The site is unique in the news-curating space in that it uses trends from the Twitter accounts Reuters and its journalists follow to arrange headlines: in effect, the news agency is automating editing and story selection and putting it in the hands of "everyone from Nouriel Roubini and Jenna Wortham to John McCain and Rachel Sterne."

News organizations have increasingly warmed toward social media in the past several years. New York Times reporters like Brian Stelter and David Carr routinely tweet about stories they are covering and offer commentary to reactions about their reporting. Small and large outlets have used live-tweeted breaking news events and press conferences.

But the Reuters effort appears to be a major step forward in using social media to shape the news cycle. Presumably, story selection for the main news page will remain in the hands of Reuters editors.

The difference between that page and Social Pulse earlier this morning show that what Reuters editors think is important (Facebook IPO, Jobless Claims Fall and a story about the Federal Reserve, among others) is not necessarily in line with what's getting traffic on Social Pulse, which was topped by a story about a drop in Iranian currency, an increase in planned layoffs last month and a feature on Swiss watch sales.

Of the three articles at the top of Social Pulse, only one, the story about layoffs, was a Reuters story.

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.

Garg and Spencer are calling the technology behind the service SpoolBot, which Garg described as an artificial intelligence and computer vision engine. By residing on a server, SpoolBot can essentially translate content on a Web page into a format your device can understand. Garg said it was also good at keeping pace with changes on the sites where content is culled.

"What we wanted for ourselves was a simple way to have our favorite content always available, without worrying about which device I'm on (my Android phone vs. my iPad), where I am (inside, outside, home, work), or what kind of media it is (text, pdf, video)," Garg said in an email. "With one click you can save content from any of your devices, and that content shows up on all of your other devices too, is available offline, and is converted into a format that will work for you. So you don't need to worry about Flash and you don't need to worry about whether your phone has a PDF reader."

The one exception to that assertion that I found after a weekend of accessing a wide range of content in New York City's mostly WiFi-free subway system on my iPhone, iPad and laptop were YouTube videos, which can only be accessed with an Internet connection because of licensing agreements. As an aside, it also seemed as if YouTube videos accessed through Spool had more advertisements than when the same video was accessed straight through YouTubes site, and it was trickier to skip over ads using Spool than it is on YouTube.

I also didn't like that I couldn't tag videos and content or organize it into lists: my only choices were Unread, Read, Favorites and Archived. Garg assured me that adding some sort of organization and classification system was on the firm's to-do list and should be available within the next few weeks.

Saving material on Spool was, for the most part, easy. A Google Chrome extension allowed me to save videos and other content with one click. Setting up the widget on other devices was slightly more time-consuming.

Spool also connects to DropBox, allowing you to save content in a folder on DropBox and then have it automatically saved on your Spool. Users can also push content to Facebook from the Android app, the webapp, and the Chrome browser extension, with plans to add the feature to the Firefox extension and iOS app.

Users cannot, however, push content to Twitter. "We used to let users Tweet out from within the app. We've removed this feature because very few users used it," Garg said. "We're going to soon launch a feature to let users tweet links at us and we'll put those URLs into Spool."

Spool will remain in it's beta, invite-only phase at least until the Spring. ReadWriteWeb readers, however, can try Spool out without waiting for an invite.

Pinterest's users are 80% women, according to recent data from Google Ad Planner, as presented by Ignite Social Media. The site is biggest among the 25-34 age range, followed by 35-to-44-year-olds. These site's popularity among people in their late 20s and early 30s is illustrated (quite literally) by the proliferation of images related to wedding planning and home decor.

Gizmodo described the service as a sort of "Tumblr for ladies" and cited internal staff discussions in which the men expressed confusion and uncertainty and the women expressed enthusiastic approval. That's just anecdotal evidence of course, but it's supported by numbers from the likes of Google and ComScore.

Here at ReadWriteWeb, the guys are a little more receptive to the Pinterest and its potential use cases. In "A Guy's Guide to Pinterest", Dave Copeland outlined why the site isn't exclusive to women and detailed his own experience getting started with it. Fellow colleague Jon Mitchell thinks Pinterest actually tackles sharing better than Google+ does, in part because it lets users follow things more granularly and selectively than Google's "circles" model.

