At the 2012 Grammys, Perry rolled on-stage with a blue wig and her hit song "E.T.", then abruptly transitioned into "Part of Me," which pop news sources have attributed to her break-up with Russell Brand. (There are lines like "So you can keep the diamond ring," for example.) Things just haven't been the same since Perry's religious parents have tried to hook her up with Jesus-lovin' Tim Tebow.

Yet Perry was formerly the queen of cotton candy cloud sensuality, of references to sucking Snoop Dogg's lollipop and a hyperfemininity that only a white girl of pastor parents could muster. Sweet and adoring in her innocence, Perry doesn't stand a chance against hardcore female rapper Nicki Minaj, who stole the 2012 Grammys with "Roman Holiday." Both a tribute to and a pushback against the movie "The Exorcist," Minaj's performance engaged the short attention spans of social media users, compelling them to post their own thoughts on Minaj's "interpretation" of Catholicism, exorcism and the use of highly charged religious imagery in pop culture social media spectacle.

In "Roman Holiday," Minaj performed an exorcism of her alter-ego, Roman Zolanski. By the end of the performance, she was levitating high above fires and clergy members. EOnline called Minaj's performance the "worst spectacle" of the 2012 Grammys.

"As much as we like the rap pixie, Nicki Minaj offered up a Lady Gaga-lite scary religious movie that was way too long, kinda silly and way annoying coming so late in the show," writes Erik Pedersen. "But hey, at least she can always ask her Pope-date for absolution!"

Whereas Katy Perry is a softcore, singsongy teenage dreamer girl who is stuck at last Friday night's drunken party, Nicki Minaj exists in a space of highly charged religious imagery, relying on a male narrative yet occupying space as a female body. This just one of the reasons "Roman Holiday" shook things up. Says Racialicious' LaToya Peterson quoting Menda Francois' thesis "Step Your Pussy Up: Nicki Minaj and the Signifyin(g) Tropes of Hardcore Female Rap":

Implicit in Minaj's Signification onto the male narrative is a strategic process of identity construction, relying primarily on the male narrative and male voice to help shape the hardcore female rapper's public image. Essentially, by engaging in dialogue with the male narrative, Minaj is aligning herself with male rappers and creating her identity as one of (pseudo)masculinity, an asset valuable to her role as a hardcore female rapper. It is within this genre that femcees operate as performers of gender and are most harshly judged by an injurious rubric of masculinity.

Unlike Perry's "E.T.", which relies on the fetishization of black male rapstar Kanye West as "alien" in a sci-fi trope, Minaj's "Roman Holiday" transcends this othered "outer space." Minaj's exorcism of her male alter-ego Roman Zolanski completes her transformation into hardcore rapper, one who is capable of simultaneously being both and neither. If she had possessed demons before the Grammys, she certainly does not now.

Yet some social media users took Minaj's performance too literally. "Nicki Minaj possessed by Demon Grammy Performance," reads an FTD News headline. YouTube commenter iJared TV announced that he was vehemently against any sort of "religious type thing" in pop culture music videos.

"If you bring in any religious type thing, like a Catholic priest...you're gonna lose a lot of your Catholic audience," he says in his YouTube video commentary. "I'm not Catholic or anything, but you don't disrespect religion in your music or anything." But Minaj was not disrespecting any sort of Catholic audience. Her on-stage transformation was her own, and out of it came her alter-ego, Roman Zolanski.

Did Nicki Minaj Save the Grammys?

According to NPR, she did. Her performance catapulted the event from just another awards show into a social media spectacle complete with Twitter and second screens:

We all well know that this is how mainstream pop music survives in the single-download age. No one style dominates, and as artists compete for attention, they're turning ever more hyperbolic. At the Grammys, this was best illustrated by Nicki Minaj's wild debut of the title track from her upcoming second album, Roman Holiday. A tribute to The Exorcist that more closely recalled a florid Dario Argento horror opera, the number included mock clergy, levitation and Minaj singing "I Feel Pretty" in an accent that would horrify Downton Abbey admirers. "Roman Holiday" sent the Twitterverse into hysterics. And it's impossible to think that wasn't part of the reason it was approved.

