This year wasn't the first time any of us heard about the impact of social media on television. People have talked about TV shows on Facebook and Twitter for about as long as those social networks have existed, and the trend has only accelerated as social media usage in general has exploded.
Last year, chatter on Twitter helped the MTV Video Music Awards boost its audience to the biggest it had been in eight years. In 2011, services like Twitter and Facebook served as the virtual water cooler for just about every major news story and broadcast media event. It may not have been invented this year, but 2011 was pivotal for social TV.
Teens sure do love their texting. New data from Nielsen proves it.
According to an analysis of 65,000+ mobile subscribers' phone bills, U.S. teens have tripled their data usage. In the third quarter of 2011, teens aged 13-17 averaged 320 MB of data per month. This number has increased 256% over the last year, and not surprisingly teens are are consuming data faster than any other age group. But when it comes to data usage, boys are consuming 382 MB per month while girls only use 266 MB. This is not the case when it comes to texting.
This year, Facebook unleashed frictionless sharing. As with most things Facebook, it stirred up controversy among everyone from the casual Facebook user to tech industry insiders. Here's how it works: Anytime you're reading news from a social news app or listening to music from a social music app, Facebook automatically shares it to your Facebook profile (soon to be Timeline). Frictionless sharing could be the end of manual curation and the beginning of an automatically curated social Web. Or it might just become a combination of both, with some users preferring to continue curating manually, while others mix it up. Still others will go all-auto all the time. Up until now, the user had more control over their version of the social Web. In the social networks battle, frictionless sharing could work. But it needs some adjustments first.
People today are sharing to social networks while they're watching TV. They're communicating with friends in real time (chatting, IM, tweeting) and asynchronously (commenting and posting). A new report from Ooyala predicts that these social elements will become a part of the content itself, appearing inside video players, in apps or on second screens such as tablets or smartphones. This vision for the future of social TV focuses mostly on sharing and discovering while watching. How does this vision differ for viewers and publishers?
Social media opens up both conversation and creativity for stock traders. But most importantly, it creates community around niche interest topics.
The way stocks are discussed among investors is different than it was even five years ago. In 2008, Howard Lindzon launched StockTwits, the online community of investors, with the idea that people wanted to share ideas about trading. Lindzon was a huge fan of Twitter, and so StockTwits was built off of that.
"A guy in Kansas can be the expert on grains, rather than the guy who trades grain stocks in New York," says StockTwits CEO and Founder Howard Lindzon. "The Kansas guy can look out his window and tweet what he sees." StockTwits, says Lindzon, has turned everyone into a potential market maker and expert.
Facebook just released its 2011 Memology, which gives a complete rundown of top Facebook's most talked about topics and biggest memes of 2011. In the top global topics on Facebook category, the death of Osama bin Laden wins, closely followed by Packers win the Super Bowl and Casey Anthony found not guilty. We've also picked out the most read/write web-y Facebook trends on the list, so be sure to take a look.
A new study from research2guidance shows that the market for apps is continually moving toward segmentation and niche stores. The Apple app store, which launched in July 2008, has contributed significantly to the rise of niche apps. The study defines three types of niche stores: Platform-oriented (apps for a specific OS platform such as AndroidPIT or Crackberry a.k.a. BlackBerry), target group-oriented (apps for a segment of users, such as business, adults, kids) and carve outs (mobile network operator with its own app store in the Android Market or something like "@work" by Apple).
As part of its ongoing sponsored research into mobile computing habits, Google released some interesting findings about the way consumers use their different devices. Google refers to the tablet as a "third digital screen in consumer's lives that fill[s] the gap between desktops and smartphones." Its study found that people use tablets for personal rather than work-related activities 91% of the time.
Google found that users quickly migrate entertainment activities over to their tablets when they get them. They use tablets for longer sessions on weekends than on weekdays. And 42% of the time, people are using tablets to multitask, especially in front of the TV, and even while eating or cooking.
A new study by Compete shows that women are adopting smartphones more quickly than men. In 2011, women outnumbered men in a study of smartphone owners by gender. This goes directly against findings in 2010, at which point there were more male than female smartphone owners. Of the types of activities done on smartphones, female-identified smartphone owners were more interested in sending text messages, accessing social networks, playing games, sharing photos and videos, conducting financial transactions and shopping online than their male counterparts. A greater percentage of men surveyed were more interested in streaming content (movies/TV) and making dinner reservations than female smartphone owners.
Of course, this study falls into the same space that all gender-specific studies from big research firms do. It conflates sex (biological and physiological characteristics that define men and women) and gender (socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women). These definitions of sex and gender are from the World Health Organization.
Online retailers were expecting hoards of shoppers on Black Friday, the biggest shopping holiday of the year. Earlier today PayPal released data that proves the "couch commerce" predictions right. More people were shopping from their smartphones and tablets than ever before. As of 11am PT, PayPal found that mobile payment volume was up 538% from Black Friday 2010.