"It helps me bookmark visual things, which I only had text-based ways of doing before, and that has proven to be a surprisingly large amount of the stuff I take in on a daily basis," Mitchell told me in an IM conversation.

Personally, I've been using Pinterest somewhat passively for a few weeks, checking in semi-regularly and periodically pinning stuff. I've started focusing on curating imagery and content related to "the future of music" since that's a topic I track quite closely at ReadWriteWeb. I've also started a board dedicated to Instagram photos taken in my neighborhood in Philadelphia, figuring it's worth experimenting with the value of local-centric content on a fledgling social service like this.

I'm still waiting for that "Ah ha!" moment in which I realize why I'd want to use Pinterest on a daily basis, but so far I'm digging it and I certainly understand the value people see in it, regardless of gender or age.

To celebrate the milestone, the four-year-old startup has released an audio slideshow storytelling app called Story Wheel. It uses the Instagram API to grab a set of pictures, from which you can select the ones you want and order them. Once the photos are arranged, a brief narrative can be recorded in the browser. The end result is a shareable photo slideshow annotated by you.

The service's growth has also been fueled by the proliferation of its mobile apps and open platform for developers, Liung told us. More than 10,000 third party apps are being developed on SoundCloud's platform, something that has a way of naturally extending the service's reach across the Web.

Perhaps more significantly, SoundCloud's availability on iOS and Android has made the service more accessible and portable. It's easy to see why that's the case. Users can record audio directly into their iPhone, iPad or Android device and publish it to SoundCloud from within the app. On the other end of the equation, listening to audio from SoundCloud on mobile devices is as straightforward as using an iPod or the mobile version of a streaming service like Spotify. For users who actively follow others, SoundCloud can be used as a mix tape comprised largely of content that isn't available on other services.

What's Next For SoundCloud: HTML5 and Social Audio

We asked Liung what SoundCloud is focusing on next. For his team, converting its default embeddable player to HTML5 is a high priority. They launched an optional beta player in HTML5 in November and are in the process of making that the service's default player. Projects like this become a necessity for any company that wants its service to work flawlessly across devices, especially Apple's notoriously anti-Flash iOS platform. SoundCloud's native iOS app has done quite well, but it's all those audio files embedded across the Web that have trouble playing back on iPads and iPhones.

SoundCloud is already an inherently social service, but further injecting itself into the larger social Web is another top priority for the company. SoundCloud recently jumped on the "frictionless sharing" bandwagon with a deep Facebook integration. As controversial as this semi-automated model of sharing is, it has nonetheless proven to be a source of major growth for sites and services who get onboard, thanks to Facebook's massive user base.

In the shorter term, Congress should release legislative data to allow third-party programmers to develop apps and better interfaces, according to recommendations made in a report released Tuesday about the first-ever Congressional Hackathon.

Lawmakers want desktop and mobile applications that would better help voters and constituents use Congressional data. They said a system much like the models being used by public transit systems in many systems where schedule data is made available to programmers could keep costs low.

"Increased access, increased connection with our constituents, transparency and openness are not partisan issues," House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., who organized the event with House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said in remarks published in the report. "There are a lot of hearings, discussions, deliberations - not only in the chambers of the Capitol, but in the committee rooms and the subcommittee rooms - that frankly a lot of people may be interested in."

Other proposals in the report included:

• Easier ways to view what portions of a bill a lawmaker wrote or edited.
• Real-time voting updates for Senators and Representatives.
• The use of a Storify-like system to keep updates of ongoing issues.
• Better tracking of casework filed with Congressional offices.
• Social media press conferences.

Facebook: By the end of 2010, there were 600 million people total on Facebook, and 250 million were new users. Seventy percent of Facebook's user base was located outside the United States. Users installed 20 million Facebook apps each day. Fast-forward one year later: 800+ million users on Facebook, including 200 million new users. By October 2011, Facebook was as big as the Internet of 2004. In 2011, Facebook mobile hit smartphones and Androids everywhere. Three-hundred fifty million Facebook users logged on from their mobile phones. They also shared 30 billion pieces of content (links, notes, photos) on Facebook every month. By the end of 2012, we're likely to see an additional category: Facebook users who log on from their tablets, especially the iPad.