Minaj has officially and fully entered into the Twitterific pop culture mindshare. In fact, her entrance was christened by a friendly email from the Catholic League, who was very concerned about the "exorcism" of Minaj's male-gendered alter-ego and, implicitly, her use of the male narrative. Indeed, anything involving non-normative gender is cause for concern.

Some Twitter users like @savory1, a self-described "hard working soccer mom" in Orland Park, Illinois, defended Minaj's performance: "It was art get over it." Minaj fired back on Twitter with a few words, slamming the Catholic League and everyone who for some reason may fear their own alter-ego, or just themselves.

• "Were they offended by 'the devil inside'??? Shut-up & watch the movie b**ch!"
• "Not, 2, Not 1...I wish I at least had a point five percentile worth of f**ks to give right now."
• "And more importantly, love people for WHO they are. #nohate #nojudgement #nocondemnation."

Now, is that something Katy Perry could have said? Not without a lot of sugary sweet sentimentality.

Image via Flickr.

We first did this list in August 2007, at which point Evolution of Dance by comedian Judson Laipply was number 1 with nearly 56 million views (it's now outside the top 10). The next update was September 2008, when Avril Lavigne's Girlfriend pop music video was number 1 with 103 million views. In January 2010, Charlie bit my finger - again ! was number 1, with 148 million views. By the beginning of January 2011, Justin Bieber was at number 1 with over 400 million views for Baby.

Here is the top 10, as of February 2012:

2. Jennifer Lopez - On The Floor ft. Pitbull; 463,245,100 views

3. Lady Gaga - Bad Romance; 438,181,560 views

4. Shakira - Waka Waka(This Time for Africa); 435,406,537 views

5. Eminem - Love The Way You Lie ft. Rihanna; 419,238,359 views

6. Charlie bit my finger - again !; 403,885,492 views

7. LMFAO - Party Rock Anthem ft. Lauren Bennett, GoonRock; 338,476,990 views

8. Parto in un letto; 324,131,517 views

9. Eminem - Not Afraid; 305,724,343 views

10. Justin Bieber - Never Say Never ft. Jaden Smith; 290,917,758 views

Dr. danah boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft, assistant professor at NYU and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, thinks that perhaps adults are worrying too much about what teenagers are doing and saying online. What happens at lunchtime on the playground is now happening on the Internet, mostly on social media sites. Kids talk about stuff they can't discuss in class, they flirt with each other, they make crude jokes. They openly discuss what they'd never utter at the family dinner table.

Teens are falling in love and sharing their passwords, potentially opening themselves up to identity theft, online reputation ruining... and a greater feeling of intimacy. Pew reports that 30% of all teen Internet users shared a password with a friend or significant other. In a blog post follow-up to that story, boyd suggests that teenagers learn about password sharing from adults. Learning starts at home.

These budding adolescents also don't give a crap about "liking" your company on Facebook. A study from Forrester shows that only 6% of online U.S. consumers ages 12-17 are interested in interacting with brands on Facebook.

Another study said that teenagers would likely leave Facebook for Google+ because they just weren't comfortable with things like the news ticker (read: stalker feed). They did, however, love Facebook Timeline. Teens take Facebook "likes" seriously: 57% felt that it was a reflection of their own personal brand, and 37% saw it as a "high-five"-like endorsement to their friends. And 56% of teens say they "liked" a brand after seeing a friend do the same thing via the news ticker. An Ericsson study that looked at how teenagers socialized through technology discovered that teens actually prefer meeting in real life to texting and liking one anothers' status updates.

