ReadWriteWeb

According to new data from comScore, 6.8% of Web traffic in the U.S. comes from "non-computer" devices such as smartphones and tablets. This is an increase from 6.2% in the previous quarter.

Phones account for the majority of non-computer traffic. Mobile devices drive 4.4% of total digital traffic, tablets contribute 1.9%, and other non-computer devices send 0.5% of traffic.

On August 15, Twitter turned on its t.co link wrapper for all links longer than 19 characters. The t.co URL shortener was first announced in June of last year, and it was implemented on Twitter.com this June. Eventually, Twitter plans to wrap all links, regardless of length. Prior to that, it will increase the link length to 20 characters to accommodate the 's' that will be added as Twitter moves to secure HTTPS service by default.

From the user's perspective, t.co links appear as the first 19 characters of the real URL, without the HTTP or HTTPS visible, and they trail off into ellipses. When everything's working properly - unlike several periods of time today - users won't see an obscured t.co shortlink but rather the actual linked domain. One problem this aims to solve is the concealing of malicious links behind external URL shorteners. Twitter checks all shortened links against their list of malicious sites. But t.co also solves another less visible problem: it reveals Twitter's true influence as a referring traffic source.

According to StatCounter's measurements, StumbleUpon has just surpassed Facebook and now delivers more than half of all social media referral traffic in the U.S. StumbleUpon founder and CEO Garrett Camp tweeted the news this afternoon.

Facebook achieved this goal in April of 2010, but StumbleUpon was already well on its way. At that time, StumbleUpon already gave twice as many referrals as Twitter. StumbleUpon's user experience is fanciful and fun, but its traffic power for publishers is quite serious. While the other social networks make the headlines, StumbleUpon has been a quiet success story. In light of today's news, it won't be so quiet for long.

We've written on auto-posting before and there still seems to be a debate as to whether or not it actually affects performance to post via bot. Anecdotally, I've found that manual posting shows significant increases in performance.

When I first started at ReadWriteWeb, the updates to Facebook were automatically posted via a Facebook application. It was an easy way to make sure our fans got to see our posts, but it didn't foster community discussions so after I got my bearings around here, I stopped the app (or at least I thought I did).

It may have only launched a mere month ago, but Google Plus is already showing signs of promise to online marketers, especially in its ability to drive traffic to other Websites.

Google's brand new social product has a long way to go before it poses a realistic threat to Facebook's massive marketshare, but having surpassed the 20 million user mark in under a month, its growth has been impressive. By comparison, it took Facebook and Twitter a few years to reach the same milestone.

Is your company's Website updated more than once a week? Is it integrated with social media tools like Facebook and Twitter?

These may seem like rather basic, obvious matters at this point, but a surprising number of small businesses are not updating their sites frequently or utilizing social media as much as they could be. The cost? Lots of traffic.

Ford Motor Company has just launched its first mobile application: SYNC Destinations, available today for iPhone/iPad and Android users, with a Blackberry version due out soon. The new app provides directions, navigation and traffic information, all of which can be sent from the app to any 2010 or 2011 Ford SYNC-equipped vehicles which are TDI-capable (Traffic, Directions and Information-capable).

In other words, it's your phone talking to your car.

Twitter is often hailed as an exalted success story whose footsteps should be followed by young startups. While Twitter is certainly a successful break-out company that managed to shoehorn an innovative social communication into our already busy lives, there are plenty of things Twitter has done wrong that startups should do their best to avoid lest history repeat itself. Co-founder Jack Dorsey fielded questions during a brief discussion at DEMO in Santa Clara, California Tuesday and explained Twitter's early missteps and how to avoid them.

Digg's users are still in the middle of their fifth major revolt on the site and the effect of this current uprising is now starting to become more apparent. According to the latest data from Statcounter, referral traffic from Digg to its network hit its lowest point ever on Monday, while traffic from Digg competitor Reddit increased dramatically. Statcounter's CEO Aodhan Cullen notes that "Abandon Digg Day" on Monday turned out to be a "Redd Monday" for Reddit.

If there's one thing we know about Web authors it's that they are constantly seeking new sources of traffic for their content. It doesn't matter if you're a blogger, a marketing manager or a small business owner, there is simply no reason to invest time with content creation and Web design if no one is coming to read it. For this reason, it's important to figure out where to actually invest time for the greatest ROI.

As a blogger I routinely asked myself the same question, until I finally realized that I (as the CEO of Woopra, the Web analytics company) had access to all the data I needed to make an absolute determination about which areas deserve the most attention.