Twitter Loves @ladygaga: By the end of 2010, Twitter counted 25 billion sent tweets, 100 million new accounts and 175 million total users. Lady Gaga (@ladygaga) was Twitter's most followed user, with a whopping 7.7 million followers. By the end of 2011, that number had more than doubled to 18.1 million followers - @ladygaga is still the world's most followed Twitter user. Twitter grew to 225 million accounts, but only 100 million of those were active.

Tumblr and WordPress blogs grew fast in 2011. As of September 2011, Tumblr received 8X more pageviews than WordPress. By the end of the year, Tumblr blogs numbered 39 million and Wordpress blogs hit 70 million.

Where Are The Internet Users? Asia

In 2010, Asia outnumbered all other continents with 42% of Internet users; in 2011, Asia made up 44% of the Internet's population. European Internet users declined from 24.2% in 2010 to 23% by the end of 2011. North America saw a slight drop off, too, from 13.5% to 13%. Africa grew from only 5.6% of the Internet population to 6%. Latin America/Caribbean, Middle East and Oceania/Australia stayed about the same from 2010-2011.

Websites & Domain Names in 2010 vs. 2011

As of December 2010, the Internet held 255 million websites. That number more than doubled by the end of December 2011 to 555 million. Of domain name types, .COM grew the most from 88.8 million at the end of 2010 to 95.5 million by the end of 2011. The .NET domain names only grew by 0.6 million, whereas .ORG added 1.3 million domain names. The year 2011 also brought along 7.6 million .info domain names and 2.1 million .biz domains.

What will the Internet of 2012 look like? Post your predictions in the comments.

Tech giant IBM believes that the socialization of business presents a big opportunity to train people to do it really well. The company announced this week a major new services initiative in social business. This kind of news makes me think it's time to put the whole question of whether engaging with social technology at all has a potential for meaningful ROI to bed.

If doubts about the ROI of social technology began sometime recently, we might as well pick 2006 as the date, when that silly distraction turned mega-platform Twitter was founded.

In 2012, things have now come far enough that it makes sense for one of the world's leading technology services companies to jump into that market. Discoure about social and business used to be dominated by doubt of the Return on Investment. IBM may be resolving those doubts with its new campaign.

The web's leading enterprise news blogger Larry Dignan summarized the initiative last night on ZDNet as follows:

IBM is planning to offer services to help customers develop skills and technical support for social networking. Naturally, there's a heavy services angle here. IBM will offer live support, online courses and meetings with social business experts.

Among the key social enterprise items from IBM:

• Consulting services to develop internal and external processes and figure out social businesses.


• Education and mentor programs for business partners.
  
• Technical certification programs to cultivate skills and assess resources.


• Workshops that will revolve around becoming a social business. Some workshops will be conducted in partnership with The Dachis Group, which is a boutique consulting firm focused on social business.

Four-year old Austin-based Dachis Group has between 200 and 500 employees according to LinkedIn and has acquired a number of other hot social business startups. That company unveiled a new Social Performance Monitor yesterday, a web application Dachis says "combines big data and social analytics to meaningfully measure performance of social marketing."

Is all of this really an effective subject of measurement and optimization? Cynics may disagree, but the socialization of business, specifically with regard to collaboration and marketing, seems of sufficient sophistication that optimization is a clear competitive opportunity. The new offering from Dachis appears to be a big effort to quantitatively resolve the question of social media ROI once and for all.

That which can be measured can be improved, too. IBM says that "the world now spends more than 110 billion minutes on social networks and blog sites per month."

When that time spent being social is spent while at work, failure to measure and optimize it would be a big lost opportunity and potentially a competitive mistake.

The IBM initiative page reports, "McKinsey & Company observed that 9 out of every 10 businesses using Web 2.0 technology are seeing measurable business benefits from its use."

Social business opens whole new worlds of efficiency,collaboration, productivity and innovation.

It also challenges top-down, command-and-control systems of working. Those aren't worth saving on principle, so their adherents will have to compete in the marketplace to see whether they can really beat social businesses or not.

Now, let's get down to business, together online.

In the U.S., 68% of social media users are "joiners," which means they maintain a profile on a social networking site and visit social networks. 73% are "spectators," or users who mostly just read blogs, online forums, customer ratings/reviews and tweets, listen to podcasts and watch videos. This number is strikingly similar in Europe (EU-7 countries, to be specific), with 69% of users classified as spectators and 50% as joiners.

