ReadWriteWeb

A new study from Forrester proves that the majority of Americans are a bunch of lazy re-tweeters. 93% of online consumers in the emerging markets of China, India, Mexico and Brazil use social media tools at least once-a-month. U.S. and European consumers are far more likely to view social media as a spectator sport, joining it and then just watching it fly by.

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.

Social media, types of media where everyday people can publish and subscribe to what one another publishes, have changed the world. At least in the United States, though, their rapid expansion through acquisition of new users may be over.

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."

Social media opens up both conversation and creativity for stock traders. But most importantly, it creates community around niche interest topics.

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.

Every year at this time, ReadWriteWeb picks out the best of the Web over the past calendar year. Our annual Best Of series will be even bigger and better than ever in 2011! We have no less than ten themed 'top 10' lists coming your way over the following four weeks before Christmas, each prepared by a different member of our writing team. We'll also survey the top trends of 2011, along with other regular features such as Best BigCo and LittleCo of the year. To kick things off, today we present our list of the 10 best social network and social media products of 2011.

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:

In a new study released today, Pew Internet Research found that 66 percent of American adults online use Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn. They cite staying in touch with family and friends as one of the major reasons for using these sites. Seventy-one percent of the younger demographic, ages 18-29, cites staying in touch with current friends as a major reason for using social networks. Fifty-five percent of users ages 30-49 are on social networking sites to connect with old friends they'd lost touch with.

Today Sprout Social has come out with v2 of their social media management service. It adds personalized dashboards, multi-user account management, an iPhone app, and dozens of other features. We covered their launch last year here.

Zwiggo touts itself as a group collaboration tool where you can share photos, posts, calendars, favorite books, chats, files, to-do lists, date planners, yellow notes, maps, list voting, forums and bookmarks. It does not integrate with Twitter or Facebook, and its API is already free and open to developers. With a clean, easy-to-use interface, Zwiggo is poised for new users. Now, it just needs to decide who those users will be.

MyLife.com, a "people search" engine that searches across social networks, has just launched a new feature called "Personal Relationship Management" (PRM), and it's much cooler than it sounds. It's a browser-based service that lets you view your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn feeds all in one stream and reply, like, retweet and so on as needed.

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.

A new Forrester report that surveyed nearly 5,000 American IT workers has found that few of them are actually using social media for work-related activities. Checking their personal Facebook pages aside, we are still at the early adopter stage for many of us when it comes to using these tools in business. The report, The Enterprise 2.0 User Profile: 2011 was written by TJ Keitt and based on research conducted during May 2011.

First-time young professionals and recent college students are getting increasingly more demanding about their workplace flexibility when it comes to their choice of computing devices, work hours, and access to social media networks during the workday. These results are part of the 2011 Cisco Connected World Technology Report, the second of three parts which was released today. Cisco and InsightExpress surveyed 200 college students and young professionals in 14 countries.