How to See these Stats

Getting to this data isn't easy, though. First of all, you have to use AdSense for feed or FeedBurner to track this data. Then, in Google Analytics, you have to go to Traffic Sources and click on All Traffic Sources. After this, you still have to filter your traffic by entering 'feedburner' in the search box at the bottom of the page. In the Campaigns view you can also filter stats by 'feedburner.'

In today's announcement, Google explains how to customize the way FeedBurner tags clicks it sends to Google Analytics. Google plans to create more endpoints for FeedBurner data in the near future.

More to Come

FeedBurner users will be happy to hear that Google plans to release more features in FeedBurner that will take advantage of this new functionality in the coming weeks. FeedBurner had been lying dormant for quite a while. Today's announcement hopefully signals the end of this stage in FeedBurner's development.

Not too long ago, mothers were still considered to be a hard group to reach through mobile applications because they tend to be late adopters. The iPhone's mainstream success has changed this, however, and iPhone moms have now become a desirable target demographic for marketers.

Greystripe is a brand-focused advertising network and obviously has an interest in making this group attractive for advertisers, but the statistics in this report seem pretty solid. Greystripe found the 1,294 respondents who filled out this survey through house ads on its own network.

The iPhone Mom

According to Greystripe, 96% of mothers with iPhones are involved in their family's purchasing decisions and 40% are the sole decision makers. Eighty percent have attended at least some college and are slightly more likely to have received a Graduate degree than the rest of the iPhone user base. The age of the children in these families skews slightly older, with 29% of the moms having children between 0 and 4, while 43% have children between 15 and 17.

How iPhone Moms Use Their Phones: Shopping and Keeping the Kids Entertained

What is more interesting, though, is how these moms use their iPhones. Fifty-nine percent of all iPhone moms let their children use their phones and 41% download games specifically for their children. Twenty percent also download educational content for their kids.

With regards to shopping, 79% of all iPhone moms use their phones for 'shopping related activities.' The majority of these activities consist of locating stores (60%). Thirty-nine percent also use the phone to compare prices. Nineteen percent of iPhone moms download coupons, 23% look for items on sale and 37% use their phones to learn about products.

When it comes to using the phone in stores, 42% of the mothers who responded to the Greystripe survey said that they regularly use their phones at the grocery store. Grocery list applications - or just the Notes app on the iPhone and iPod touch - are the most popular uses for the iPhone and 19% of all moms use these. Thirteen percent of moms also use the phone to look up prices in the store itself - which explains the popularity of apps like Red Laser.

As Greystripe's founder and CEO Michael Chang told us last week, this data shows how the iPhone has become a tool for everyday life for this demographic. This group tends to have a large influence over everyday purchase decisions in their families and these iPhone moms often use their phones to make a good number of these decisions, which make them an attractive target for marketers.

This study also shows that there is a large market for apps that are specifically geared towards this demographic, including mobile price comparison apps or apps that can deliver mobile coupons - and a lot of iPhone dads will probably be interested in these apps as well.

Of course, because it's Google, this resource is a search tool. Although you can just click around and scroll through the stats displayed, it's more useful to actually perform a search if you're looking for specific data.

The data for the stats comes from a variety of international resources provided by the following vendors:

B2Bonline.com, BARB, BusinessWeek, Coke, Commission of the European Communities, Comscore, Core Metrics, Datamonitor, Deloitte, The Economist, eMarketer, Enders Analysis, Eurostat, Film Distributors Association, Financial Times, Forrester, GFK, Google Insights for Search, Greenbee.com, Guardian, HarvardBusiness.org, Hitwise, IAB, IFPI, IMF, Internet Retailing, Internetworldstats.com, JP Morgan, KMPG, Media & Marketing, Mediascope Europe, Mindshare, Motorola, Net Imperative, New York Magazine, Nielsen, NMA, Ofcom, Opsos MediaCT, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, QuickPlay Media Inc., Retail Week, Reuters, TGI Net, Times Online, TNS, Verdict Research, Wall Street Journal, WARC, YouTube, ZenithOptimedia, GM

It's strange that despite featuring global companies, Google has launched this valuable resource tucked away on the UK domain. Because of this choice, many of the stats provided have a UK or European focus. However, mixed in with the localized data are global stats as well as stats that focus on the user base of just one company. For example, Twitter. (e.g. Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women - HavardBusiness.org).

We hope that Google is simply using the UK as the testing grounds for this new utility and they'll soon launch something with a more global focus for everyone. Or even better, we hope they'll launch more regionalized versions of this same tool across all Google domains worldwide.

Thanks to Steve Rubel for sharing this new find.