Only 24% of U.S. users are content creators and 36% are conversationalists. Those numbers are quite similar in the EU, with 23% classified as "content creators" and 26% as "conversationalists."

In Asia, these numbers look drastically different. Seventy-five percent of online adults in metropolitan China and India create content, which includes publishing blogs and web pages, uploading video and audio/music they made and posting articles or stories that they wrote.

Japanese social media users do not follow the same patterns as Chinese and Indian social networkers. A mere 28% of Japanese users visit social networking sites at least once a month. Only 13% of online Japanese adults visit Facebook on a regular monthly basis. Instead, they prefer sites like mixi or Twitter, which fit their preference for online anonymity.

Emerging Social Mobile Markets: China and Africa

Another Forrester report proved that China and other Asia-Pacific countries led the pack in mobile adoption, including mobile social usage and work usage. They were also more likely to own multiple devices. This report showed that in metropolitan China, 33% accessed social networks via mobile, whereas only 25% of U.S. users and 11% of European users did the same. Forrester's report revealed that Chinese users accessed social sites the most, calling them "super connecteds."

This study does not include social network usage in Africa, which is only second to China. Toward the end of last year, Facebook partnered with French cell operator Orange to bring inexpensive cellphones armed with Facebook to Africa and Europe.

Facebook is available in 70 languages, and more than 75% of its users are located outside the U.S.

Facebook specialist Eric Eldon published a compilation of statistics from around the web this week on TechCrunch that pointed towards US and Canadian market saturation this past year for Facebook. Surely Facebook represents the forward line of all social media. Academic and tech industry analyst Vivek Wadhwa posted a set of predictions for 2012 in the Washington Post last night, starting with a prediction that the period of rapid growth for social media is over. In the future it will be a feature, not a product, he argues. To startups and investors, Wadha says "It's time to jump on the next bandwagon, folks."

Wadhwa is an astute observer of long-term technology trends and is likely correct within a particular understanding of the situation. For one thing, I can't help but imagine raw user numbers still have a long, long way to go in many parts of the world just beginning to come online.

Even within the US and the rest of the West though, such conclusions require an assumption that the key metric is number of new users in total. "Instead of raw user growth," Eldon argues on Techcrunch, "the numbers to watch going forward will be around engagement."

What might that look like? I'd like to present two possibilities for major continued growth in social media.

Afterwords, Vivek Wadhwa's response.

The Instrumentation of Everyday Life

One way to understand engagement with social networks is not just time on site, but data provided as input. Mark Zuckerberg sees it this way, he argues that the amount of information people share doubles every year.

Facebook's Open Graph API allows all kinds of websites to push user activity into their Facebook newsfeeds. The roll-out of Open Graph, widely referred to as Frictionless Sharing, has just barely begun. It's already super controversial. I believe it has been implemented in a way that puts the whole kitten caboodle at risk, unfortunately.

Have you noticed how much more prominent music has become in Facebook since the introduction of the Open Graph on Spotify, Rdio and other services? Now imagine that rolling out to everything you do online. It's already begun to enter into news reading and video viewing. Facebook is sure to do it better the next time around when they roll it out to shopping again, after the Beacom debacle several years ago.

Meals eaten? Hours of sleep slept? Distances traveled? TV shows and books watched? There are many more parts of our lives that can be wired up to Facebook or other social networks.

The instrumentation of everyday life may sound frightening to many people, but so did posting photos of yourself online or using a debit card (at all) just a few years ago.

If it's done well, with privacy protections, security, user education, informed consent and delighted users - then this type of engagement with social media could represent a huge and desirable period of growth in the industry.

"Just as location-based applications became a 'feature' rather than the 'big thing,' social media will live on and become an integral part of what we do," Wadha writes. "But the party's over for investors and start-ups in this space. The big growth is behind us. Revenues from social media have not lived up to the promises, and the vast majority of those thousands of start-ups are either dying or on the ropes. It's time to jump on the next bandwagon, folks."

Given the huge growth of data input that is likely just around the corner, it makes no sense to me that investors and start-ups don't have plenty of room to make money in social still.

