ReadWriteWeb

Yesterday, as Facebook rolled out their revamped homepage which delivered new features like real-time updates, filters, and an improved sharing box, another update was quietly occurring behind the scenes. While everyone was busy analyzing the front-end changes to the user interface, Facebook announced to advertisers there were some major updates coming for them as well. According to a Facebook blog post, advertisers are now able to target ads based on languages spoken and the location of users.

The share of adult internet users who are involved in social networking online has more than quadrupled in the past four years in the U.S. In 2005, only 8% of adults had a social network profile. As of December 2008, that number was 35%. What motivates those in older generations to go online? Is it the opportunity to professionally network with their colleagues? The answer may surprise you.

If there's any doubt that Facebook is rapidly becoming the next big thing in social networks, you only need look at their recent statistics. According to new reports, in recent weeks Facebook is growing at a rate of 600,000 users each day, up from 300,000 to 400,000 users per day earlier this quarter. The company is also reporting that, as of today, they have reached 140 million active users.

Crowd Science is a new tool that allows web publishers to gather demographic data. We're using Crowd Science currently on ReadWriteWeb - you may have already come across a pop-up invite and filled out the survey. If you haven't, that's because it's done randomly. So if you do get the Crowd Science pop-up, we'd love it if you filled in the demographic survey. The data from this survey lets us know more about our readers, which helps guide us in our topic selection and so on. Plus of course it enables us to get sponsors and ads that are highly relevant.

PolicyMap is a new website that offers more than 4,000 points of data about any location in the United States, including demographics, real estate markets, crime, schools, housing affordability, employment type, energy consumption, and public investments. It's powered by a new Application Programming Interface (API) from commercial mapping service PushPin.

Google announced this morning that YouTube's new Insight video viewer analytics now includes free demographic stats on any video's viewers. YouTube users who have included gender in their user profiles can be anonymously reported and providing your age is a requirement to open an account with YouTube.

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.

Website traffic monitoring service Quantcast has launched a new search function that lets logged-in users search for sites that have particular audience demographics. Interested in finding websites that get a lot of traffic from young, childless, US "Hispanics" with an annual income over $100k per year? Quantcast suggests you check out HolaMun2, Reggaetonline.net and Power106.fm.

Demographics are extrapolated from user panels and multiplied by traffic numbers gleaned from embed codes and presumably ISP data.