According to a recent article in the New York Times, teens are more likely to use text messaging than Twitter for keeping up with their friends. Today's teens feel somewhat uncomfortable with the public nature of the communication that takes place on Twitter, and, besides, they just don't see the point in broadcasting what they're doing to the whole world. Yet even without this age group's participation, Twitter has seen amazing success, proving the point that a new technology does not have to be adopted by this young group of users in order to make it big.

Twitter's Youth Sees Growth

Although Twitter didn't attract teens at the outset, that could still change. In fact, it looks like that change may already be underway. A newly released chart from comScore breaks down the age groups of Twitter users and plots each group's growth over time, relative to audience. The most surprising revelation from this chart is the steep incline seen in the age group 12-24. Over the past few months, this group's participation levels have been increasing dramatically.

In reading the chart, a score of "100" means that the age group on Twitter is represented in perfect proportion to how much that age group uses the rest of the Internet as a whole. Go over 100 and that means the age group is represented more heavily on Twitter than they are represented on the rest of the web. In July, those aged 12-24 scored a "121" - a score that was only in the mid-70s a mere six months ago.

Statistics Can be Misleading

But wait - a quick glance at these statistics can be misleading. At first, it appears that the chart simply shows the increasing participation levels of teens (and young adults) on Twitter. While that may be true, it's important to note that the actual number of younger users on Twitter is still much lower than those of their adult counterparts. In fact, the New York Times recently reported that only 11% of Twitter users are aged 12 to 17, according to comScore.

Plus, there's the fact that the age group 12-24 represents an odd way of breaking up the demographics. Why not 12-18 instead? The way Twitter's user base is sliced, there's no way to tell how many users are teens and how many are young adults in their 20s.

Finally, the chart is showing audience growth compared to the rest of the Internet as a whole. That's also an interesting way of charting the demographics of Twitter, to say the least.

All that being said, the data seen here is still valuable to some extent. It's interesting to see this market segment's growth, even if it's sliced and diced in this odd way. But does this mean that teens are going to start tweeting sometime soon? Let us know what you think in the comments.

When it comes to different age groups on the service, there are a number of clear differences. Users under 35 are more likely to use Twitter to keep in touch with their friends (43.8% vs. 39% for those over 35). These younger users are also significantly more likely to use Twitter to update their status (38% vs. 19%).

Interestingly, though, users over 35 are far more likely to use Twitter for work-related reasons (29%), and the older the user, the more likely they are to use Twitter for research. 16.2% of those over 55 report that they use Twitter for research purposes, while only 7% of respondents under 35 say that they use Twitter in this fashion.

These numbers clearly show that users under 35 are far more comfortable with the idea of publicly broadcasting their status, while older users tend to have a slightly more utilitarian approach to the service.

Who Do They Talk To?

When it comes to who people talk to on Twitter, women are significantly more likely to use the service to talk to their friends and family members. Almost 30% of all respondents also use the service to interact with celebrities - which is clearly a driving force in the mainstream adoption of the service. About 24% use it to talk to bloggers (you can find RWW here), 13% use it to talk to their employers and co-workers, and 11% use the service to interact with brands.

Why Do You Use Twitter and Who Do You Talk To?

Do you use Twitter more to keep in touch with friends and family, or to do research? And when you use it to talk to other users, who do you talk to? You can find our own poll just below this post (note: you can check more than one answer).

That top 10 comes directly from the like compatibility index - it shows you the top ten users from the compatibility bar graph. If you authenticate with FriendFeed within FeedStats, you'll also be able to subscribe to the users in your top 10 right from the site itself.

Besides the charts and graphs, there isn't much more to FeedStats. Still, it's definitely a great way to help you find more people to subscribe to on FriendFeed. Not only can you discover who you're most compatible with, you can put in the names of some of your favorite FriendFeeders to see who they're compatible with too. This is much better than any sort of "suggested users" feature since it's just going to show you people who like the same things you do. We only wish that it would show you if you were already subscribed to the various folks it finds. Maybe in a future release?

To gather its data, Nielsen monitors about 200,000 panel members, a technique that is clearly informed by Nielsen's method for gathering data about TV viewers. Other metrics companies use data from toolbars, ISPs, and other sources, though Quantcast also gives site owners the option to embed a code snippet on their pages that reports data directly to Quantcast (Hulu does so, for example, and so does RWW).

Stats Need Standards

The real problem here, of course, isn't even about knowing exactly how many people watched videos on Hulu last month (even though we have to admit that this discussion is quite interesting in its own right). Instead, this kerfuffle once again shows how hard it is to correctly estimate usage numbers on the web, especially in the absence of any real standards. As every blogger can easily attest, three different stats programs will give you three different numbers.

We have to take publicly available stats, no matter from which provider, with a grain of salt. In our experience, it is always worth looking at a number of different sources, and while the trends that these services show tend to be relatively trustworthy, the exact numbers are always open for debate.