The Web of Things

Connected devices, many of which you might not even consider connecting to the Web today, are expected to facilitate fundamental changes in human life over the next few years.

Hans Vestberg, CEO of Ericsson, predicts that the world's nearly 5 billion mobile phone subscribers today will be surpassed by 50 billion connected non-phone devices in 10 years.

What does this have to do with social media? Quite simply, what do you think people will be doing while they ride in the driverless car that picked them up at home to take them to work? They'll be Facebooking and Tweeting, of course.

What will happen after your 50th automatic re-supply of Cap'n' Crunch? You'll win a Super Fan badge on your social media profile, I'm sure.

Blippy, the social network that publishes every debit card transaction you perform out into your social network of fellow exhibitionist friends may never take the world by fire. But Mint.com's aggregate financial data and benchmarking is much more likely to. Real-time data bout local spending sounds like social media to me.

Social media in the age of instrumentation and connected devices may be more about aggregate social activity than about the long voice blogging and Tweeting.

The intersection of people, machines and passively monitored objects (the cheapest input of all!) all combine to form an entirely new world of opportunity.

That may be the biggest opportunity yet.

As Mark Roberti, founding editor of the publication RFID Journal, wrote this Spring:

"This change - enabling computers to see and understand what is happening in the real world - is enormous. Most people have yet to grasp it, seeing RFID as a more expensive alternative to bar codes. They don't comprehend that when computers can automatically collect information regarding what is happening in the world, new insights and business strategies then become possible. And the companies that leverage these capabilities most effectively will be the big winners in the century ahead."

Cloud-scale information gathering regarding what is happening in the world we live in, leading to entirely new insights and business strategies. That sounds like social media to me.

I expect that this kind of information is going to make the number of photos we all pro-actively upload to Facebook look like a drop in the ocean. Let's hope this vision of the future gets built in a way that's equitable and pro-freedom. Those are key concerns here at the early morning, just after the dawn, of social media.

Wadhwa's reply

I was fortunate enough to catch Vivek Wadhwa on Twitter last night and sent him this post before publication. This was his response.

"I don't disagree with you. But I maintain that this segment will lose its sizzle--just like eCommerce did in the early days of the Internet. We overhyped this, invested in too many of the same startups, and portrayed this as a destination rather than a means. Facebook and to a lesser extent, Twitter will become platforms from which other, deeper, services are built. But gone are the days of the silly me too social media startups--the Twitter and Facebook clones.

"Look at 'location based services'--the insane hype that TechCrunch created around this. This has just become a feature that we take for granted and build other meaningful applications on. Social media will go the same way. It will persist and grow, but in depth and value rather than just numbers and hype.

"I expect the excitement and hype in 2012 to be in the social game companies, newfangled B2B technology plays, and cloud computing. These will be the next bubble. Soon after, we'll see the Big Data bubble. All of this is good because it spurs investment and innovation. That's the beauty of Silicon Valley--it moves from one fad to another as if nothing ever happened."

The way stocks are discussed among investors is different than it was even five years ago. In 2008, Howard Lindzon launched StockTwits, the online community of investors, with the idea that people wanted to share ideas about trading. Lindzon was a huge fan of Twitter, and so StockTwits was built off of that.

"A guy in Kansas can be the expert on grains, rather than the guy who trades grain stocks in New York," says StockTwits CEO and Founder Howard Lindzon. "The Kansas guy can look out his window and tweet what he sees." StockTwits, says Lindzon, has turned everyone into a potential market maker and expert.

Joe D (@upsidetrader) says that social media actually hasn't changed the way he trades but, he says, "it has made me a much sharper trader I think because when you share with the community it keeps you accountable." He has been a full-time day and swing prop trader for more than 20 years, and is a former hedge fund founder and manager.

Social media also delivers information far more quickly than traditional finance news media. Says Lindzon, "NASDAQ, Reuters, PRWire, they don't do social distribution." Adds StockTwits Executive Editor Phil Pearlman adds: "This puts a ton of pressure on traditional finance news media to keep up, open up or fall behind."