A study from the University of Texas at Austin proved that peoples' Facebook personalities were the same as their real life personalities. Why do people use Facebook? Researchers at Boston University say it's to connect with others, and show their friends who they are. Teens' use of social media sites isn't so different from their adult counterparts.

This doesn't mean that parents and relatives should go stalk their teenagers on Facebook, or even comment on their status updates. Respect that the Internet is space where teenagers go to be themselves. Kk?

Image via U.S. National Library of Medicine.

Interested in learning more about Dr. boyd's research? Read about her teen sexting talk at the 2011 ReadWriteWeb 2Way Summit.

A thoughtful New York Times article published yesterday speaks to an eerie new trend: In the digital era, teenagers in love want to share their most intimate secrets, ideas and, of course, their Facebook accounts. They leave virtual residue on each others' Facebook walls, they send Facebook messages, they text each other and video chat. And they even share their passwords with each other.

Why are teenagers doing something so risky? To feel close. As with sex, teens engaging in this type of behavior aren't thinking about the potentially huge consequences. After a break-up, an angry ex could hack into the other person's account and steal their identity for a period of time. Or worse yet, one ex could damage the other person's online reputation. How easy would it be for an angry teenager to log-in to their ex's Facebook profile, spam a bunch of friends and post intimate secrets about their relationship? This is the other downside to not changing one's password often enough. According to the same Pew survey, however, only 17% of teenagers set their profiles to public; so even if this were to happen, at least the information would only broadcast out to a network of friends.

A new study out from Ericsson surveyed 2000 U.S. teenagers ages 13-17 to understand more about how they socialize through technology.

Texting and Facebook in particular have changed the way that teenagers date, particularly in the "courting" process which concludes with an actual date. The initial first interaction still takes place offline. In fact, when asked the question what type of communication would they miss most if it were taken away, teens responded with "face-to-face."

According to the study, texting is teens' second tool of choice when they can't meet up in-person because it's easy to do while multitasking. A study from Nielsen showed that teen girls text 1.5 times as much as teen boys.

Facebook came in a sad fourth place after texting and talking on the phone.

Teens see voice calls as better suited for adults. Google+ wasn't mentioned in this report, but teens do say they'd abandon Facebook for it.

Another less-explored means of communication is video chat, which is mostly by 13- to 15-year-olds, who tend to have more restrictions than 16- to 19-year-olds. When teens video chat, they are often times doing something at the same time, including chores or homework.

When it comes to Facebook, teens see it more as an additional means of communication, and they tend to have far less friends on it than adults. Teens tend to only befriend people they already know, and have an average of 265 friends.

A recent study from Pew showed that 62% of teens on social media sites set their profile to private. Only 19% make their profile partially private, and a mere 17% left their profiles completely public.

Unlike adults, teenagers use Facebook as another means for expressing their emotions by posting song lyrics and movie quotes. There is no reason for this type of information to be public. For teens, Facebook is an extension of their real-life relationships. Adults use Facebook to take the place of forms of communication, using it more for exchanging information and less for friendships they have in real life.

Teenagers are also more likely to have regular mobile phones that smartphones. The 13-year-old age group is more interested in owning a smartphone than the 17-year-olds.

Image via Mediabistro.

A new infographic from G+/Gerson Lehrman Group shows these and a few other interesting trends too. For example, Dell was able to cut service calls by posting video how-tos on its support site. This and other TV oddities can be found below.

ToutApp has built a free service called Year In Review that will help. It scans your Gmail/Google Apps account and gives you all kinds of feedback. Tout is upfront about privacy, and your report is just for you, unless you share it. ToutApp has the same goal for Year In Review as its users do: to get better at email.

The report starts with big numbers: "You dealt with XX,XXX emails in 2011." "You sent XX% less emails than you received." (Hey ToutApp. It's Jon. That should be "fewer," not "less.") "You sent the most emails in June." "Wednesday is your busiest day." That's all good to know. It helps you get into the rhythm.

