Of those who follow a brand on Twitter, nearly 44% reported that access to exclusive deals is the main reason. On Facebook or MySpace, 37% said that access to exclusive deals or offers was their main reason for friending brands.

43.5% reported following a brand to get "exclusive deals or offerings," which again is a statistic that companies should take note of.

An even higher percentage of respondents have "friended" a brand on Facebook - a whopping 40%. Considering that Facebook is a social network that started out as a way for college kids to network, this is a statistic that will make companies and organizations take note. If you want brand recognition on the Web, according to these statistics there's a very good chance that Facebook is a place you want to be.

A smaller percentage follow a brand on Facebook for exclusive deals or offers (36.9%) - but still a majority.

Is this "connected consumer" crowd mainstream? Well, about 62% of the respondents still use Internet Explorer as their browser, with 30% on Firefox. So yes, they are.

It's interesting then to look at what are the homepages of these people.

While Google is unsurprisingly number 1 with 32.6%, Yahoo is close behind at 29.7%. MSN is still well used at 11.9%. We were most surprised that AOL is now only 7.9%. These statistics show that Yahoo remains a force among mainstream consumers, whereas AOL is slipping further behind.

We reported last week that smartphones have almost overtaken 'feature phones' as the cellphones of choice for consumers. Razorfish's survey shows that 56% of connected consumers now use a smartphone - i.e. one that has email and web capabilities.

As with the ChangeWave Research survey recently, Razorfish puts Blackberry (29.5%) ahead of Apple's iPhone (20.1%).

Another illuminating statistic is the number of people who now get their news from Twitter and Facebook. While nearly 80% of respondents still access "traditional news web sites," 33% get news from Facebook and 19.5% from Twitter. Only 27.3% get news from "alternative news web sites" - by which we presume they mean blogs.

Overall, these figures from Razorfish show that Facebook and Twitter are now major places for brands to be; as well as online sites where consumers get at least some of their news.

In the company's latest report (sample) "Mobile Broadband Traffic Across Regions 2009-2017," they've determined that this increase will account for nearly three quarters of all global traffic via mobile broadband portables. The top region for video consumption will be Asia Pacific which will account for over half (53%) of the traffic. That will be followed by Europe (26%) and then North America (14%).

The reason why Asia Pacific comes in so high is because, in many countries, mobile broadband is often the sole option for internet connectivity. Another forecast states that two-thirds of the global traffic will be via LTE (Long Term Evolution), a 4G wireless technology, where Asia Pacific will consume just under half (45%) of LTE traffic. In Europe, 80% of traffic will be LTE-based and in North America, 75%.

It Will Get Worse Before it Gets Better

According to Steve Smith, founder of Coda Research Consultancy, "the sheer amount of traffic people will consume worldwide will put pressure on operator revenues and network capacity, necessitating radical efficiency drives." He also notes that, in the short term, end user frustration with bandwidth and speed will increase. To illustrate this point, he mentions that today as many as three-quarters of Europeans are dissatisfied with the speeds they currently receive. That's an interesting comment, especially considering all the grumbling we hear about AT&T in the U.S. and their general failure to deliver on the promise of high-speed internet for iPhone users. (In many urban areas, they can't even consistently deliver a signal!) Although this report didn't focus specifically on smartphones, it's somewhat comforting to know that overseas users are experiencing the same struggles as we do here in the U.S.

However, once mobile broadband operators complete their build-outs and upgrades to this high-speed data network of the future, the resulting impact it will have on the internet as a whole will be mind-blowing. One could even argue that bandwidth speeds have accounted for many of the major revolutions the internet has seen over time - since the invention of the hypertext protocol and the web browser, that is.

The Next Revolution for the Net: Extremely Fast, Lots of Bandwidth

In the early days, slow dial-up speeds left us with simplistic, HTML-coded web pages where the most action to be had was an animated GIF. As bandwidth and speeds increased, pages became more robust, too. This change led to sites like Amazon and eBay, both of which launched in 1995, allowing people to shop from home using their PCs. By 2001, the usefulness of the net encouraged enough people to come online to make sites like the crowd-sourced Wikipedia possible. By 2003, the still-increasing speeds meant users could now download music from the newly launched iTunes store, customize (and overload!) their online profiles on MySpace, and play in online virtual worlds like Second Life. The following year, online photo-sharing prepared to go mainstream thanks to the launch of Flickr. Facebook, too, launched this year and eventually became the largest photo-sharing site in the world only three years later when they announced how they hosted over 10 billion photos on their site.

