ReadWriteWeb

The social media data company Rapleaf has just released the final parts of their 3-part study involving the demographics and online behavior of webmail users. In the first part of the study, gender and age data was examined and revealed some interesting findings...like the fact that Gmail has more female users than male, for example. In the final sections of the study, the company has turned its attention to social networking data to discover more details about webmail users' social media profiles, memberships and network preferences.

Facebook has just added a new photo uploader tool to their Prototypes directory, the "labs" section of the social network where new programs are released for testing prior to their public rollout. The uploader dramatically improves on what was previously one of the worst experiences on Facebook: adding photos. Despite the fact that Facebook hosts over 80 billion photos and adds around 2 billion more each month, the process of adding new photos to your profile was cumbersome, slow and buggy. Even Facebook itself admitted there were problems saying that most users found the tool "functional, but only just." They also discovered that a significant percentage of users couldn't even upload photos due to technical issues. Because of these complaints, the company finally decided it was time to revamp their uploader for good.

After a predefined period designed to increase transparency and maximize user feedback, Facebook has announced that, with fewer than 7,000 user comments, it will proceed to implement its proposed amended privacy policy.

With adequate user information, Facebook hoped to become better stewards of "the unnaturally uncontrollable nature of communication," as we called their general user-data privacy dilemma in June. And this revision also makes a nod to Canadian objections to Facebook's policies. What's in store for users, and how did the thousands of units of user data impact Facebook's governance and privacy policy? Read on to get the full story.

In late August Br.st was nothing more than a URL shortener service with link stats and malware filters. While the company allowed users to cross post to social networks like Twitter, Myspace and Digg, it was simply too late to the space to be considered a contender. As of today the caterpillar has transformed into a butterfly. Br.st is spreading it's new wings with a slew of features and instead of resembling Bitly, it's looking a lot closer to the current social media reader of choice Brizzly.

The New Oxford American Dictionary announced its Word of the Year today and like everyone else, the organization is keeping an eye on the internet. Its selection? unfriend - verb - To remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook.

Has Oxford Dictionary made the right selection? ReadWriteWeb's Founder Richard MacManus thinks not. I disagree with him; I think this is a very valid Word of the Year. We make our cases below and invite you to cast your vote in a poll.

Barack Obama spoke to a group of Chinese students tonight at a town hall in Shanghai. The meeting was streamed live, worldwide on the Whitehouse website and on the Whitehouse's Facebook page. He was asked a limited number of questions by the audience and one was about Twitter, which has been blocked in China since July.

Got that? The President went to China, was asked about Twitter and it was streamed live on his Facebook page. How the world has changed.

News reverberated through the developer community that long-time and highly prominent community contributor Joe Hewitt has quit developing the iPhone Facebook application. While Joe said that Apple has the right to do what it wants, he does not agree with its policies and has chosen to move on. Joe posted this tweet in the afternoon of November 11th:

"Time for me to try something new. I've handed the Facebook iPhone app off to another engineer, and I'm onto a new project."

Though I'm chronically checking in on services like Brightkite, Loopt and Foursquare, it's rare that I'll actually make an appearance at the behest of a friend's status update. For the slovenly masses that work from home, venturing out to meet friends on a weeknight can seem daunting. But rather than submit to the unkempt perils of pantless utopia, there's hope. Sponty offers us a chance to plan and prep for casual outings.

The news from Palo Alto Networks reinforces what we should probably expect will be the norm for the foreseeable future. According to the company's Application Usage and Risk Report, social technologies and collaborative applications are moving deep into the enterprise with Twitter seeing a 250 percent increase in use since Spring of last year.

In face of a report like this, it makes sense that Enterprise 2.0 technologies would be a fit for companies. Employees understand how social technologies function. Collaborative applications make sense for getting the work done.

We've just found a new application for finding your Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections and other friends from around the web on Facebook - all at once and all quite simply.

This tool is called FBFriendFinder. It comes from the Dutch web dev shop Open & Sociaal, and it works like a charm by using OAuth, Facebook Connect and contact export functions to gather enough data to organize a user's social graph. The most interesting part, however, isn't the technology but the business model. You have to read it to believe it.

Digital marketing company Razorfish has just launched its third annual FEED survey of 1,000 "connected consumers." The survey is focused on online consumer behavior. This year Facebook and Twitter feature prominently. 40% of respondents "friended" brands on Facebook, while 25% reported following brands on Twitter. What's more, Razorfish found that consumers access brands on Twitter and Facebook mainly for deals and promotions.