Then it moves on to the social side of email, showing your closest and most frequent contacts, as well as popular words from subject lines, giving a sense of what you emailed about.

Finally, the report gets into the trends. It shows messages sent and received by month, week, day and even hour. This breakdown is amazingly helpful. For me, the trends were so clear, I can now plan my day better based around email rush hours.

The last section, a nice touch, shows you which email marketers and notifications you dealt with most. Lord knows we all get plenty of that. How about this for a new year's resolution: Unsubscribe from 95% of the things in this list?

Check out the sample report if you want to see exactly what you're getting before you sign up. The Year In Review report is only for Google email accounts for now, but ToutApp will support other email systems "very soon." You can join the private beta if you want to be alerted when your email service is supported.

What strategies do you use to manage your email?

We all know that the world is going to end in December 2012 because a giant solar eruption is going to swallow the Earth. Or is it supposed to be the implosion of the Yellowstone Caldera? Reversal of the global poles? Does anybody even care about how the Earth will end if we are all doomed anyway?

Apparently, yes. NASA has set up a Frequently Asked Questions page on its website to answer questions pertaining to the end of existence. According to NASA, there is no scientific evidence that the world is going to end in 2012. Contrary to popular beliefs, put your trust in science and do not set up the foundations for that underground bunker just yet.

NASA reaffirms this: "Just as the calendar you have on your kitchen wall does not cease to exist after December 31, the Mayan calendar does not cease to exist on December 21, 2012. This date is the end of the Mayan long-count period but then - just as your calendar begins again on January 1 - another long-count period begins for the Mayan calendar."

There is also the notion of the "Nibiru collision." Some say this dates back to ancient Sumerian and Babylonian texts, it was actually an idea put forth by Nancy Lieder of the website ZetaTalk in 1995. Nibiru, or the infamous "Planet X" was supposed to crash into the Earth in 2003, causing a pole shift that would bring and end to world. The name "Nibiru" comes from study done by author Zecharia Sitchin based on his interpretation of Babylonian texts. Nibiru is supposed to pass by Earth every 3,600 years and its alien inhabitants come to our planet to rule as gods.

There is no Nibiru. Scientists have thoroughly debunked the idea of the "12th Planet." NASA says that there are no planetary alignments in the future that could cause harm to the Earth, let alone in 2012. There is a dwarf-sized planet located within the outer regions (the Kuiper Belt) of our solar system called Eris that some apocalyptic theorists says could impact the planet. NASA says that this simply could not happen.

"Nibiru and other stories about wayward planets are an Internet hoax. There is no factual basis for these claims. If Nibiru or Planet X were real and headed for an encounter with the Earth in 2012, astronomers would have been tracking it for at least the past decade, and it would be visible by now to the naked eye. Obviously, it does not exist. Eris is real, but it is a dwarf planet similar to Pluto that will remain in the outer solar system; the closest it can come to Earth is about 4 billion miles."

What about a giant solar eruption? This theory was put into play in the movie "2012" starring John Cusack among others. Basically, a solar eruption destroys the Earth, causing the Yellowstone Caldera to erupt, the poles to reverse, all the continents begin shifting and are swallowed by the oceans. When it comes to apocalyptic thrillers, "2012" is easily one of the best. It is followed closely by other extra-terrestrial thrillers like "Independence Day" and "War Of The Worlds."

NASA says that its satellites are in more danger of solar activity than our little blue orb, "Solar activity has a regular cycle, with peaks approximately every 11 years. Near these activity peaks, solar flares can cause some interruption of satellite communications, although engineers are learning how to build electronics that are protected against most solar storms. But there is no special risk associated with 2012. The next solar maximum will occur in the 2012-2014 time frame and is predicted to be an average solar cycle, no different than previous cycles throughout history."