Also in 2005, the abundance of high-speed data connections made video-sharing site YouTube a hit among a new generation of user-generated content producers. By 2007, broadcasters banded together to launch Hulu, a video-streaming site for commercial content in an effort to compete with pirated peer-to-peer downloads as well as iTunes, which by now was serving up TV shows and full-length movies. In Europe, the BBC iPlayer was doing much of the same. In 2008, the launch of the 3G iPhone brought the high-speed internet to the handheld and revolutionized the mobile phone industry. This year, the handset's hardware was upgraded to record video, too.

As you can see, many of these changes were either directly or indirectly impacted by the increasing speeds and bandwidth provided by both mobile operators and ISPs. But currently, it's the mobile broadband networks which are having more of an impact on the latest trends. Even with all their struggles (cough AT&T cough), without the bandwidth provided, phones like the iPhone wouldn't even be possible and the smartphone revolution wouldn't be underway as it is now.

So what will the world look like by 2017? It's almost hard to imagine. But the promise of 4G could deliver things like live streaming HDTV, real-time updates from a variety of services, video chat, abundant use of MiFi, mobile cloud computing, streaming via iTunes instead of downloading (we like that!), and much more. In other words, the high-speed net that you use at home could go with you everywhere via your netbook, tablet, smartphone, or some other device in between. What will that mean for the world of online applications and cloud computing? Only that the next big shift for the internet as a whole is underway and we're privileged to be watching it happen now.

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.

Top 10 U.S. Sites, July 2008; source: comScore

Our Analysis

Facebook is the only new entrant to the top 10 since one year ago, moving CBS out of that esteemed company.

It's a little surprising to see that Yahoo is still very competitive with Google, showing that Yahoo's portal approach is still paying off, even in this late stage of 'web 2.0.'

A scan of the top 50 reveals some other big moves over the past year:

• Twitter has entered the top 50, in at number 42 with an estimated 21.2 Million monthly uniques. Twitter first entered comScore's Top 50 in June '09. Note that comScore probably undercounts Twitter's audience by a lot, because many Twitter users don't visit twitter.com but use third party clients. We reported last week that an estimated 65% of Twitter users still use twitter.com, so it may be undercounted by as much as a third (but it's hard to know for sure, as many people use both the Web and third party apps).
• Demand Media has risen from #36 to #24. The company proclaims itself to be "the leader in social media solutions."
• Answers.com Sites is a new entrant to the top 50 from a year ago, at #26 in July '09. It's a dictionary, thesaurus, encyclopedia - amongst other things.
• Wordpress is up to #29, from #38 last year.
• Mozilla is up to #30, from #42 last year.
• Break Media is a new entrant at #35. It's a site for "Funny Videos & Funny Pictures".

These statistics show some relatively obvious trends: Facebook is a major major player now, Twitter is hot stuff, and Wordpress and Mozilla continue to make waves.

Also interesting though are the less 'glamorous' sites which are making impressive progress up the charts: Demand Media, Answers.com, Break Media to mention a few of the more significant movers.

Sysomos's Alex Cheng and Mark Evans decided to take a closer look at the top 5% of Twitter's most active users, and the results of their study are quite interesting. Most of them (60.6%) live in the United States, 6.9% in the U.K., 4.7% in Japan, and 4.3% in Canada. 54% are male and 46% are female (on Twitter overall, 46% of all users are male and 53% female).

These active Twitter users also tend to have more followers. 48% have more than 100 followers, compared with 6.3% for Twitter overall.

Interestingly, a third of these highly active users only signed up for Twitter this year. About 72.5% of all of Twitter's users only signed up this year. These numbers seem to suggest that some of the most active and enthusiastic users had already signed up for the service before it became the mainstream phenomenon it is now.

Who Are The Most Active Users?

Sysomos also compiled a list of the most active Twitter users with more than 50,000 followers. Fox News (@foxnews) leads this list with 136 tweets per day, followed by Japanese BMX and mountain bike rider @mooris with about 108 tweets per day, and Hawaii's Arleen Anderson (@Alohaarleen) with 101 daily tweets on average. Other notables in this list include Chris Brogan (43 tweets/day), Guy Kawasaki (39 tweets/day), Tyrese (37 tweets/day), and Tila Tequila (33 tweets/day).

Active News Organizations on Twitter

While Fox News is clearly the most active news organization on Twitter (though 136 tweets/day might be slightly overwhelming), the New York Times posts about 39 tweets per day and Time.com sends out about 30 tweets per day to its over 1.2 million followers. With just under 29 tweets per day, Breaking News didn't quite make the list.