The downsides? Social media does tend to be a bit impulsive and, as stock market blogger "The Wild Investor" says, gone is a "sense of finality." Social Media Consultant Michael Carusi says that the "spontaneousness is exactly what's wrong with predicting sock market information using Twitter. People on their phones may mistakenly tweet a bogus story without even realizing it." He believes that every industry, including the financial industry, will find ways to take advantage of social media, but also needs to "keep in mind that social media is very susceptible to misleading information."

For now, conversations are trading live on Twitter and StockTwits, not Facebook, which is more of a space for friends, family, puppies, super-sharable graphics, but not stocks. Where will the conversation go next?

Lindzon thinks Foursquare has the potential around location, especially in the areas of measuring data around retailer and restaurant traffic. Is this a data set that hedge funds might be interested? For now, only six percent of people are using geosocial apps like Foursquare.

Almost every Web product these days has some kind of social element. But to make this list, the product has to have social networking or community building as a core part of its offering. So without further ado, here are our top 10 Social Web products of 2011:

Up till 2011, Google wasn't known for its social networking prowess. Unless you count Orkut, a social network product that became a phenomenon...in Brazil only. At the end of June 2011 that all changed, with the worldwide launch of (in our opinion) the best social network product of the year: Google+.

It was a muddled launch. Back in March, ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick got the scoop about a new Google product based on a circles concept. At the time, Google vigorously denied the existence of such a product. But lo and behold, Google+ launched over three months later - and its core feature was indeed "circles." With circles you could better segment your friends, something that was a major pain point in Facebook.

Initially Google+ launched to a chorus of media outlets shouting "Facebook killer." However, it soon became apparent that Google+ was going to be most useful to Google as the social component of its entire online product suite: including Google search, Google Reader and YouTube. Although it's a more than useful standalone social network, too. Particularly for topic-focused discussions. Google+ has grown rapidly, attaining over 40 million users in a matter of months - although just how many are active is a contentious point.

2. Facebook

We selected Facebook as our Best BigCo of last year, due to astounding user growth. Facebook not only continued its impressive growth over 2011, but released a number of innovative new features. Some of those announcements were spurred on by the arrival of Google+. But the important thing is that not only did Facebook respond quickly, they changed things up with a radical new design and an entirely new form of sharing media.

The new profile design was termed Timeline and at time of writing it's still in developer only release. The new type of sharing was nicknamed "frictionless sharing" and enables users to automatically post what music they listen to, what they read, and more. It has been controversial, with many people uncomfortable with how much they are sharing. Whatever the eventual outcome of Facebook's new features, it's very encouraging to see that it hasn't stopped innovating - despite having by far the largest user base of any social network, with over 800 million active users.

3. Twitter

Twitter was overshadowed a bit this year by Facebook and Google+, but it remains a force to be reckoned with as a mainstream social network. In September, it announced it had 100 million active users. It also got closely integrated into Apple's iOS 5, which among other things enabled users to tweet directly from Apple apps like Camera, Maps, Photos and Safari.

Perhaps the feature that most epitomized Twitter's continued growth as a mainstream tool was its usage with TV. Not only do many users tweet while watching television, Twitter began to partner with TV networks. For example its partnership with popular TV show The X Factor, enabling users to tweet their votes.

4. Tumblr

Tumblr is another social media product to have experienced huge growth over 2011. During the past year, Tumblr has grown from just over 100 million visits per month to over 350 million now (according to Quantcast). Tumblr gets over 12.5 billion page views per month, over 8 times more than Wordpress.com. Although we should note that Wordpress.com still gets more visits and it too has grown a lot over 2011.

Just as important as the user growth, is how Tumblr has brought the curation of content to the mainstream. Plus it's having a big impact on journalism, with old and new media brands alike using Tumblr to provide curation to their readers.

5. reddit

The Web of course is not just about reaching a mainstream audience - as Facebook, Twitter and others in our list have done. There are tens of thousands of social networks that appeal to a niche audience. Reddit is one example, although it has also shown strong growth by diversifying from its core tech-focused audience. In September, reddit blogged that it had tripled in size over the previous 15 months: "Since last May, we've grown from 7 million monthly unique visitors to 21.5 million. Our pageviews have exploded 4x to a staggering 1.6 billion pages served per month."