What should people fear about the possibility of The End coming in 2012? Do not look to the heavens. Look to your neighbors and the people you see on the street. The notions of apocalypse brings out the crazies. They load up survival gear, sell off their possessions, cause general hysteria. People are the biggest threat to your well-being. When it comes to the Internet, watch out for spam, scams, malware, phishers and poisoned websites that breed on the hysteria or curiosity of the public.

Please, do not drink the Kool-Aid.

"For any claims of disaster or dramatic changes in 2012, where is the science? Where is the evidence?" NASA asks. "There is none, and for all the fictional assertions, whether they are made in books, movies, documentaries or over the Internet, we cannot change that simple fact. There is no credible evidence for any of the assertions made in support of unusual events taking place in December 2012."

Bonus: A video created that I created with Boston University classmate Ashleigh Costanza when we were in graduate school. We asked Mayan experts, theologians, people on the street and other investigators to weigh in on The End and what people should be worried about. Check it out.

Ryan Gosling Feminist, one of the smarter iterations of this meme was created by Danielle Henderson, a graduate student in the University of Wisconsin Madison's women and gender studies program. We asked her a few questions about her take on the popularity of "Hey Girl." And just days after we did that, the Internet produced Museum Hey Girl, for the artier among us. Hey Girl Happy Hannukah appeared on December 20, the first day of the holiday.

This is not at all the first celebrity-inspired Internet memes. LesbiansWhoLookLikeJustinBieber points to the secret that everyone fears blurting lest they appear homophobic - Justin Bieber is as androgynous as most boyish lesbians, and vice versa. And then there's RappersDoingNormalShit, which makes the all-mighty rapper appear as mundane as your boring next-door neighbor.

These memes are never-ending virtual art shows curated by either one person or the collective Internet. Henderson wasn't really thinking about that when she created FeministRyanGosling, which provides a feminist context to the blank slate that is the open-ended "Hey Girl" meme.

"I don't really follow memes, and don't think of what I'm doing as fitting into that category," she tells us. "I'm still just posting flashcards for my friends, and could stop the whole thing tomorrow. I have no allegiance to this format. I'm just a nerd trying to get through the semester."
 
Truth be told, she actually dislikes memes and the collective impact they've had on the Internet-at-large.

"It's like in junior high when people would repeat the same joke over and over again until eventually it removed all joy and just filled you with contempt," she says. "I think memes contribute to the community feeling everyone thinks the Internet should instill in us so that we don't feel so bad about spending most of our free time communicating to a machine, but they mostly serve to remind me how unoriginal and boring we've become."

Like the nice guy who won't leave your side, Ryan Gosling hangs on till the bitter end - even when the meme he inspires makes us feel like completely unoriginal pop culture-obsessed media consumers. Henderson, for one, counts herself as one engaged in this love/hate relationship with memes. "I'm including myself here, of course," she tells us, "as what I'm doing is totally derivative."

Here's a full list of the "Hey Girl" meme iterations that we've found.

• Hey Girl I'm A Serial Killer
• Librarian Hey Girl
• Ex-Boyfriend Ryan Gosling
• Feminist Ryan Gosling
• Ryan Gosling Disneyland Cats
• Typographer Ryan Gosling
• Fuck Yeah Ryan Gosling
• Museum Hey Girl
• FeministRyanGosling
• Hey Girl Shabbat Shalom
• Manarchist Ryan Gosling
• Public Policy Ryan Gosling
• Law School Ryan Gosling
• Preservationist Ryan Gosling
• Stage Manager Ryan Gosling
• "Campaign Staff" Ryan Gosling
• Biostatistics Ryan Gosling
• Medieval History Ryan Gosling
• Handmade Ryan Gosling
• Programmer Ryan Gosling
• Silicon Valley Ryan Gosling
• Teacher Ryan Gosling

Please enjoy a few more variations on "Hey Girl." We picked these especially for you.

Ryan Gosling Typography

Ryan Gosling Feminist

Ryan Gosling Stage Manager

Did we miss any variations on "Hey Girl"? Let us know in the comments below. We'll add them to the list.

