ReadWriteWeb

Contrary to an Associated Press report implying otherwise, teens are not shutting down their Facebook accounts in favor of Twitter.

Emil Protalinski has a much more thorough analysis of what is happening, which includes the Pew Research report AP used, as well as a July 2011 Pew report that focused solely on teens and social media use. His conclusion? Teens are definitely using Twitter more, but they are not giving up their Facebook accounts to do so.

Services like Read It Later and Instapaper have developed huge followings from people who want to quickly set aside content for when they have more time, or to access it offline.

Now, along comes Spool, which promises to do much of the same link-saving as Read It Later and Instapaper, with the added perk of being able to do the same with video. We've been playing around with Spool, which remains in invite-only mode, for the past several days and found that it works (mostly) as advertised.

We also have invites available for those of you who want to try Spool out but don't want to wait around for an invite of your own.

Tout got a big boost when Shaquille O'Neal announced his NBA retirement in one of the service's 15-second video clips. Before then, few people had heard of the service, which allows users to easily link the videos to their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Prior to O'Neal's unsolicited endorsement, Tout, which just launched in April, was largely unknown. After Shaq's quick message thanking fans, however, interest in the service exploded. "We got lucky with him being so involved with it," said Melissa Breen of Tout.

But since then, interest in Shaq may have risen thanks for Tout.

Noticed some Facebook downtime? We have. It's intermittent, but Facebook has some trouble with uptime right now, and a Twitter account representing Anonymous claims responsibility (somewhat obliquely, in order to troll tech bloggers).

In some kind of conflation of Facebook with the government, a puppet representing Anonymous threatened Facebook with an attack in retaliation for SOPA/PIPA (though other Anonymous sources denied involvement). That was scheduled for three days from now. The organization has declared war against Facebook in the past, but Facebook is no ordinary target. It's the cream of the crop. It's practically never down. Has Anonymous finally cracked it?

When Facebook announced 60 new social sharing apps, I wrote about two that weren't joining the party. And now I'm trying to tell you about the top 5 social apps on Facebook?

I know what you're thinking. But as much as we (and I) have issues with Facebook's feelings about privacy and data, sharing intrinsically makes us feel connected. Here are five frictionless sharing apps that do so in a non-creepy way.

The folks at Flowtown have put together a quick reference guide to six different social media services. Called the SMB Social Media Cheat Sheet, it contains basic stats on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Tumblr and Digg. What, no LinkedIn? That is perhaps the biggest missing service, but otherwise the infographic, reproduced below, is worth bookmarking for those noobs in your company that are looking to learn more about each service.

Much has been said about Facebook's Timeline feature, but very little attention has been paid to the actual tech behind the feature. Timeline goes well beyond the scope of Facebook's previous profile pages and deals with years of Facebook activity. Starting this Fall, O'Reilly and Cloudera are going to be smooshing together their conferences, and Siddharth Anand has some thoughts on the state of NoSQL in 2012.

The State of NoSQL in 2012 – Anand has some thoughts on the limitations of today's NoSQL options. "Many of the NoSQL vendors view the "battle of NoSQL" to be akin to the RDBMS battle of the 80s, a winner-take-all battle. In the NoSQL world, it is by no means a winner-take-all battle. Distributed Systems are about compromises."

It's late afternoon, and you're clicking around on Facebook. Then you stumble upon a person who appears to be Facebook friends with many of your mutual friends. This person is active on Facebook, posting links, videos, images and status updates. Still, something just seems off. A bit more digging reveals that this user isn't a real person. But Facebook hasn't noticed. Sound familiar?

"Facebook has always been based on a real name culture," a Facebook spokesperson says to me via email. "We fundamentally believe this leads to greater accountability and a safer and more trusted environment for people who use the service." But what if you need to maintain a fake profile for personal, professional, security or creative reasons?

Pro-Internet freedom Americans aren't the only ones who got pumped up about this Wednesday's Internet blackout day.

The L.A. Times reports that Chinese Internet users praised American Internet users for taking action against their own government. Wen Yunchao, a prominent Chinese blogger and government critic who left the mainland for Hong Kong, says that China's Great Firewall, which was initially about stopping online piracy and pornography, quickly became about Internet censorship of websites and content. Critics of SOPA/PIPA say that it would, in effect, do the same thing to the Internet in America.

Mark Zuckerberg's closely-watched, 2010 trip to China isn't the only reason why Facebook may be the safe bet on which of the major U.S.-based social networks will be the first to get the go-ahead to operate in China.

Access to Facebook, Google+ and Twitter are all currently banned by the Chinese government. Google may be renewing expansion efforts in China, but a recent crackdown on popular Chinese microblogging sites designed to mimic Twitter suggest that if any of the big three get the permission to operate in China, the nod will go to Facebook.