A few of the statistics announced this morning include:

While the company is making several announcements at Chirp, including the archival of all public tweets since 2006 with the Library of Congress, these statistics confirm the impressive growth and potential of Twitter.

But now, students, journalists, and everyone else can access data straight from the source - the actual statistics published by the UN.

Using UN Data

Underneath the search box on the homepage are a few popular searches, based on what users are searching for the most. You can either click on those or enter in your own keywords to begin.

For example, to see data about a country, you just enter in the country's name and click "Search." The search result will take you to a landing page where some general information about the country is provided, like population, GDP, life expectancy, etc. You can click the link to "view full profile" to get the full details of that country's statistics.

To the left, is a box where you can apply filters to your search by specifying that you want to include or exclude certain information from your search.

Below the country's profile are all the search results for that country. Each result has a "Download" link to download the data, but there is also a handy "Preview" link which will open a small window displaying the data, so you don't have to navigate away from the page you're on to see if that data is what you were looking for. Another link, "Explore," allows you to delve into to related data sources around that topic.

You can do more than search for data on specific countries or regions, though. You can also search for data about global statistics, like greenhouse gas emissions or global solar production statistics (well, that's what I looked up).

What's great about the UN Data site is not just the ability to access this huge database of statistics (currently 55 million+ records), but the well-designed way that such massive amounts of data have been provided to the public. Anyone can use this database - school kids, techies, even mom and dad. This is one site that is definitely worth a look.

The service breaks down the changes into four categories in a tour of the new site - shorten, share, track and manage.

Shortening links is as easy as it ever was - just cut and paste a long link and bit.ly gives a short and easily shareable link. Beneath the shortener, the site offers a history of links with a brief set of statistics and options for each.

New sharing features, which now includes Twitter and soon Facebook, come primarily in the form of a new bit.ly sidebar. The sidebar makes it simple to share links using the service and offers instantaneous statistics on how many people are retweeting the same link and how many people have clicked on yours.

For those of you who use bit.ly often, the tracking and analytics features may be your favorite new feature. The tracking section allows you to compare how links you share fare compared to that same link shared by everyone else using bit.ly. It also offers all of the standard statistics you might expect, such as referrer domains, locations and basic click data organized by different time periods.

The final new feature, managing links, pulls all of these features together, providing you with a single page to examine all of the links you've shortened and shared using bit.ly and giving basic statistics on each.

Bringing together heavier analytics with easier and more integrated sharing might be a smart move for the URL shortener, especially after much speculation in recent weeks that Twitter would be adding URL shortening to its ever-growing list of features.

In light of Facebook's recently announced vanity URL availability, founder Jesse Stay writes, "We're extending our existing Facebook profile redirect URLs, which redirect yourusername.socialtoo.com to your Facebook profile, and adding an additional layer of analytics to the whole process. So tonight, you'll be able to get a Facebook vanity URL and get the SEO benefits, but the URL you'll want to hand out to all your friends will be your SocialToo vanity URL because we'll provide statistics around those clicking on the URL, the browsers they're using, where they're located, and where they're clicking from." And yes, there's an app for that.

Here are some examples of the types of data users will be able to see:

To get the analytics-powered profile, all a user needs to do is register an account, click on the link to get a special code from Facebook, provide the code (along with a SocialToo username and password), and submit that information. No Twitter username is necessary, although providing Twitter information will give users additional features for Twitter. When the user logs in, he will see the new "SocialStats" tab with statistics for their URL.

The enhancement is visible once you log in to your Lijit account. Just click on the 'search widget' button in the navigation bar and the new option will be obvious in the upper-right corner. Once you fill out the form with your (second) blog's details, the new widget can be customized and deployed.

Lijit warns that the widgets are still walled off in different accounts. This means you won't be able to see combined search results or statistics. However, this is still bound to be a big time-saver, since it means you don't have to remember and re-enter two sets of credentials.

In case you have more than one account already created, Lijit recommends you contact them via their Feedback page and they can help you merge them.

Beginning today, nearly 350 Division 1 college basketball teams will receive constant, in-depth coverage of their season in what the company is calling "the world's first network of websites driven entirely by high-quality, automated content".

StatSheet Founder and CEO Robbie Allen told us by email that "This is truly a first in the media world - every site will be updated in real time with long form narrative content generated automatically from our system and at no incremental cost to us."

