Those people who click heavily have a number of other characteristics of note. "Heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000," the study said, and they "are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers."

These numbers probably speak for themselves, and will mean different things to different people, but we do hope that our unusually engaged readers will enjoy checking out the services of RWW advertisers. :)

The news coverage of this study seem to make the assumption that generally, Facebook was at least partially (or even in the case of Yahoo! News, completely) responsible for the students' scores being lower. But it seems to me that there are too many outside factors that aren't being accounted for to make a causal link with Facebook in this case. First, the student themselves denied Facebook use was causing their bad study habits and lower test scores. It makes just as much sense to say those students are looking for distractions from their studies, and socializing is certainly a popular student pastime, whether it be in person or on Facebook.

It was noted that undergraduate students and students who participated in extra-curricular activities were both more likely to use Facebook and have a lower GPA. If there is a connection with Facebook use, I think it would be more reasonable to say that these students would be distracted by online socialization whether Facebook existed or not. This is also a theory that was put forth by Aryn in the report:

"It may be that if it wasn't for Facebook, some students would still find other ways to avoid studying, and would still get lower grades.  But perhaps the lower GPAs could actually be because students are spending too much time socializing online."

As long as everyone is guessing what the data in this report really means, you might want to read up on the term continuous partial attention, the state in which you multitask, but are motivated by a desire not to miss anything. More studies have proven that people who multitask (think texting on a phone while driving) already end up doing each of the tasks worse, and if you include the willingness to be continuously distracted by online goings-on, it could definitely mean that critical scholastic skills such as rote memory and concentration are noticeably affected.

"Users will experience a slow, subtle degradation, so it's back to the bad old days of dial-up," Nemertes President Johna Till Johnson told USA Today. "The cool stuff that you'll want to do will be such a pain in the rear that you won't do it."

According to the report, cable and phone companies, which provide 94% of the United States' broadband access, must invest about $55 billion to upgrade their networks to cope with the coming bottleneck. That is far more than planned, says Nemertes.

"Two years ago, nobody knew what YouTube was," said Johnson. "Now, it's generating 27 petabytes of data per month."

Much of the cost of upgrading will be in installation of higher-capacity lines, according to the Nemertes study. Verizon's new fiber optic service, FiOS, which reaches 1.3 million users in the US (myself included) is a start, but the study implies that the upgrade may not be happening fast enough to stave off an impending bandwidth crunch.

This year, TV viewing is even breaking records. The average time a U.S. home used a TV set during the 2007-08 television season was up to 8 hours and 18 minutes per day, a record high since Nielsen started measuring television in the 1950's.

Since Nielsen only measures TV viewing in the U.S., that could explain the differences between their findings and those of the IBM study. Or perhaps the IBM study was just a little too subjective. A poll where you ask people to rate their own habits can't compete with the cold, hard data that comes from the Nielsen boxes installed in thousands of homes across the U.S.

TV Execs, Remember: All Three Screens Are Doing Well

We're glad that network TV isn't going away anytime soon, but we're concerned now that this report will give the ever-hesitant TV networks another reason to back away from making their videos available online. If they only hear the part about "TV viewing having a record year," then they're going to miss another very important aspect to this report: viewing has increased on all three screens. That means that even though TV viewing is an all-time high, both mobile viewing and online videos are seeing a surge as well. If anything, that should be a huge encouragement to the industry as it proves that, not only does online and mobile video not detract from TV viewing, there's an opportunity to monetize all three screens for record amounts of income too.

Of course, that's if you believe Nielsen's numbers. IBM said otherwise. (Wait, IBM said? Since when is IBM an expert in TV?) Well, maybe the other counties IBM polled are behaving differently, but here in the U.S. it seems the TV is still king.

Reporters are shocked by the findings. We're in shock that this is where the state of academic study is concerning social technology use vs. workplace filtering technology when it comes to productivity. A 9% increase in productivity? Try using these social technologies for on topic work and you'll see productivity increases that make 9% look like nothing.

