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Annual changes of note: Facebook #5 with a rocket; Twitter entered Top 50 in June; Demand Media, Answers.com and Break Media sites to watch.

comScore has just released their latest Media Metrix rankings for the Top 50 U.S. Web Properties. If we compare the top 50 to one year ago, we see that the top 4 is still the same: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL. But there's one notable entrant to the top 5: Facebook. Last year the same list by comScore had Facebook ranked number 16. As of July 2009, it is number 5; Facebook's highest ranking yet. What's more, guess who Facebook displaced at number 5? That's right, Fox Interactive, owners of increasingly untrendy MySpace.

Only 5% of Twitter's users account for 75% of all the activity on the service, and almost one third of all the tweets posted by the most active users come from bots that each generate more than 150 tweets per day. According to a new report from Sysomos, the up-and-coming social media monitoring and analytics service, one quarter of all the messages posted on Twitter are currently generated by bots. Some of these are obviously spambots, though a large number of bots are also run by legitimate organizations, including @diggupdates, @imdb, and @dogbook, which posts updates from pets on Facebook to Twitter.

Web security SaaS company Purewire evaluated the profiles of millions of Twitter users to show the depth of a new tool it has created called Tweet Grade. While the tool itself is not unlike numerous other Twitter grading services, the company has uncovered some very interesting user statistics. It seems as though far fewer people are actually using and contributing to the site than Twitter's recent hype and massive growth would suggest. In fact, the data shows that a large percentage of Twitter users have not "tweeted" since the first day they joined the service and at least a quarter of its users don't have any followers at all.

According to a new report from web analytics firm Compete, 1 in 3 smartphone users use a location based service at least once a month. Weather and navigation apps are currently the most popular location based services, followed by apps that provide store locations, movie showtimes, and local news. Interestingly, there also seem to be a number of highly underserved markets. According to Compete's research, users also want to be able to receive local alerts about topics like traffic jams and gas sales.

In a report covering web analytics from 2008 to the present day and forecasting the industry's future into 2014, tech research firm Forrester said this area is in an adolescent phase, working through critical changes and preparing for significant growth.

"Forrester forecasts that US businesses will spend $953 million dollars on Web analytics software in 2014, with an average compound annual growth rate of 17%," the report reads. "Growth will emerge from unexpected places as the value proposition of Web analytics technology oscillates for sophisticated analytics users and becomes more welcoming for new entrants. Ultimately, Web analytics will become part of a broader array of integrated services supporting marketers."

Air pollution is one of the number one factors that affect our quality of life and health. Currently, pollutants are measured at different stations in a city and that data is aggregated to a single number (the air quality index) and published once a day on a website. There is not enough data that gets gathered to evaluate air quality in a given neighborhood and that data is hard to find. Now a European company called Sensaris is using Bluetooth wireless sensors, used in combination with mobile phones, that allow citizens to monitor and report air and sound quality data. Its first large scale deployment is in Paris.

InsideFacebook, one of the best blogs dedicated to Facebook, just released a new metrics product that tracks the popularity of Facebook Pages (also known as "public profiles"). PageData tracks the most popular pages on Facebook, as well as the daily and weekly top gainers and losers. Barack Obama's page is by far the most popular Facebook page with close to 6 million fans, while Coca-Cola, Nutella, and a page about Pizza follow with around 3 million fans.

Twitter users clearly love the social alarm clock Sleep.fm, the Vaynerchuk brothers, Chris Knight, and ezinearticles. At least, according to search analytics firm Compete, which aggregated the top search terms since Twitter acquired Summize in July 2008, these are some of the top searches that users performed on the popular microblogging service.

Besides the terms mentioned above, the top ten is rounded out by searches for Barack Obama, the iPhone, AJ Vaynerchuk's PleaseDressMe, music site TheSixtyOne, and FollowFriday.

According to the latest data from Hitwise, Twitter sends most of its traffic to Google, Facebook, TwitPic, and MySpace. Overall, Twitter sends about 1 in 5 users to social networks and another 1 in 5 to entertainment sites like Twitpic, YouTube, or Flickr. Even though some people think that Twitter is just a 'poor man's email system,' Twitter's clickstream profile is very different from that of most email services.

StatCounter, one of the larger free online stats services, just released a new online research tool that monitors the market share of search engines, browsers, and operating systems. StatCounter Global Stats' focus is different from other services like Compete, Alexa, Google Trends, or Quantcast, as it doesn't break out data by specific sites, but only focuses on these high-level statistics. StatCounter's data goes back until the middle of last year and allows you to break the statistics down by continent and country.