According to Hitwise, 38% of the top 50 searches for 'twitter' in Australia include the name of a celebrity. Lindsay Lohan leads the charge, followed by Ashton Kutcher, Miley Cyrus, and Australia's own Hugh Jackman. While Kutcher's much publicized race to 1 million followers increased Twitter's share of daily visits in Australia by 10.6%, Oprah's first tweet only registered a 2.46% increase

Twitter is also seeing similar growth in other Asia Pacific markets. In New Zealand, the official home of RWW, Twitter's share of daily visits increased 305% in 2009, and it is now the 49th most visited web site there, and its growth rate in Singapore is comparable. Only Hong Kong is lagging far behind these other markets.

Twitter is Sticky

One interesting phenomenon about Twitter is that new users tend to stay on the service. In Australia, according to Hitwise, the single largest spike in visits came one day after the Queensland Election in March, and interestingly, Hitwise did not record a drop in numbers since then. This bodes well for Twitter, which, thanks to the hype around Oprah Winfrey and Ashton Kutcher, was able to pick up a lot of new users who typically wouldn't have been too interested in joining Twitter.

According to a post on Nielsen Wire, unique visitors to Twitter.com increased 1,382 percent year over year, from 475,000 unique visitors in February 2008 to 7 million in February 2009. This growth earned it the title of "fastest growing member community site," a term that encompasses not just social networks but any online community - even one such as online wiki community Wikia, which, incidentally, came in at number five on the list. Zimbio and Facebook followed Twitter, growing 240 percent and 228 percent, respectively.

Nielsen also reported that the largest age group on Twitter was not college students or teens, but adults from the ages of 35-49. This group comprises nearly 42% of the site's audience at 3 million unique visitors. Twitter is also a popular site for people to visit while at work, notes Nielsen's Michelle McGiboney, as 62% of the combo unique audience accesses Twitter.com from work versus only 35% from home.

Of course, visitor stats to Twitter.com from a traditional web browser don't show a complete picture since the service is also accessible from a number of desktop and mobile clients as well as SMS. In January, 735,000 unique visitors hit Twitter's mobile web site, averaging 14 visits per month and spending an average of 7 minutes per visit. Twitter also had 812,000 unique users sending and receiving text messages in the last quarter of 2008. However, this last stat only took into account AT&T and Verizon cell phones. Within that group, though, there were nearly 240 tweets per person for the quarter.

A Word About These Numbers

Before taking these numbers to the bank, it's worth noting that they are being pulled from Nielsen NetView (U.S. Home & Work), so they're not representative of the service as a whole - they only give us a snapshot of what's occurring there. Also, the demographic chart is annotated with a note that reads "these demographics have insufficient sample sizes" in the 18-24 age group column, which may speak to the overall insufficient sample size of this particular survey, a number which was not reported.

That said, these numbers do seem to confirm what our gut instincts have been telling us for some time. Twitter is apparently not becoming the next big thing with teens and other members of Gen Y, despite rumors to the contrary. The hype surrounding Twitter's connection to the younger generation was even skewered hilariously by Jon Stewart not too long ago on "The Daily Show."

It looks like Twitter may be for "old people" after all. Just like Facebook.

We last covered aggregate stats in the middle of December and the new numbers are similar to what we saw then. IT and software companies are hiring more than anyone else, but marketing firms are now hiring more than publishing and social media companies, a switch since our last report.

The "Other" category includes the long tail of "hard to categorize" companies, like government hires, health care tech and gaming. Who are all these companies and people hired? You can see the lists at these links:
IT/Software
Marketing
Social Media/Social Networking/Publishing
Hardware
All new hires

We didn't break out hires by job title for this report but we did when we reported hiring numbers in November and December. Just for interest, here's those numbers from that report.

Have you made a new hire recently, or just been hired in a tech or new media position or company? Fill out our submission form and let us know.

Want to keep track of all the new hires we report on? We hope you'll subscribe to the feed, to the email newsletter (see top of Jobwire page) or follow the news on Twitter.

We've tracked these and other interesting stats and stories about people still getting jobs at a time of economic downturn. Check out our chart-laden full coverage of this season's new hires in tech and new media over at our hiring news site Jobwire.

If Facebook continues at this rate, by the end of December they could add a total of 20 million new users. By March, the company could then reach 200 million active users - which would mean they doubled their userbase in less than a year's time. The majority of this growth (70%) is taking place outside the U.S.

To handle this growth, a poster on Slashdot notes that "the Facebook engineering team has been tweaking its use of memcached, and says it can now handle 200,000 UDP requests per second. Facebook has detailed its refinements to memcached, which it hopes will be included in the official memcached repository. For now, their changes have been released to github."