"People who do surf the Internet for fun at work - within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office - are more productive by about 9% than those who don't," said Dr Brent Coker, from the Melbourne Department of Management and Marketing. Got that? You can spend as much as 20% of your time at work dorking around on the internet and still end up 9% more productive than people who don't! Print this article and put it in your wallet for the next time you get in trouble for browsing on the job, eh?

In fact, this isn't an entirely worthless insight. We like to use StumbleUpon every once in a while just to run some cool water through the pathways of the brain associated with imagination.

Really, though, reading news feeds at work and using social networking sites (especially Twitter) can lead to so many multiples in productivity that any surprise over this 9% finding is hard to wrap our heads around.

On-demand access to geographically dispersed, topic-specific knowledge and feedback through both synchronous and asynchronous communication over multiple technology platforms is what social media use at work can be and that is a game changer. Could someone please study that?

What this study says to us is that the social web is so incredibly powerful that even people who don't know how to use it find themselves made 9% more productive because of it - on accident. Studying that seems like missing the point, though it is interesting.

Photo: Shock-ed by Flickr user CarbonNYC.

PatentSim was presented as a game in which the goal is to make as much money as possible. In each environment, subjects combined objects in a "Creation Box" to simulate an invention. Whenever a subject created an invention and clicked on the "Make" button, money would appear in their virtual bank. In the pure patent and mixed patent environments, subjects could also click on a "Patent" button to increase their profit. Each patent was priced at $20 and each use of a lawyer also cost $20. At the end of the study, students had produced significantly more inventions and profit in the commons environment when they were not being penalized for patent infringement or were busy enforcing their patents.

The study suggests that innovation not only thrives in a competitive environment, but that more profit can be generated by inventors in a commons system. Because PatentSim is just a simulation, readers need to take findings with a grain of salt. While the rate of inventions would likely increase without patents, it's tough to tell if inventors would really see unlimited profit potential in an environment free of patents. After all, how many different zipper pulls does the market demand?

Nevertheless, in some cases, the demand for a product or process is all too evident. Imagine the competitive market for hearing aids and prosthetics, or the success rate of farmers who are free to use the best possible processes. And honestly, does HIV really care if it's being treated by Glaxo, Pfizer or a tested generic knockoff?

This study is important in that it might spur policy makers to question how we look at innovation. Are inventions just disparate exclusively-owned products, or should we be sharing them out of necessity to solve our bigger-picture problems?

Those big conclusions may be relatively unsurprising but the study also includes a number of other tidbits that might be news to you, as they were to us. It's a really interesting snapshot of different cultural contexts and technology use patterns.

• The United States has the world's highest percentage of Opera Mini users over the age of 48 (7%) and 20% of US web users are women.


• Mobile web users in India are 97% male and that country has the lowest percentage of under-18 mobile web users (5.6%)


• South Africa has the world's highest percentage of women mobile web users (25%) and Facebook is the top site accessed in Opera Mini in that country.

The study is full of interesting statistical observations like the above and is displayed in a very readable format.

While the mobile web and Opera Mini in particularly are very widely used around the world, they are also only a part of the emerging global mobile experience. We like to read about mobile social change activities, often based on SMS, over at MobileActive - a great place to learn about different ways people around the world are using their phones. danah boyd's recent blog post about the way that Palestinian girls receive cell phones as a gift from boyfriends to facilitate serendipitous communication and then struggle with expectations that they will not use it to communicate with other people is also a very interesting read.

Some people argue that a binary definition of gender is falsely limiting and inappropriate for an accurate observation of any cultural experience, but the vast majority of people in much of the world do self-identify as one gender tied specifically to their sex. In that context, it's unclear on what it means that men are 10X as likely to use the mobile web as women - but who would have been surprised if the study had concluded that men spent 10X as much time on the mobile web (including at the dinner table)?

Opera's study will no doubt be discussed in settings ranging from marketing to advocacy of social equity in technology. It's a good one to have in the back of your mind when thinking about the mobile web.

