For many, the launch of FaceTime, Apple's video calling service for the iPhone and iPod touch, seemed like a gimmick with little practical usage. According to a new survey by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, however, 19% of American adults have now tried video calling, video chats or teleconferences using services like Skype, Google Talk and Apple's iChat. Looking at the number of total Internet users in the U.S., this means that almost a quarter of them have now tried video calling.
The Social Network, the movie about the murky origins of Facebook and its primary creator, Mark Zuckerberg, has been out for just over a week now. Just after its release, David Carr wrote a piece for The New York Times looking at how the "Film Version of Zuckerberg Divides Generations".
YouGov BrandIndex, a company that measures consumer perception, is now offering numbers to back up the perceived generational divide.
We Are Hunted is just one of a number of web upstarts hoping to displace Billboard as the chart of record for music. What makes We Are Hunted slightly different is that it not only produces the requisite daily and weekly music charts, it releases a set of research reports every 6 months. It recently published over 100 reports on popular music artists, covering the 6-month period January to June 2010. The research is based on analysis of 531,901 music articles
and 13,439,734 music-related tweets.
The reports are most helpful in showing the impact of Twitter and online press coverage on musicians. One of the most popular artists of 2010 has been Lady Gaga, so let's see what her We Are Hunted report shows.
Google's social network Orkut never quite caught on in most countries, but it remains the most popular social network in Brazil. According to new data from comScore, Orkut remains safely ahead of Facebook there, with 36 million unique visitors last month. Facebook is only the third most popular social networking site in Brazil, but it is growing rapidly, and the site now attracts about 9 million visitors per month - up from just about 1.5 million a year ago. The second largest social networking site in Brazil is Windows Live, which reaches about 12.5 million visitors.
As the popularity of e-books and e-readers continues to increase, e-book piracy is also growing rapidly. According to Attributor, a company that develops anti-piracy and content monitoring solutions, the daily demand for pirated books can be estimated at up to 3 million people worldwide. The company's latest study also highlights that the total interest in documents from file-sharing sites has increased more than 50% over the course of the last year. Interestingly, e-book piracy is moving away from large sites like RapidShare to smaller sites and those that specialize in pirated e-books.
For some, Twitter is a social network and for others it is just a broadcast medium. Judging from the latest data from social media analytics and monitoring service Sysomos, for the majority of users, Twitter is indeed mostly a broadcast medium. After analyzing over 1.2 billion tweets, the Sysomos team found that only 29% of tweets actually produce a reaction - that is, a reply or a retweet. According to Sysomos, just 6% of all tweets are retweeted and these retweets have a very short lifespan. Virtually all retweets happen within the first hour after the original tweet.
In its climb up the social networking ladder, Twitter - the service that many mainstream Internet users still like to equate with inexplicably sharing what you had for lunch - has surpassed former social networking giant Myspace in unique visitors.
The Wall Street Journal reports that new data from comScore puts Twitter in the number three spot for social networks, bumping Myspace out of the top three.
Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism released a study today examining the media's ambivalent approach to addressing technology finding that, among other things, the positive effects of technology on productivity just barely edge out privacy concerns as the most common theme in technology coverage.
According to Pew, the research suggests that "the press reflects exuberance about gadgets and a wonder about the corporations behind them, but wariness about effects on our lives, our behavior and the sociology of the digital age."
While blogging was still a major topic of discussion just a few years ago, things have been rather quiet around it in recent times. Even in the so-called blogosphere, we don't talk a lot about the actual activity of blogging anymore these days. According to a new report from research firm eMarketer, however, blogging is still alive and well. Today, half of all Internet users read blogs and while blogging itself remains somewhat of a niche activity, about 12% of U.S. Internet users update a blog at least once per month.
Adult cell phone users who use apps are younger, more educated and more affluent than other adults. Over the last few weeks, the Pew Internet & American Life Project has been looking at how adults use technology, and a new report released today focuses on app usage among this age group. According to this report, apps are not indispensable for most adults. While about 35% of U.S. adults now have apps on their cell phones, only 24% of adults actually use them. About a tenth of all U.S. adults doesn't even know if their phones can run apps.
