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Google Analytics may be free, but it is still based on proprietary technology - which means you only ever get reports on the things that Google thinks are necessary and some of those reports are aimed at people using Google's other services (managing campaigns on AdWords, for example). Further, using Google Analytics means that you're tied to Google's TOS. Enter Piwik, which aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics. It is closely affiliated with OpenX, the open source ad server alternative to Google Ad Manager [Ed: which we just started using on RWW].

Last week trendy micro-blogging service Twitter launched officially in Japan, after the company had "noticed a significant percent of Twitter usage consistently originating from Japan". At the time of launch, Joi Ito - an investor in Twitter - claimed that Japan usage "was nearly 30% of Twitter earlier on", but had dropped to "about 13% as the US user base has grown."

However, the signs are that Japanese Twitter usage is set to explode in popularity - Twitterlocal shows that Tokyo is currently by far the city with the most Twitter usage.

If you're a fan of digg, you've probably been noticing that tech stories are becoming less and less a feature of the social news site. The reason? Digg is attempting to attract a large mainstream user base. Just how low has tech sunk in digg? We have new data that shows that the number of frontpage tech stories is halving every year on digg.

A recent survey of iPhone users put out by Rubicon Consulting entitled "The Apple iPhone: Successes and Challenges for the Mobile Industry," reveals some interesting demographics about the typical iPhone user, their satisfaction with the device, and the revenue that the iPhone brings to AT&T. Not surprisingly, it seems that iPhone users are very satisfied with the product and are making heavy use of features like email and web browsing. The increased use of these types of data functions has also led to higher bills, which produces about $2 billion in additional revenue for AT&T, the exclusive iPhone carrier for the U.S., as well as higher bills for iPhone owners.

By using FriendFeedStats, which creates service-level usage statistics from lifestream aggregator FriendFeed based on its public timeline, we can see which services are the most popular. Specifically, Twitter tends to dominate the conversation with about 44% of all activity on the service. Eric, over at Internet Duct Tape, spent the time to helpfully compile the stats and identify some trends.

Online reputation company Rapleaf sent us some interesting statistics about the most prominent OpenSocial companies, along with Facebook. Rapleaf gathered data on users of MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster, Plaxo, and Hi5 – five social networks on the OpenSocial platform – and also gathered data on Facebook users. Some highlights, followed by full details below:

• The greatest overlap between OpenSocial container sites exists between Myspace and Hi5, in which 43% of Hi5 users also use Myspace.
• Facebook users are 63% female and 36% male whereas the sites integrated with the OpenSocial platform are 61% female and 38% male.
• 52% of Facebook users are 18-25, whereas 40% of the users are 18-25 for the five container sites on the OpenSocial platform.
• Facebook users tend to use 2.9 major social networking sites on average whereas users of OpenSocial container sites tend to use 2.7 major social networking sites.