According to a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, this is also what Obama's supporters expect from their candidate. 46% of Obama voters expect the newly elected President to reach out to them directly through email, social networks, and text messages.

Looking back at the election campaign, the Pew survey also found that 59% voters flocked to the net for campaign activities before the general election.

Can the Administration Sustain this Enthusiasm?

Sustaining this enthusiasm among voters will be a challenge for the new administration, however. The Pew study rightly asks if these voters will remain politically engaged once the excitement of the election has worn off. At the same time, the administration itself will have to work hard to fulfill these expectations and to sustain its own enthusiasm for these new technologies. After all, it has now been almost 56 days since Obama last used Twitter.

It will also be interesting to see if the Republican party will now turn to the net to mobilize its supporters in preparation for the next election cycle.

"People bristle at personalization just for the sake of personalization," said Tiffany Barnett White, the professor who headed the research. Barnett White found that relevance was one important factor in increasing recipient interest, but ultimately it was the actual value being offered that made the lion's share of the difference in peoples' reaction. At a time when information overload is often being responded to by varying degrees of personalization, we believe this study is worthy of consideration.

What This Means

We would argue that this behavior is probably common in online communication in general. If your service is personalizing its messages to users for anything but a very good reason, it's probably a bad idea. Flickr's "welcome [username]" in various languages around the world is cool - but other forms of fake personalization are not. Now we've got the numbers to prove it.

We've written here about how we want to get RSS feeds from PR agencies, not just emails - but the pseudo personalized emails are pretty obnoxious. The most obnoxious are emails personalized with our competitors' names! (This happens at least once a week.) We also receive any number of other emails from online training services, conferences and others that include some personal information. Especially when this personalization tricks us into opening the email, then we really get angry at whoever sent us that email.

We are interested to know whether you, [Reader'sName], feel the same way - or if you are someone who uses this kind of personalization in your online communication and have seen different results.

Image from Beth Kanter

As Michael Chin points out on the KickApps blog, social media first changed how we interacted with friends, family, and customers. Now, as consumers are getting more familiar with these tools, they also expect them to be a way to interact with companies - and based on this data from Cone, they want this to be a two-way conversation.

Here are some other interesting data points from the study:

• 60% of Americans regularly interact with companies on a social media site
• 43% of consumers say that companies should use social networks to solve the consumers' problems
• 41% believe that companies should use social media tools to solicit feedback on products and services
• Men are more likely to use social media tools to interact with a company than women (33% vs. 17%)
• 33% of younger consumers (18-34) and those with household incomes over $75,000 believe that companies should try to market to them through social networks

It would be nice to see Cone break these numbers down a bit more. What types of social media sites, for example, do users prefer? Are there any specific categories of companies and brands that they want to see on these sites? How exactly do they want to be marketed to? What do they think about implications for their privacy?

What is clear, however, is that social media is quickly becoming an important means for companies to reach consumers - and that consumer are also quickly changing their expectations about how, when, and where they want to be marketed to. As more users are embracing social media (and often to the detriment of traditional media), companies have no choice but to follow them.

After logging in, you will be prompted to create sets of cards with any information you want to study. Questions on the front, answers on the back.

Once the set is ready, you can begin flipping through the cards, testing your knowledge. Then, you can mark whether you got the answer right or wrong. All of this information feeds the algorithm, which serves up the cards in an order that helps you practice the topics that you're missing while keeping you refreshed on the topics you know.

But the true value of Cramberry is the fact that the service makes your flashcards accessible wherever you go. Use them while you're sitting at your desk, at the coffee shop, or even on your phone.

What if you don't want to build flashcards? Cramberry has just announced that they'll begin releasing a library of public cards in the not too distant future. Once available, you'll be able to choose from any number of topics on which you'd like to learn.

Again, a simple service. But sometimes, it's those simple things - like something as simple as saving your bookmarks to the Web - that provide the most value. If you're having trouble remembering some important facts, give Cramberry a try.

