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There have been a lot of stats thrown at developers this week. The Pew Internet and American Life Project said that 50% of all U.S. adults have apps on their cellphones either coming from downloads or pre-loads by the carriers. Nielsen says that 43% of all U.S. adults have smartphones and that 62% of adults aged 25-44 have smartphones. This all brings us to a question all mobile developers should be asking themselves: Who are you developing for?

Coders have a habit of focusing on functionality. They see that something can be done in the environment they are working in and then go about connecting the codes, SDKs and APIs to create a dynamic app. Add some great artwork and a great app is born. Or is it? Is it a great app if nobody is using it?

A few weeks ago, we reported on some demographic information about the first wave of Google Plus adopters. Bime, the data visualization firm who conducted the study, found that early Google Plus users were mostly young American men working in technology (surprise!). The Bime study used profile data from Find People on Plus, a third-party directory of Google Plus users, except for the age numbers, which were pulled from comScore numbers.

Bime has just put out an updated visualization that breaks down Google Plus demographics including the month of August, now that the service has had some time to grow. This survey covered 10 million users, more than twice the size of the previous one, and some things haven't changed. About 70% of Google Plus users still identify as men, and the vast bulk of them are American. One major shift has taken place, though: While the updated post doesn't have the age numbers (which came from a different dataset last time), the occupation data show that students have overwhelmingly displaced tech workers, though all the same tech jobs as before dominate the rest of the top spots.

Flurry has a new version 3.0 of its free Analytics tool that focuses on audience segmentation, giving mobile application makers the power to segment their audience on any usage behavior (e.g., paying vs. non-paying customers, light vs. heavy users, etc.). They also estimate demographic data such as age and gender for any application using their service. Mechanisms have also been added to this version to allow you to test how long viewers stay in your app. The company says its analytics tools are now in apps reaching 300 million monthly unique users, tracking six billion transactions a day.

Today, PlaySpan, a subsidiary of Visa whose UltimatePay product provides global in-app payments for Facebook Credits and other gaming platforms, released a demographic breakdown of U.S. gamers who purchase virtual goods. The study finds that gamers are beginning to purchase more virtual content with real money, rather than credits given for free by advertisers. According to PlaySpan, nearly 31% of the gamer population has purchased virtual content with real money, and of those, 57% do it at least once a month.

But their profile of the average U.S. gamer varies noticeably from what the Entertainment Software Association found in their 2011 report. The two studies have markedly different measurements of the age and gender breakdown of U.S. gamers.

Older Internet consumers are very low users of smartphones and online media, states a new report from McKinsey. To analyze this more, we decided to compare the youngest and oldest groups surveyed: "Digital-media Junkies" (average age 28) and "Traditionalists" (average age 48).

McKinsey states that "Digital-media junkies" are three times more likely to be early adopters of new technologies. This segment makes up 19% of McKinsey's survey, up 7% from 2008. The "Traditionalists" meanwhile make up 24% of the survey respondents, the same as in 2008. Traditionalists overwhelmingly do not own smartphones. They also have not yet adopted online media devices, such as tablets and e-readers.

Many words have been expended covering user demographics on Google Plus, mostly regarding whether or not the newborn social network is dominated by men. The data visualization wizards at Bime have just posted an interactive dashboard of Google Plus data that gives us a much more granular picture.

According to a new report from the Luxury Institute, today's affluent mobile customers are getting into smartphone applications, with 34% having downloaded apps onto their phones and 11% reporting they have plans to do so soon.

So what apps are these customers go for? The free ones, of course. As it turns out, even though they can well afford to pay, 39% of affluent customers using mobile apps only download non-paid apps. Says the report, "having to pay extra for downloaded applications is the leading barrier to more widespread use of mobile apps." That may go for the rest of us too.

New data from Nielsen out today delves into the behavior of the youngest mobile consumers: the American teenager. The study further solidifies what we've known for some time - teens are heavy-duty users of text messaging services. No other demographic group texts as much as teens do, with an average of 3,339 texts sent and received per month. (For girls, it's even higher - 4,050 texts per month!)

But the study also revealed that teens are now turning to mobile applications, too, with 38% of teens using downloadable apps like those from Facebook, Pandora and YouTube. And usage in this area is growing, says Nielsen.

Facebook just announced the availability of a new feature for users creating accounts on the social network: Suggested Interests. Facebook will now recommend that new users sign up for updates from ("Like") publishers with high reader engagement and subscribed-to by people demographically similar to themselves. That's a unique combination of factors that only Facebook could offer.

If this intersection of 3 key social software trends is someday exposed more fully to all 500 million Facebook users and more - the Facebook vs. Google battle could become a fight between Recommendation and Search. Facebook recommendations are in the sidebar for most users today, but they are so powerful that it's worth betting they'll be center stage in the future.

Ten years ago, most people were not aware of blogs and blogging. Today, however, blogging is a mainstream phenomenon. While it doesn't get the same hype as Twitter and Facebook today, there are still millions of blogs and bloggers out there. Looking at almost 100 million blog posts in its database, social media monitoring and analytics firm Sysomos created a mini-census of today's blogosphere. Specifically, Sysomos looked at the age, gender and location information attached to these posts.