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Opera just released its latest State of the Mobile Web report. In this report, Opera focused on analyzing the behavior of users of Opera Mini, the company's mobile Web browser. Worldwide, Facebook is the leading social network among Opera Mini users, and the social network saw its traffic from Opera Mini users increase by 619%. Twitter's global growth rate was close to 2,900%. In the US, however, Opera Mini's users are not very interested in using Twitter. Traffic to Twitter from Opera Mini users declined 21% over the course of the last year.

Websense has just launched a new security suite for the Web, a product called Defensio 2.0. The main selling point of this software is its ability to protect users from malicious content posted to their Facebook profiles. Using a combination of technologies - which include a URL category blocker, a profanity filter, an executable file blocker, and a script blocker - users can configure what content can appear on their Facebook profiles or their public pages. In addition to offering Facebook security, Defensio offers blog protection, too, supporting a number of platforms including Wordpress and Drupal.

An iPhone application released this week from a company called i-Doodz tracks those who have "defriended" you on the social networking site Facebook. Defriended, as the app is called, takes its name from the slang word that means "to remove from one's list of friends (e.g. on a social networking site)", according to Wikitionary, an open content dictionary that operates like Wikipedia for words.

The Defriended app gives you an easy way to track these defriending events since Facebook itself doesn't provide this feature - or at least that's what the app did until Facebook blocked its operation. Apparently, the social network thinks defriending should be a private matter. As of now, the app is no longer available for download in the App Store.

A study released earlier this year by Anderson Analytics looked into the demographics and psychographics of social networking users on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn with a goal of providing marketers with information about users' interests and buying habits as related to their network of choice. The end result is a detailed look at the profiles and habits of social networking users on the web today.

Some of the study's findings echo things we've already heard. For example, Facebook users tend to be old, white, and rich. MySpace users are young...and fleeing. Other info is new: Twitterers are more likely to have a part-time job, LinkedIn users like to exercise and own more gadgets.

Two years ago, ethnographer danah boyd had the blogosphere abuzz with her look at class-based divisions between teens on MySpace and Facebook. The esteemed Microsoft researcher found that Facebook's collegiate origins encouraged a group of slightly more educated mainstream community members. Meanwhile, MySpace encouraged self-expression and the organizing of subcultures. boyd's latest paper entitled, "White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook" suggests that those same origins also propel race-based divisions. She likens the mass teen migration from MySpace to Facebook to "white flight".

According to recently released research from the Pew Center, we're just as optimistic about the web as we were ten years ago during the Internet's first boom cycle.

At the end of 2009, most Americans in this Pew survey have a dismal view of the 2000s. Between the Iraq war, the 9/11 attacks, economic and political distress and the curse of reality television, the decade has been voted the worst in our collective memory. But one of few bright spots in a tense ten-year period was and remains technological innovation, including the Internet, cell phones and email. Social sites, however, still have a way to go in the public eye.

In the mid-1980s, Pierre Bellanger launched Skyrock pirate radio station as a continuation of his efforts with the French free radio movement. A community inclusive of a diverse voices and agendas, Skyrock inspired a generation of 18-25-year-olds who had never lent their unscripted opinions to a mass distribution medium. As Skyrock developed an IRC channel and later its own blogging software, the community evolved into what it is today - the third largest social networking site in Europe.

Microsoft researcher danah boyd took a decidedly different approach when considering social networking at today's LeWeb conference. In speaking to a room packed with more than a thousand entrepreneurs, investors and journalists, boyd explained how we tend to focus on the positive aspects of social networking services. Technologists tend to praise web publishing for its ability to encourage artistic expression and public dialogue. In contrast, boyd makes the point that negative and disturbing web content can also serve as a vehicle for change.

In a late night post on Facebook's company blog, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a round of upcoming changes that will affect all users of the social network. Specifically, the changes focus on new privacy controls for information sharing. For those who have been following Facebook closely, the announcement doesn't deliver any new information, it only confirms some previously discussed plans. However, for Facebook's user base, now 350 million strong, the updates represent a major overhaul as to how privacy is handled on the site.

Chester French is a rock band that has built an application on the Force.com platform. That's compelling for the simple fact that when a rock and roll band develops its own application, you know that the market is seeing a far wider adoption than it has ever before.

Even more, it's an important reminder of the advantage of building your own applications over complete reliance on a social network that does not give you access to the customer information that you have developed on the platform.