"It became very, very evident to me that as technology moves forward, there will come a day where we'll be able to not just create animation based upon our comic books and our characters and stories that we've told, but there will come a time when eventually we'll be able to take existing comic art, the flat, static art, and be able to animate it," said Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada. "So [now] we can put out a product that is not quite a comic book and not quite animation, [but] a wonderful hybrid that incorporates all of our great talents."

X-Men and Spider-Woman are among the first books to take on the new format. No pricing or release date has been set.

While printed works have always held promise on iTunes - and the iPhones and iPods that derive content from it - this new comic format could be the perfect fit for the handheld Apple devices that excel with audio and video.

When you combine the Apple hardware - or any device capable of playing iTunes content - with the geek appeal of Marvel's universe of heroes, this seems like a sure winner for both Marvel and iTunes.

In the original research study that examined offline interactions, the researchers found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. In other words, your happiness is related to that of your friends, your friends' friends, and their friends' friends. They also discovered that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and are found in large clusters of other happy people. For each additional happy friend, a person's probability of being happy increases by about 9%.

Armed with these results, the researchers decided to see if the offline research could translate to the online world as well. Of course, determining happiness in the online world is more difficult - a smiling profile picture does not necessarily equate to you being a happy person.

The Facebook Study

The study began with the researchers examining a group of 1700 college students interconnected on the social networking site Facebook. They took note of the students' profiles and who their friends were. They also noted whether the profile photos contained a smiling face. Next, the researchers looked at the other photos found in the students' Facebook albums, this time paying careful attention to who "tagged" who in the photos. This was important because the people who take the trouble to be in the same place, take a photograph together, upload the photograph, and label ("tag") it, almost always have a closer relationship with each other than they do with the rest of the "friends" found on people's profile pages. These "photo friends" tend to represent a person's real-life friends. In fact, the average student in the study had over 110 friends on Facebook, but they had an average of only six of these "photo friends" (close friends).

To determine happiness, the researchers noted who was smiling in these tagged photos. Although they admitted that smiling is, of course, very different than happiness, it was as close as they could come in the virtual world. Apparently, that may have been close enough.

Happiness Is Contagious

The data from results of the online study ended up correlating to their offline study - the results were essentially the same, they were just translated to the digital world. What the researchers found was that smiling students were surrounded by others who were also smiling in small "happiness clusters." Those who were not smiling seem to be located more peripherally in the network. After performing statistical analysis, they determined that those who smile also tend to have more friends - on average one extra friend, which is good considering that people only tend to have six close friends. Those who smiled were also more likely to be at the center of the network when compared to those who don't.

You can see the results of the study mapped out in the image below. The figure shows just a part of the Facebook network, containing 353 students. The smiling people who are surrounded by other smiling people are in yellow, those frowning or giving any other "serious" look are in blue, and those in green indicate a mix of smiling and non-smiling friends.

In the end, the main conclusion of the study was that, whether online or offline, "when you smile, the world smiles with you."

Image credits: smile, suchitra prints; network, edge.org; smiling girl, porcelaingirl

As of October 29, 2008, the Market offered 167 applications, the vast majority of which were categorized as tools or games. Of those apps, roughly a quarter garner the lion's share of the downloads.

So what types of apps are Android users downloading? Turns out the most popular Android apps, so far, are very similar to those that tend to lead the iPhone market: entertainment and reference.

Pac-Man and the Weather Channel lead all apps. Ringdroid - an app that allows users to record and edit sounds - and iPhone-favorite Shazam - an app that can "listen" to a song and help users identify the name and artist - are also among the top downloads. Yes, there's also a flashlight app.

How does Android Market traffic compare with the Apple App Store? At this point, it's difficult to tell. Based on the initial metrics, VentureBeat offers estimates that the Android Market downloads may reach "58 million after 100 days." For comparison, the Apple App Store reached 100 million downloads in 60 days.

While the Android Market numbers aren't earth shattering or record breaking, they are respectable. Given the current trends, the number of downloads should climb steadily, as should the number of applications available for download.

We're sure to see more and more happening with the Market and the handset it supports - even though Google is currently in the position of following a path established by Apple. Lest we forget, this isn't the first market Google has entered in this position. And they seem to have done fairly well for themselves in those markets. Will Android prove to be a similar win? That remains to be seen.