This new feature smooshes together your Facebook social graph and your Digg social graph, two social sets that might not really have much in common. This is yet another attempt at making Digg more social, following on the heels of Digg's real-time newswire and social newsrooms, which function like topical channels curated by users. Will this new feature help Digg get back into social news?

Digg decided to launch this new feature after it found that fans of the Digg Facebook page were visiting top Digg stories more regularly than its actual users. In fact, Digg tells us that logged-in Facebook users spent more time on the site - an average of 15 minutes vs. 10 minutes for the average user.

After users turn social sharing on from the Digg side (see above), all stories that a user reads on Digg will appear in the Facebook news ticker and news feed.

The Digg Social Reader on Facebook will roll out slowly.

After its re-design, the departure of founding CEO Kevin Rose and the eulogy that many have already written for it, this seems like a feeble attempt at getting back in. It seems like Digg is handing over what was once its prize - power users and control of social news - to Facebook.

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.

Revolution in Egypt. The death of Osama bin Laden. The launches of the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S. Amy Winehouse's death. The royal wedding. Losing Steve Jobs. A lot happened in 2011, but very little of it didn't unfold, at least in part, on the social Web.

Twitter continued to be a driving force in the convergence of social media and television this year. With or without the encouragement of Twitter's management or TV networks, people would naturally be inclined to talk about shows in real-time on the Internet.

This fact has even helped the company start to carve out one viable idea for monetizing its service. Its social advertising products can let media companies tap into a passionate, pre-existing audience, gain more viewers and then get a rich and detailed amount of data back about how people responded to their campaign. Promoted tweets and topics aren't available exclusively for television shows, but the volume of TV-related chatter on Twitter, combined with the marketing budgets of TV studios and networks, make it a win for both sides.

Twitter has further embraced its social role in TV, for example by teaming up with the creators of X Factor USA to implement live social voting mechanism for viewers to use during the program. To help encourage TV producers to get involved, Twitter published a best practices guide for integrating social media with television.

These social media-fueled discussions are more than just meaningless chatter. For those in the business of producing television shows, the phenomenon can be hugely valuable, with or without paying for social ads. This year, we saw more evidence of a positive correlation between Twitter buzz about a show and actual ratings.

Trends like this are not lost on digital marketers, who banded together this year to form the first trade group for advertisers and marketers looking to tap into future opportunities Internet-connected TVs.

Second Screen Apps, Content-Shifting and Tablet TV

The growth of tablets and smartphones is having a huge impact on television. About 86% of those who own such devices use it while they're watching TV, according to a study released by Yahoo in the beginning of the year. Many of them are tweeting and posting updates to Facebook about shows, while others are looking up pertinent information about programs they're watching.

The proliferation of these devices has given rise to the growth of so-called second screen apps. This includes social check-in apps for entertainment such as GetGlue, which by September had seen an 800% increase in check-ins from the beginning of the year. Mind you, that was just before the Fall television season started.

Yahoo got in on the second screen app game this year by launching Yap.tv, digital TV guide of sorts with Twitter integration and live chats and polls about television shows.

We're also beginning to see the early evolution of content-shifting for video and TV. Just as you can hit the "Read It Later" button for Instapaper, videos you come across during the day can be saved for later viewing as well. The "Later" button on all Vimeo players lets you save videos to a queue, while Boxee has its own bookmarklet for saving nearly any Web video to your Boxee account for later. It can be viewed from the desktop, of course, but perhaps more conveniently, the video will also appear immediately on Boxee's set-top box or its new iPad app. The app allows you to view saved videos, as well as browse a selection of videos shared by your Facebook and Twitter contacts, not unlike what Flipboard does for text-based content.