The effort will be driven by real-time sports statistics and a database of more than 500 million statistics. Each teams site will not only include these automated articles, but photo and video highlights, its own Twitter account, Facebook Fan Page and mobile application.

"For many of these teams (like Lamar)," wrote Allen, "this will be the first time their fans will have access to the kind of comprehensive coverage typically afforded only to the top programs (like UNC)."

To take a look at some robot-generated journalism, go ahead and visit StatSheet and take a gander.

Allen assured us last time we spoke with him that he wasn't trying to replace human reporters, but simply augment their coverage.

"There are going to be times that any writer can outperform a computer," he said, "but when you look at the breadth it's going to be hard to beat a computer."

Unsurprisingly, younger adults under 35 are more likely to have cut their landlines, but the CDC also reports that the number of wireless-only households increased among all age groups. About half of all adults aged 25 to 29 now live in households that are wireless-only, though only 5.2% of adults over 65 have cut their landlines. Renters and adults who have roommates, by the way, are far more likely to live in households with only wireless phones than most other demographics.

For more detailed statistics, have a look at the full report here (PDF).

What Does This Mean for Developers?

For mobile developers, this is an interesting trend. While most developers tend to focus on applications that are meant to be used while on the road, the market for in-home apps that control appliances or allow you to program your DVR will only continue to grow over the next few years.

While IE still dominates the browser market - with 55% of people using some version - all combined versions of Firefox occupy 32% and have been steadily gaining ground. Released at the end of June, version 3.5 of Firefox has quickly climbed the charts. IE 8, on the other hand - which was first released in beta more than a year earlier, with a full release in March 2009 - now holds a similar 20% of the market to that of Firefox 3.5's 22%.

It would seem that a majority of Firefox 3.5 users were already using 3.0 and upgraded, as the 20% drop in 3.0 use almost directly correlates to the 22% increase in 3.5.

The answer to the first question, by the way, is Adele, who gained 175,000 followers over the last 24 hours (at time of writing). Adele's popularity on Facebook is mainly due to her female fans; 62% are female and 38% male. The fastest growing TV show is Mob Wives, perhaps thanks to the current "swear jar sweepstakes" promotion on its Facebook Page. This type of data is useful, albeit limited at this point.

The main site, the awkwardly named SocialMedia-live, updates Facebook Page data on 90,000 "big players" every 10 minutes - including Eminem, Coca Cola, YouTube and other very popular brands. A further 1.8 million "medium-sized pages" are updated every 12 hours. The other 36 million or so "little pages" are refreshed every 5 days.

There's a special page for "Hip Fanpages," those Facebook Pages "that have distinguished themselves in terms of layout, navigational ease, interactive fanpage features, etc." Current members include Adidas Originals, Snooki, Livestrong, Star Wars and a German comedian named Linda P. That last pick is a clue that SocialMedia-live hails from Germany.

There are some useful comparison tools, too. Below is a chart comparing the growth of Adele, Jennifer Lopez and Katy Perry over the past 90 days. We can see that the popularity of Adele's Facebook Page spiked in January of this year. She has about 12.6 million fans at time of writing. Meanwhile Lopez is growing faster than Perry. Although note that Perry has more fans than Adele and Lopez combined. She has 37.6 million fans, while Lopez has 8 million. A likely explanation is that Perry is much nearer to peak popularity on Facebook than either Adele or Lopez. Growth rate could also be affected by when the fan pages were started. So, as always, take these statistics with a grain of the proverbial salt.

The big thing missing from SocialMedia-live is search. I could find no way to get statistics about our own ReadWriteWeb Facebook Page, for example. There also seems to be no easy access to the 36 million or so "little pages." Both of those issues severely limits the usefulness of the site for marketers, who would be a prime audience for this data.

But this is a beta site, so we hope it will expand over time. For now, if you're interested in finding out how fast certain brands are growing their Facebook Page fan bases, then SocialMedia-live offers an interesting set of statistics.

It's interesting to know that my latest video about late night escapades was viewed primarily by men ages 30 to 50. In a few minutes I will embed in this post a video of myself eating a live baby chicken and will report back on viewer demographics when they become available. You can view the demographics on your videos by clicking the "insight" button next to each video on your account view.