Part of the reason for reddit's growth are "subreddits," which the company says is "the secret to reddit's growth." A subreddit, such as DoesAnybodyElse (a place for people to talk about their quirks), is "a class of online community, just like mailing lists, forums, and chatrooms are." There are thousands of subreddits and each is "a distinct community with its own purpose, standards, and readership."

It's worth mentioning StumbleUpon here too, another "social news" service that had strong growth this year.

Next Page: numbers 6-10 of the Top 10 Social Web Products of 2011...

6. SoundCloud

One of the talking points of Mary Meeker's presentation at Web 2.0 Summit in October was the future of sound. Meeker claimed that sound would soon be bigger than video on the Web. She name-checked a startup from Germany called SoundCloud, which enables people to create and share sounds. What brings SoundCloud to the top 10 Social Web list is its very active community. SoundCloud users upload, comment on and re-share audio with a level of engagement not too far behind YouTube (which it is often compared to).

SoundCloud has enjoyed exponential growth this year. It had about 7.5 million users as at October, with 5 million of those signing up over the past 12 months.

7. LinkedIn

LinkedIn, the leading business social network, has had a good year. Its user base increased by over 60% and revenue more than doubled.

Most impressively, LinkedIn has innovated with new product lines. Apply Through LinkedIn job applications and the recently launched Classmates are two examples. The latter is a data-driven tool targeted at students and recent graduates, its biggest growing demographic.

8. GetGlue

One of the key trends of 2011 has been so-called second screen apps - mobile apps that make watching television a less passive activity. GetGlue, a self-described "social network for entertainment," is tapping into this growing market. It enables you to "check-in" to watching TV shows and movies (you can also check-in to a great range of other activities, such as reading a book or viewing a web page).

As at September, GetGlue had over 1.5M users and a database of over 200M ratings, reviews and check-ins. [Disclosure: GetGlue founder Alex Iskold was a columnist at ReadWriteWeb from 2006-09]

9. Instagram

For a service that is only available on one platform (iOS) and doesn't even have a proper website, Instagram has experienced very good growth since launching in October 2010. The photo sharing service now has 13 million users.

Photo sharing apps are a dime a dozen these days, but Instagram has managed to keep ahead of the pack despite its limited resources and iOS-only focus. It's a simple app: you upload a photo, apply some funky effects to it, then share it with the community. In short, people love the app. It will be interesting to see if Instagram can continue growing in 2012. To do that it needs to launch an Android app soon, but in the meantime its API has gotten solid take-up. See also: 6 Effective Ways to Get More Instagram Followers.

10. Meetup

Social networking used to mean getting out and meeting people in the real world. At least one of this year's top 10 hasn't forgotten that! Meetup.com facilitates offline group meetings. While it got off to a shaky start in January, with a redesign that met with resistance, Meetup has impressed us this year for its ability to connect people in real life. We have used it ourselves, to organize local ReadWriteWeb meetups. It is a well used product among a wide variety of people - for example I belong to a book club that is organized through Meetup.com.

This year Meetup celebrated its 10th birthday. Co-founder and CEO Scott Heiferman sent out an email in September, explaining how Meetup was founded after 9/11 to try and get local communities doing more together. According to Heiferman, there are now more than 10 million Meetup users and 100,000 Meetup groups.

Honorable Mentions

As always, there isn't room for every product we would've liked to include. Here are some of the ones we considered, but which didn't make the top 10: Quora (Q&A service that got a lot of interest during the first half of 2011, but has since dropped out of the limelight); Foodspotting (fun app for food photos that gained a loyal following); Pinterest (next-gen Delicious, one to watch for 2012); Foursquare (it grew a lot, but we felt it didn't quite do enough this year on the social side - although it will likely pop up in one of our other 2011 Best Of lists).

There you have it, our ten picks for best Social Web products of 2011! Let us know if you disagree with any of our choices in the comments, or if we missed one of your favorites.

Even though hobbies and interest fan pages proliferate on Facebook, only 14% of users say that they go on social media sites to connect around a shared hobby or interest. Only nine percent of users say making new friends is a key reason for joining social media. Reading comments by public figures and finding partners is a big reason for only five percent and three percent of users, respectively. Middle-aged and older adults tend to use social media more for connecting around a hobby or interest. Sixteen percent of 30-49-year-olds and 18 percent of 50-64-year-olds use social media for connecting around a hobby or interest versus only 10 percent of 18-29-year-olds.