Watching TV content directly on tablets also grew more common this year. Apps like Hulu Plus and Netflix have been on the iPad since last year, but networks themselves are warming up to the idea of letting viewers catch up on their favorite shows on smaller screens. NBC released an iPad app that offers limited access to recent episodes, while HBO Go expanded its reach, although it's still only available to cable subscribers. Comcast subscribers can stream some content from the Xfinity iPad app, and the cable giant is even testing out live TV broadcasts over the Internet.

The future of TV is still very much emerging, but we fully expect 2012 to be another crucial year in its evolution. From Apple-branded TV sets to new (and quite possibly cheaper) tablets hitting the market in 2012, it will be interesting to see where things end up by this time next year.

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.

Teens are not very interested in making calls from their mobile devices, with voice usage down from 685 to 572 minutes per month. Overall, teens see texts as faster, easier and a lot more fun.

Nielsen issued a similar report last year, and discovered pretty much the same thing: That parents better get their teenagers an unlimited data plan, stat! Results from this past study showed that teens sent out more than six messages per waking hour. This is one less text per hour than the 2011 report.

The previous report also showed app usage on the rise, with 94% of teens saying they used the Internet, messaging, multimedia, gaming and apps on their phones.

Yet despite all this news about texting, teen sexting might actually be more of a myth. NPR recently reported that only 1% of teens have actually created and shared sexually explicit images.

Frictionless Sharing: Music

Spotify rolled out deep integration with Facebook shortly after f8, requiring a Facebook account in order to sign up. Usage shot way up, but that's not to say all are in favor of its frictionless sharing techniques.

In exchange for free music from Spotify, Facebook streams music tracks onto one's profile for their network to see. Spotify calls this the "soundtrack of your social life" - and it's all right there on the Facebook profile. Spotify is also centered around social discovery, hoping to increase music recommendations among friends. As with any free service on the Internet, users pay with their data though ultimately Spotify hopes to turn its free users into paying customers. Like Spotify, music streaming services competitors MOG and Rdio also dropped their fees.

Not everyone wants to tell their social graph about what they're listening to. In fact, our own music writer John Paul Titlow turned off his Spotify integration.

Spotify does add an interesting new social layer to the online music listening experience. And it opens you up to your friends' entire library of music. Through frictionless sharing, you might discover that you have the same taste in music as someone else you know - or you might find new tunes based on the social graph rather than through a music recommendation service like Pandora. In fact, this happened to me. I discovered that a friend was also listening to Katy Perry (because really, who in the world isn't listening to Katy Perry?) and we, like, totally and instantly bonded over that! For a moment on Facebook, anyway.

While these types of happenstance discoveries could bring about new interests and connection, the majority of Spotify streaming just feels like noise that's popping up in the news ticker. Facebook has not proven itself to be a one-stop shop for music like Pandora. But that's not what it wants to be, really.

The good news is that you can adjust the privacy settings for frictionless sharing apps like Spotify. If you really wanted to, you could just change to "Custom" so that only you would see what you post from the app.

On the actual data collecting side, does Facebook really need this much information about anyone's music listening habits? If Timeline is a curated version of your life, then the answer is yes. But not everyone is as interested in lifestreaming as Facebook seems to believe.

Next page: Frictionless sharing for news, and how this trend will play out in the coming year.

Frictionless Sharing: News

The three big Facebook social news apps come from the Guardian, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. Install the app onto your Facebook account, and everything you read will automatically show up on your Facebook profile (Timeline). All articles that you read through the app will be done inside Facebook itself.

Does your Facebook network care about what you read? If so, social news apps might be useful for starting discussion. If your network is more focused on friends and family, then social news will just end up feeling like noise.

Of course, there are pros and cons to every new product that Facebook launches. But really, I think this once again comes down to better segmentation of Facebook friends. In this instance, Facebook could learn a thing or two from Google+'s Circles.

Conclusion: Frictionless Sharing Needs Some Serious Tweaking

Facebook has a history of launching new products, altering privacy settings and doing whatever it pleases without the user's consent. The FTC settlement should change that, but of course Facebook will continue to innovate.