Geographic location is also reported as part of the Insight package. Statistics can be limited to any time frame and are viewable side by side with metrics on a video's relative popularity and leading sources of off-site inbound traffic. It's a great little metrics package.

Presumably YouTube isn't getting all Facebook Beacon on us and tracking the demographics of users logged into YouTube but viewing videos embedded around the web. That would be a positive thing to see in anonymous aggregate. Since such views are unlikely to be counted, perhaps I should spare the fluffy little baby chick. Oh what the heck, let's give it a try.

These kinds of statistics were presumably available for advertisers, in large quantities, since the dawn of YouTube. Breaking them out on a video by video basis and offering a nice interface is a very logical next step but one that too few services online would take the time to provide - much less for free.

It would be nice if users were given the option to publicly expose their video Insight statistics and could view them on a chanel-wide basis instead of just for a single video. Update! I was wrong, several readers pointed out that YouTube does offer aggregate demographics of all your videos! Thanks, friends!

While overall blog mentions of Obama and McCain varied greatly during the last year (and we can't say if those were positive or negative posts), close to 500 million blog postings mentioned him since the beginning of the conventions at the end of August. During the same time period, only about 150 million blog posts mentioned McCain (though it would also be interesting to see similar statistics for Governor Palin as well).

Twitter and MySpace

On social networks, Obama also held a clear lead, with 844,927 MySpace friends compared to McCain's 219,404. Just between November 3rd and November 4th (election day), Obama gained over 10,000 new friends, while McCain only gained about 964. On Twitter, Obama gained 2865 new followers between the 3rd and 4th (for a total of 118,107), while John McCain's Twitter account only has a paltry 4942 followers in total.

There are, of course, a lot of reasons for why Barack Obama's campaign gained a lot more traction on social networks and blogs than the McCain campaign. The demographics of social media users tend to fall in line more closely with those of today's Democratic voters, for example. However, looking forward to the next campaign cycle, it seems clear that all political campaigns, especially at this level, will start ignoring social media trends at their own peril.

See also: Obama's Social Media Advantage, Act II

UPDATE: Turns out the new design wasn't so great after all. SiteMeter has implemented an immediate rollback to the old design!

SiteMeter has made a switch from a codename based management system to an email based system. This means that users can now consolidate their SiteMeter accounts under one email address. In doing so, users will be required to reactivate their accounts under their email address. You can even group your premium account reports by topics to compare and contrast the data of all your sites .

Visually, the service has redesigned the way users can now view their data. Statistics can now be visually seen using charts, graphs, or a table view. Choose date ranges of data to view, export your data, view demographics and do a ton more via a sweet visual interface. SiteMeter is also reporting to have more accurate data for visitor counts and page views by differentiating between visitors and unique visitors. All of your statistics are available visually and textually for any section of the service.

Taking Notes

With some of the new features, we have to wonder if SiteMeter decided to take a couple of visual cues from Google's popular Analytics service. Whether they have or haven't, SiteMeter has certainly done a great job on an long over-due upgrade. However, we're not sure if the new features are enough to keep users from using Google Analytics for free. If you're a user of SiteMeter, let us know what you think of the site's redesign and changes in the comments section.

Swimming with the Stream

There has, however, been a clear shift in the types of applications that are becoming more popular right now. The new emphasis on the stream is driving users to apps that are able to leverage the feed, while those apps that haven't adapted to this new reality yet will find it increasingly hard to get any kind of critical mass on the service.

Thankfully, as Nik points out, Feedburner addressed the issue and the RSS subscriber stats of the blog in question are now showing the correct figure. I can verify that I checked this myself, before said blog removed access to his Feedburner chicklet. The rightful figure is less than 30,000 - not quite "hundreds of thousands" I think you'll agree.

It's great that Feedburner fixed this issue quickly (and thank you to Pageflakes for also working it out), but really this kind of web stats exaggeration has to stop, for the good of the industry. While Google is trying its best to stamp out click fraud on CPC ads, there is a more subtle fraud that can be perpetrated by fudging your web stats - either through quoting outlandish Urchin or web server stats, or by other means.

The company's Twitter statistics (as with all URL shortening services) are used to determine and aggregate Twitter trends by Tweetmeme; however, as of today, according to the company these statistics "can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward." Tr.im links will continue to redirect until at least December 31, 2009.