In the latter parts of the study, the company looked specifically at social network membership data for users of the AOL, Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo webmail services. Not surprisingly, the study found that Facebook was the most popular network across the board. What's more interesting is how well MySpace fared in some cases. On both the Hotmail and Yahoo webmail services, Facebook only had a small lead. Here, around 20% of all Hotmail and Yahoo webmail users were found to be on Facebook and MySpace. What does this reveal about the Hotmail and Yahoo user base? That they're a little more behind the times? Or that they've been around on the net longer and at one time had created (and possibly now abandoned) their MySpace pages? Unfortunately, the study can't provide us with these sorts of answers.

The study also showed that Twitter is far more popular among Gmail users than anyone else. In fact, on the other services, it's 4-5 times less popular than Facebook. We would like to think that's because Gmail users are just more web-savvy and cool, but it's possible that it's because they're just younger than everyone else.

Not surprisingly, LinkedIn is the least popular social network, but as Rapleaf points out, many LinkedIn users may have registered with their business email instead.

Participation Levels - Hotmail Users have Most Profiles, Gmail Users Better-Connected

When it comes to how the webmail users participate on social networks, Rapleaf found that the majority of the users have only one social media profile. But the service where the average number of profiles is the highest might surprise you - it's Hotmail. There the average is 2.5 profiles per user. Hotmail is followed by Yahoo, then AOL, and it's Gmail users who have the least number of social media profiles. That finding seems odd considering that Gmail users are younger and more likely to use Twitter in addition to Facebook. In fact, it almost seems like this data doesn't even fit with the rest of the study.

However, the discovery that Gmail users are better-connected than the other users makes more sense. On average, Gmail users have the most friends on social networks with 46.2 friends while Yahoo users have the least with 40.0.

Since again, Gmail users tend to be younger than the rest, it goes to reason that they would be in a demographic where their peers are more likely to have social membership profiles. Older webmail users, meanwhile, are still signing up for these sites. Although baby boomers and other middle-aged folks are joining sites like Facebook in droves these days, social networks are still dominated by the young.

Methodology

For the Rapleaf study, the company sampled 120,000 webmail accounts from users with @aol.com, @gmail.com, @hotmail.com and @yahoo.com email addresses. They then looked into the users' age, gender and social networking data by collecting information from public social media profiles. Obviously, in doing so, they've skewed their findings a bit, as the company notes in their original blog post. However, the sample size is large enough to form some conclusions about the members of these services, even if it relied on a particular subset of users.

According to a study done by the Sand Hill Group and Neochange, the most critical factor (70% listed it as number 1) for software success and return-on-investment is effective user adoption.

You can have the best software in the world, with the most sophisticated features, analytics and integration, blah blah blah - but if people don't use it, it isn't going to add value. I can't tell you how many RFPs and software selection processes I've been involved with in prior lives that focus almost exclusively on tiny little features that few people will ever use. This study shows that focusing so much on features is missing the boat entirely.

This finding is very interesting for all kinds of applications, particularly enterprise apps but also consumer apps. Features very rarely make someone take to an application or not. Moreover, I doubt most software companies really take user adoption as a holistic approach into account when designing their applications.

If this trend is accurate (and my experience tells me it is), then I think it has very interesting ramifications on how software should be designed, sold and implemented. User adoption is typically something that comes at the end of a cycle. This says it should be one of the most important elements of the entire process. Please share any opinions or war stories that either confirm or refute this conclusion.

Email Marketing a Top Priority

Those companies that are seeing the current downturn as a chance to expand and that are planning to spend more on their online efforts this year, say that they will focus their investments on search (80%), email (65%), and social marketing (60%). According to this report, these businesses see email as one of the most important means to communicate with their customers and most plan to use it to inform customers of new product launches, promotions, and to get customer feedback. 90% of all respondents listed a focus on email marketing as a top priority.

Companies Won't Scale Back Social Media Campaigns

Interestingly, the study also found that those companies that are growing faster than expected during this downturn are also more likely to embrace social media. Even those companies that are planning to scale back their online operations this year still plan to experiment with social media campaigns.

Imaged used courtesy of Flickr user jakerome.