More Info

Here are a few more interesting tidbits from the Sysomos report:

• Among the top 5% of active Twitter users, 48% have more than 100 followers; only 6.3% of all Twitter users have more than 100 followers.
• 3.3% of the most active users have more than 2000 followers compared to 0.29% among all Twitter users.
• 88% of the top 5% post at least one new message every day - only 36% of all Twitter users do so.
• Retweets account for 5% of the activity from the top Twitter users - it accounts for 4% of the activity of all Twitter users.
• Active users with more than 1000 followers tend to have "Internet marketer", "Internet marketing", "business marketing" and "entrepreneur" as keywords in their profiles.
• The leading keywords for those with less than 1000 followers are "Web designer", "graphic designer", "love", and "Web developer".

First, many Twitter users "have abandoned their accounts shortly after creating them, and a significant percentage are not showing signs of account activity".

* 40 percent of Twitter users have not tweeted since their first day on Twitter (i.e., the account was most likely created and subsequently forgotten about).

* Approximately 25 percent of Twitter users are not following
anyone, while two-thirds are following less than 10 people (i.e., the
account was created but is not actually being used regularly).

Second, the data shows that "Twitter is used more as a mass medium for receiving information, rather than as a way to interact with others. Proof is shown by evaluating the followers and friends of Twitter users".

* More than 1/3 of Twitter users have not posted a single tweet, and almost 80 percent of the users have less than 10 tweets (i.e., while Twitter is billed as a great collaboration tool, a large number of users are there to consume content, not distribute it).

* Approximately 30 percent of Twitter users do not have any
followers, and 80 percent of Twitter users have less than 10 followers
(i.e., for many users, their posts are not being widely tracked or
read).

* 50 percent of Twitter users are following more people than they
have as followers, and another 30 percent of Twitter users are following
the same number of people that are following them (i.e. users are
aggressively trying to attract followers by hoping they will "follow
back" but have been unsuccessful).

It's clear that celebrities like Oprah and Ashton Kutcher have made Twitter the "flavor of the month", but there are many people out there who will never quite get it. That's alright with us. There are bound to be folks trying out different Web apps that won't end up using them, we do it all the time. We still think Twitter has become a valuable mainstream communication platform and its usage will continue to evolve and grow.

Be sure to check out Purewire's new Twitter grading tool Tweet Grade to see if you and your followers pass the test.

You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Sean Ammirati, Doug Coleman, Dana Oshiro, Steven Walling and Lidija Davis.

Currently, there are still a number of technical and privacy issues that are holding back some of the most interesting services. Due to the absence of background processing, the current generation iPhone, for example, can't regularly ping a server with a user's location and then send alerts to the phone based on this information. Alerts you have to actively pull up are, after all, not nearly as compelling as automated messages that tell you that you are heading right for a major traffic jam.

Underserved Markets: Local Alerts, Special Offers

Advertisers will also be happy to hear that a large number of consumers would like to receive special offers tailored to their current location, but only a very small number of current smartphone users are actually aware or able to use these services.

According to Compete's Andy deGaravilla, this means that companies that manage to provide users with more compelling and relevant ads based on their location will "likely see higher clickthrough rates and subsequent engagement." At the same time, though, we can't help but wonder if at least some users would also like to simply receive a text message or another kind of alert on their phones if, for example, a nearby store has an offer for them.

User Initiated vs. Background Services

The current generation of location based apps mostly relies on users to initiate the process. It would be interesting to see how consumers would react to a background service that actively monitors a person's location and sends out alerts when a user enters a certain location, for example. Of course, this could get highly annoying quickly, but there is no reason to believe that it couldn't be done right.

"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."

This assessment is undoubtedly bleak, but researchers also identified a few growth factors in the world of web analytics. First, interactive marketing budgets are growing overall. Second, online media is by far the dominant channel. And any money spent on online marketing requires that someone, somewhere be held accountable, that metrics be identified and measures, and that processes be optimized. Forrester also offers the prediction that, given the availability and affordability of web analytics data, a secondary market will spring up to offer services showing companies opportunities for using said data, thus bridging the "action chasm" between knowledge and execution.

In looking at spending, Forrester sees a move away from licensed software and toward hosted web analytics solutions. Service fees will continue to generate revenue for the industry even during turbulent economies; web traffic certainly isn't slowing down, and neither is the need for capturing accurate data about that traffic. They also see this as a vibrant market for agencies and consultancies. Also, new entrants seeking web analytics for sites with moderate traffic will account for most of the growth in this area.

