Live Stream of all the most recent updates from your contacts. That's the opposite of the way FriendFeed did it and neither strategy should be taken for granted. Decisions like this impact a major method of communication for hundreds of millions of people around the world.

By showing the News Feed highlights as the default view, Facebook will probably encourage users to pay more attention to, interact with more and grow closer to the people they already have a history of interacting with and the events that are already popular. Weak social connections and your personal long-tail of content are less prioritized in this view.

The inclusion of a user's past behavior as a criteria for hotness is key, though. It's not just a popularity contest. Your News Feed is your little universe and popularity is defined in relative terms.

That, again, is a particular strategy. The new Google Reader Popular View, for example, appears to evaluate popularity across all users in total.

What It Could Mean In the Future

Someday social networking is going to be like the telephone. Today you can't send messages from Facebook to people on MySpace or LinkedIn but that isn't going to last forever. Just as you can call someone who uses T-Mobile from your Sprint phone, someday sharing and messaging between online social networks will be a given.

How will social networks retain users then? Why stick with Facebook when some smaller service offers a decentralized social networking service outside of Facebook's control but still tied into your friends on Facebook and elsewhere?

These services will someday have to compete on user experience, when they no longer have your social connections locked-in. The service that does the best job filtering up the most important information you have coming your way will likely be the service you stick with. That's going to be a key area of competition between social networks.

How well will Facebook do at filtering the Live Stream of content? We're about to find out and it's going to make a big difference in how we experience the web. That will only be more true as more and more people begin publishing content.

There's been a lot of emphasis on the live stream of real-time web content, but Facebook now joins many other services in recognizing that the best value is sometimes built by combining real time and slower assets.

While email clients can filter bot and spam messages, it's more difficult to discern between personal and general messages from real people. With Raindrop, users messages are categorized and prioritized. For example, in Twitter your direct messages and reply messages are highlighted while the rest of the stream is cast aside. Meanwhile, mailing list messages are also given their own category, separate from personal emails. As with most Mozilla products, the group will encourage front-end widgets and code from outside 3rd party developers.

While the tool certainly shows promise, it is currently only available to developers. The group's first priority is to build a downloadable installer. To ensure that you're one of the first non-developer testers, keep an eye on labs.mozilla.com/raindrop.

Raindrop UX Design and Demo from Mozilla Messaging on Vimeo.

Thanks to Arjo for the tip!