Gender plays a key role in this study, which reveals that women are more likely than men to cite family connections (72 percent vs. 55 percent) and friends (70 percent vs. 63 percent) as major reasons for using social media sites. Men are more likely to use social media to connect around a hobby or interest, with 56 percent citing it as a major reason for using social media versus only 44 percent of female users. Twelve percent of men are more likely to use social media for meeting new friends.

Of all social media users, Twitter users are the most interested in connecting with public figures. One in 10 Twitter users (11%) say that reading comments by politicians, celebs or athletes is a major reason for using social networks.

Social media does not play a major role in helping people find potential partners--more than eight in 10 (84%) do not use social media for this reason.

Facebook is increasingly focused on integrating reading and music into the social space, making it less about your friends and more about sharing content. If you miss the actual social aspect of Facebook, moving your closest friends to Zwiggo could be a great alternative.

Zwiggo feels like a less noisy way to plan meet-ups, trips or even a book club for friends. The flexibility of spaces make this perfect for small, tightly-knit groups. It's similar to Glassboard, a free app that you can use to share privately with groups.

Zwiggo Developer Maurice Sikkink had groups of friends in mind when he built the site. "It started out as a Google Circles thing, a social network to make groups of friends," he says, "but then then we decided just to focus on groups."

Spaces resemble Circles conceptually, but because Zwiggo is not a social network, the similarities stop there. On Zwiggo, Spaces give groups a more private space in which to convene.

On the other hand, Zwiggo could also go the way of a business collaboration tool, morphing into something like Jive or SocialText.

In its current state, Zwiggo is a collaboration tool best suited for a small development team. Regardless of where it goes next, Zwiggo's clean design makes it attractive to both businesses and groups alike.

This PRM stream appears on the 'Home' screen, from which you can launch all kinds of searches for old classmates, colleagues, singles and such, using MyLife's existing people searches, already in use by over 60 million people. It's a 'freemium' site, and the paid features give you more access to features like 'Who's Searching For You,' showing you people with whom you aren't already connected.

The sign-up process might try to fool you, but don't worry; the basic features are free. Once you click through to sign up, there's a teeny link in the top-right corner that says 'Continue with limited access' to let you past the paid signup that confronts you before you get to see what the service does.

The free MyLife.com service is pretty pushy. It pops up huge, meaty pictures of cheeseburgers in your face and asks you to sign up for MyLife Deals emails. But that's the price of free, and for someone looking for a Web service to manage one's online life in a centralized place, you can't ask for more than this in terms of features.

Make sure to check your spam folder for your sign-up email, because ours ended up there.

Upcoming Features

CEO Jeff Tinsley says that MyLife will release mobile apps later this month, and that's a great use case. One app that lets users manage Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn will save lots of icon space. Google+ integration is coming soon, as are Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo mail and AOL Instant Messenger. It's an interesting proposal to open a social media dashboard up to email and IM, too, so watch for upcoming releases later this year.

How do you manage your online social life? Share your solutions in the comments.

This behavior has emerged more or less organically. Just as with major sporting events and breaking news stories, people naturally gravitate toward services like Twitter and Facebook to post their thoughts about television shows.

Most recently, Twitter entered into a formal agreement with the creators of the show X Factor USA to implement a social voting feature, which allows users to cast votes on the show's outcome via Direct Message. Whereas a decade ago "American Idol" viewers phoned in their votes, today viewers turn to Twitter.

For Twitter, the strategy is not necessarily one that's going to translate directly into revenue right away. Rather, it's a way to boost engagement and draw more people to the service, which in time will be monetized in other ways.

It's not the first time the company has actively encouraged social engagement with TV content. Twitter has forged partnerships with networks and cable channels and even employs somebody whose job it is to cultivate those relationships. Their "Twitter on TV" guide itemizes best practices and tips for television producers who want to make the most of the microblogging service.

Social TV: A Growing Trend

The cross-section of social media and television may largely be led by Twitter, but it's not limited to it. We've been watching the slow but steady growth of second screen apps like GetGlue, which recently added real-time conversation and deeper integration with existing social services to its Web app. According to Yahoo, 86% of people who use the mobile Internet use their mobile device while watching television.