Finally, because of the availability of versatile, free analytics tools, vendors in this industry are (or need to think about) shifting from "a point solution to an underlying service embedded within broader marketing applications," wrote Forrester rep Jon Symons in an email this morning.

"The transformation will only have a positive effect as customer intelligence data will be shared more widely across organizations. Significant challenges remain however, including the need for human analysis of mountains of data, the ability to develop metrics that can tie to larger business objectives, and the necessity to integrate marketing and IT organizations in order to achieve true data integration."

The executive summary is on the Forrester site, and the full report is available for purchase there.

How Does it Work?

According to Sensaris,

"Whether used by pedestrians or cyclists, the sensors provide noise and ozone levels in real time over the Internet and web based visualization (mashups). Our Senspod technology forms the basis for innovative citizen centric services. We look forward to helping other cities use it for their own community action and urban life quality improvement plans."

We think this is potentially a wonderful tool that will empower citizens to become involved and take back some control over their quality of life. Hopefully it will force cities to pay more attention to air and noise pollution problems in less affluent neighborhoods and take steps to improve conditions.

Of course, the interesting fact about the Coca-Cola page is that it wasn't even created by the Coca-Cola company, but by two fans (according to AdAge, there are now over 250 Coca-Cola fan pages on Facebook). Indeed, looking at some of the other top pages like the Nutella page, we are quite sure that it wasn't created by Ferrero either (and neither was the Ferrero Rocher page, for that matter).

Popular Pages

As we explained in detail last week, Facebook Pages are not without problems. Over time, Facebook will merge these public profile pages with the standard Facebook profiles, but for now, they are an integral part of the Facebook experience and are very popular with brands and advertisers, though judging from the PageData statistics, Facebook's users are also using them heavily as alternatives to Facebook groups.

PageData makes it possible to keep an eye on which campaigns are succeeding, but also to track developing (and dying) memes on Facebook, as the most interesting data is not so much in the leaderboard, but in the lists of top gainers and losers.

Here are a few other facts we noticed while looking at this data:

• There are a high number of pages in languages other than English among the top gainers.
• A large number of the top gaining pages do not belong to public figures or brands (which was the reason why pages were introduced in the first place), but are 'novelty' pages like 'pizza,' 'cuddles in bed,' 'ice cream,' 'dormir,' or 'Los besos no se piden, se dan...'
• FML (FMyLife.com) was already quite popular, but over the last few days, it managed to add more than 100,000 new fans every day

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.

Some of these search terms are no surprise - but it is definitely interesting that more people searched for the Vaynerchuk brothers than for 'obama.' Compete's Becky Blitzenhofer argues that all of these brands and users used "Twitter aggressively as part of their marketing strategy" - and apparently, this popularity translates into search activity as well (but then, Obama also used Twitter quite aggressively during his election campaign).

It should be noted that this data spans over half a year, so it purposely ignores short-term trends and instead features those search terms that users have consistently searched for over a long period of time. Still, we are somewhat perplexed by some of the terms that appear on this top ten list.

Twitter is slowly integrating the search function deeper into the core of its service. Among other things, it is slowly rolling out a new version of its user profiles, which features a search box (some users already have access to this). These new homepages also feature a prominent link to the top ten trending topics on the service. According to Compete's data, traffic on search.twitter.com kept lagging behind the growth curve of Twitter itself, but given that Twitter never really promoted search.twitter.com, this is really no surprise and we will probably see a major uptick in usage now that Twitter is integrating search into the user profiles.

Another interesting fact about the downstream clicks from Twitter is that very few users go from Twitter.com to retail, business, or finance sites.

Here are a few other interesting findings:

• after visiting Twitter.com, more users visit Etsy.com, the marketplace for buying all things handmade, than Amazon
• in terms of downstream clicks, CNN.com is the most popular news service on Twitter
• Yahoo Mail gets more downstream clicks than Gmail or Windows Live Mail

One caveat about this data that Hitwise does not mention, however, is that a large number of Twitter users never even visit Twitter.com because they use more fully-featured desktop or mobile clients like Twhirl, TweetDeck, or Tweetie. Hitwise obviously doesn't have access to this data, but it would be interesting to see if those Twitter users who use a Twitter client exhibit a different behavior compared to those who use the web site.