Facebook needs to figure out how to help users share to niche segments of their friends. For example, the new Facebook Subscribe button for websites, which went live last week, makes it easy for fans to subscribe to public posts. Previously, the subscribe option was only available within Facebook. What's bothersome about it, however, is that every public post still has to go through the user's Facebook profile (or Timeline), meaning that Facebook friends who may not care will still see it. And by the way, whatever happened to the "watch" aspect of Facebook's read/watch/listen?

The same problem occurs with frictionless sharing. On the initial launch, Facebook sharing definitely felt wrong. Facebook seems like it's redefining sharing, but is it really? It's just launching something new, then tweaking it.

Facebook should ask its users how they'd prefer to use frictionless sharing and with whom they want to share endless streams of information. I doubt the answer is "everyone."

In the land of social TV sharing, people are communicating with friends in real-time (chatting, IM, tweeting) while they comment on the content they're watching. Eventually there may be a synchronization of sharing with video, which means users will be able to comment specifically on what they're watching when they're watching, check in to content and invite others to do the same, actually affect the outcome of a show as if it's a "Name Your Own Adventure" story, earn badges and other social rewards that revolve around the show and in fact build a new social network completely focused around content interests.

With the new YouTube re-design and the idea that YouTube may produce its own content, video and social just got one step closer to each other.

Social TV is about discovery. The report also mentions discovery as a major reason for why people use social networks. The StumbleUpon and Twitter redesigns make clear that the user interface of social is becoming more about discovery.

In the age of social discovery, users will be able to request recommendations based on their social graph (think Facebook, especially) or specific social circles on networks like Google+. Social TV will be curated by you and your friends. Of course, this runs into the wrong idea of conflating the social graph with the interest graph. You and your friends do not necessarily share the same interests, though you may share the same social graph. This aspect of social TV will need more tweaking if it is truly going to work - it cannot assume that people who are friends share all of the same interests.

For publishers, the idea of social TV is stellar. If it works, it would make finding target audiences that much easier. Everything is based around the social graph. And with targeted program comes more highly targeted advertising, like users are already seeing on Facebook.

The second screen trend, which we cited back in July, relies on users watching TV while concurrently using a tablet or smartphone. Twitter has embraced its social role in TV, making it a natural place to go if you want to post thoughts and feedback about something you're watching.

Rumors have circulated about Apple jumping into the social TV game. Will they launch the HDTV set sometime next year?

Readers, do you think there's a future for social TV? Give us your thoughts in the comments section.

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.

Joe D (@upsidetrader) says that social media actually hasn't changed the way he trades but, he says, "it has made me a much sharper trader I think because when you share with the community it keeps you accountable." He has been a full-time day and swing prop trader for more than 20 years, and is a former hedge fund founder and manager.

Social media also delivers information far more quickly than traditional finance news media. Says Lindzon, "NASDAQ, Reuters, PRWire, they don't do social distribution." Adds StockTwits Executive Editor Phil Pearlman adds: "This puts a ton of pressure on traditional finance news media to keep up, open up or fall behind."

The downsides? Social media does tend to be a bit impulsive and, as stock market blogger "The Wild Investor" says, gone is a "sense of finality." Social Media Consultant Michael Carusi says that the "spontaneousness is exactly what's wrong with predicting sock market information using Twitter. People on their phones may mistakenly tweet a bogus story without even realizing it." He believes that every industry, including the financial industry, will find ways to take advantage of social media, but also needs to "keep in mind that social media is very susceptible to misleading information."

For now, conversations are trading live on Twitter and StockTwits, not Facebook, which is more of a space for friends, family, puppies, super-sharable graphics, but not stocks. Where will the conversation go next?

Lindzon thinks Foursquare has the potential around location, especially in the areas of measuring data around retailer and restaurant traffic. Is this a data set that hedge funds might be interested? For now, only six percent of people are using geosocial apps like Foursquare.