Of those who follow a brand on Twitter, nearly 44% reported that access to exclusive deals is the main reason. On Facebook or MySpace, 37% said that access to exclusive deals or offers was their main reason for friending brands.

Five years ago I interviewed tech publisher Tim O'Reilly about a new term that his company had just coined: Web 2.0. The first Web 2.0 conference had been held the previous month, October 2004, and O'Reilly had graciously agreed to give an interview to yours truly - "an unknown blogger from New Zealand," as I put it back then. The interview ran in a 3-part series (see also part 2 and part 3) and covered Web 2.0, new business models, social software and eBooks.

I've always been a big believer in learning from history as we look to the future. So let's re-visit this interview from five years ago and see how prescient the father of Web 2.0 was.

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we analyze how Google CEO Eric Schmidt thinks the Web will evolve, review Hulu's latest plans to make money, investigate use cases for Google Wave, ask why VCs aren't investing in Augmented Reality, review the latest Mobile Web statistics, and more. We also check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

Thanks to the popularity of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, it's a given that malicious hackers will devise ways to exploit the sites' numerous users in order to infect their computers with malware. This unwanted software is designed to do a number of terrible things ranging from identity theft to turning computer into remote-controllable "zombie" machines.

Without sufficient anti-virus and malware protection programs installed, social networking users can easily become victims to these ever-evolving attacks. However, the best way to avoid becoming a victim yourself is to be aware of what's out there and what sorts of things you should avoid. Below are the best practices which you should use on Facebook and Twitter in order to keep yourself safe.

Hitwise, a web traffic analytics firm that often publishes fun and interesting stats on issues of the day, looks today at how threatened Facebook's growth might be by Twitter. The company's conclusion: Twitter is no threat at all.

Traffic to Twitter is declining, Hitwise General Manager of Global Research Bill Tancer writes, while Facebook's growth continues to go through the roof. Facebook is approaching ubiquity, while Twitter's appeal is narrow and its average registered user is totally unengaged. "That being said," Tancer writes, "I still plan to tweet this entry."

Today, Facebook has published a developer roadmap outlinining upcoming relevant changes and a rough timeline for each.

Changes include developer access to user emails, more prominent app displays on user profiles, all-new homepage dashboards for apps and games, and improvements to Open Graph and Analytics APIs. Facebook Connect libraries will be "smaller, clearer, and faster," and app policies and principles will be streamlined and uniformly enforced. Read on for details and screenshots of the new faces of Facebook apps.

New data released from Experian Hitwise reconfirms what we've known for some time: Facebook is killing the other social networks. Nowhere is that more true than here in the U.S. where they found that the visits to the site have increased 194% from September of last year to September 2009. However, it's Twitter that's seen the largest year-over-year increase in visits - during that same time period, they're up 1170%. But one of the oddest findings being reported is how the social network known as Tagged is beating out Twitter for the number three spot in terms of visits.

If Facebook were a country, it would be the 3rd most populous country on earth behind China and India - but now Facebook thinks it can play Switzerland and lead a push for world peace. I'm not so sure that's a good idea.

Facebook and the Persuasive (no, not pervasive, persuasive) Technology Lab at Stanford launched what they call the "dot peace" campaign today. There's reason to pause before enthusiastically supporting the effort. There are other ways that Facebook could make the world a better place and there are some reasons why the company deserves caution more than trust when it comes to its political agenda.

Social Search just went live in Google Labs. Google announced that it was working on this Social Search feature at the Web 2.0 Summit last week, but at that time, Google's Marissa Mayer announced that it would only be available "in a few weeks." Social Search taps into a user's social network profiles and displays relevant links and status updates that members of a user's own social network have shared at the bottom of the default search results page. According to Google, Social Search will enhance the search experience on Google by providing users with more personally relevant search results.

Joining the ranks of tools such as Tweetmeme and Digg widgets, Facebook's Share button will now be showing the number of users who share items in real time - and with a new set of analytics features.

Facebook Platform product manager Mark Kinsey writes on the Facebook Developers blog, "Today we're making the sharing experience on Facebook and off even richer by launching the next version of Facebook Share, with a live counter, as well as new ways to measure how content is being shared on Facebook."