Compared to some of its competitors, however, some of StatCounter's data points seemed a bit off to us. StatCounter, for example, saw Google's U.S. market-share in January at over 80% (and down from a high of close to 85% last fall), while Hitwise reported 72% for January. StatCounter also sees Mac OSX as hovering around 4% worldwide, while Net Applications reports it at 9.6%. RWW readers, by the way, skew more heavily towards the Mac than the mainstream, as Google Analytics tells us that about 20% of you use Apple's OS.

For mobile operating systems, StatCounter reports that the iPhone is in a neck-and-neck race with the SymbianOS (about 35% each), while AdMob's global stats (PDF) saw Symbian as leading the race with 44% (32% for the iPhone).

Source: StatCounter Global Stats

One nice feature of StatCounter's tool is that it is updated 5 times a day. However, while this would be great if StatCounter was showing us data from specific sites, these frequent updates almost seem like overkill when it comes to the broad categories that the company currently tracks.

Given that there is no universal standard for how to measure these statistics, any of these numbers from any service have to be taken with a grain of salt. StatCounter gets its data from all the sites that use the service, and chances are that the types of sites where StatCounter is installed on inevitably skew the data in one way or another.

Overall, StatCounter is providing a valuable service with this new tool, but users will still have to compare the information from Global Stats with data from other services and draw their own conclusions about the validity of that data.

According to the first detailed look at mobile browsing by Web metrics firm Net Applications, the iPhone dominates the mobile browsing market with a 66.61% share. But do the numbers add up?

At first glance, the report looks promising until you notice that the BlackBerry only has a 2.24% market share. Odd, given Gartner recently reported that there are more BlackBerry's out in the world than there are iPhones. Look a little further and it starts to makes sense.

Information about Net Applications mobile share methodology can be found here, but in a nutshell:

"Our mobile share methodology measures share for browser capable mobile devices. This means the mobile device must be able to render HTML pages and JavaScript. Visits to WAP pages are not included."

VIsits to WAP pages are not included? As in the WAP browser you can install on BlackBerry OS version 2.5 and higher?

As Philip Elmer-DeWitt pointed out earlier today: "Net Applications is judging the race for mobile Web dominance using the rules set by the iPhone," which we think pretty much sums it up.

The report, which is available for free until January 31, 2009 if you register at Netpop, provides an extremely rich amount of data.

Netpop, for example, found that the typical social networker is female (57% vs. 43%), between 18 and 29 years old, employed (55%) or a student (23%), and single (48%). The average social networker uses the Internet to connect with more than 18 people one-to-one in a given week, and with close to 110 one-to-many.

Interestingly, those broadband subscribers who don't contribute to social networks tend to be male (57%), married (57%), and older. They also connect with less than 3 people online per week.

Social networkers spend an average of about $101 online, while those who don't contribute to social networks only spend $80. On average, social networkers are also interested in a more diverse range of topics, with music, friends, movies, and games being the most prevalent interests.

Facebook vs. MySpace

Netpop also compared Facebook and MySpace users. Most of the results there aren't highly surprising, but they do provide hard evidence for some of the more anecdotal stories we have seen about the two services.

Facebook users, for example tend to skew towards the 18 to 29 year olds, while MySpace users span all age groups. Facebook also has more users with college degrees (74% vs. 56%) and these users are less likely to be married than MySpace users.

MySpace users, however, spend more time online  during the week (5.5 hours vs. 5.1 hours) and also remain more active during the weekend.

In terms of interests, MySpace users are more interested in NASCAR, astrology, and gardening, while Facebook's users are predictably more interested in school, science, and investing.

Advertising

Netpop concludes the report with a longer discussion of what this means for online advertisers. A lot of this advice is right along the lines we have already discussed in earlier posts: engage with users on social media sites, give consumers a voice, enable companies to listen and learn, and allow your 'fans' to influence others.

With over 40 million Americans now contributing to social networking sites in one form or another, this is clearly a lucrative market for advertisers, but also one that is very different from more traditional online and offline media sources.

Compete estimates that there were about 99 million people who visited Google.com during that period, so that's a little less than 1% click through. To be honest, we're a little surprised the number isn't higher than that. That's just the beginning of the surprises, though.

We're a little surprised that less than 1% of visitors were curious enough to click on the first new link on Google.com in a long time and we're quite surprised that other parts of the marketing campaign were able to deliver even more traffic!

How did all this traffic convert into sales? Some people have said that there's an estimated 1.5 million G1 phones in circulation, but others, like Information Week, say those numbers aren't believable.

Compete's traffic numbers are probably a little soft as well, but they sure are fun to think about. For the full write up, see the Compete blog.