Facebook's Users Are Active and Engaged

Facebook did release some figures of their own today that show their users are actively using the site and engaged with the content. Here's what they reported:

General Growth

• More than 140 million active users
• More than half of Facebook users are outside of college
• The fastest growing demographic is those 25 years old and older

User Engagement

• Average user has 100 friends on the site
• 2.6 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
• More than 13 million users update their statuses at least once each day
• More than 2.5 million users become fans of Pages each day

Applications

• More than 700 million photos uploaded to the site each month
• More than 4 million videos uploaded each month
• More than 15 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each month
• More than 2 million events created each month
• More than 19 million active user groups exist on the site

International Growth

• More than 35 translations available on the site, with more than 60 in development
• More than 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States

Platform

• More than 660,000 developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries
• More than 52,000 applications currently available on Facebook Platform
• 140 new applications added per day
• More than 95% of Facebook members have used at least one application built on Facebook Platform

Also worth noting is the data on mobile users released last month which revealed that the company has 15 million active mobile users using their site, having grown from only 5 million at the beginning of the year. Those aren't additional users, but are a subset of the 140 million who use the site from their mobile phones and other devices. We can't help but think those numbers were also aided by the September launch of Facebook's iPhone app, version 2.0. The new release, a huge improvement over the original, managed to pack in nearly every feature from social network including wall posts, status updates, the news feed, photos and more, all from the simplified iPhone interface.

How to Get More Stats

If you like delving into statistics or are just looking for specific information on Facebook demographics, the AllFacebook site has a pretty handy online tool available. With it, you can use drop-down boxes to select country, gender, and age range and have the tool chart that data on the screen for you. You can compare up to three companies using this tool.

Image credits: top chart, Inside Facebook; bottom chart, AllFacebook

But Google Reader isn't the only web app that could use a feature like this. If we could pick any other Google service to provide an analysis of our habits, it would certainly be Gmail. But could it be that Trends for Gmail is already underway?

A recent post by Ed Kohler pointed us to a project under development for this very purpose. The project, called simply "Mail Trends," was mentioned on Mihai Parparita's personal blog back in March. (Parparita is a Google employee who had helped to build Google Reader itself.) Since Gmail doesn't have an official API, Mail Trends instead uses Gmail's IMAP support to pull the message headers and analyze them in order to extrapolate the data. Mail Trends can generate tables, graphs and distributions based on time of day, senders, recipients, mailing lists, etc. You can see an example of what it can output here where Parparita ran it on a piece of the Enron Email Dataset.

The project, currently hosted at Google Code, offers the code available for download, but, unfortunately to run it over your own email, you have to do geeky programmer things like downloading something called Cheetah and mess around with a command prompt. There is not an executable file for either Mac or PC. (Lifehacker has a step-by-step guide to installation if you want to go this route, though).

We Need Mail Trends!

Outlook users already have an add-in called Xobni (our coverage) which provides a look at email trends among other things, so why not Gmail?

Although Mail Trends is clearly a personal project, we wonder if there's any chance of seeing it show up one day in Gmail's Labs section. Labs, the area under Gmail's Settings that introduces experimental features seems the ideal place to debut the trends technology...at least until it's perfected.

We contacted Parparita to see if there was any chance of that ever happening, but he never responded.

Most strikingly, we found that a whopping 5% of all Twitter (in terms of tweets) is powered by the top 100 active accounts. Those 100 users post updates 200-3000 times a day, which might even impress uber-Twitter users like Robert Scoble or Jason Calacanis.

What we saw was that the top Twitter users are not always people, but rather, they're sources using Twitter as a feed publishing platform. For example, the most active user we saw was an account called "lejddfr," which does "push journalism" (sending out frequent links to new stories) for French news service Le Journal du Dimanche. lejddfr has just 315 followers, is following no one, and has made over 101,000 tweets. Another example we saw is "GSSP," which tweets links to stories on the news web site NewzOf.com. Our favorite high volume Twitter user, though is "chandraxray," a space station that tweets its location up to 350 times per day.

To get a feel for the distribution of tweeting activity across the Twitter universe, we sorted users by the number of tweets per day and graphed that vs. the total traffic. 66% of the users only tweet once per day.

But that still doesn't answer the question of what people are talking about. So we started analyzing tweets and came up with a list of the top five words people send. Apparently, the first thing anyone sends out on Twitter is a "test" message.

1. test
2. lol
3. working
4. :)
5. sleeping

Unfortunately, while we can guess from that list that Twitter users tend to be sleepy workaholics who are generally happy, we still can't tell much about what they're really talking about on the service. So we next applied some fancy topic extraction and started calculating trends over our week's worth of data.

What we found is that there are three main types of conversations going on. First, there are status updates of every day occurrences such as, "getting coffee," "check out this post on X," "going to sleep," or other mundane life things. Second, there are short term memes where many people talk about some event before, during, or after it. These conversations are usually short lived -- ranging from a few minutes to a few hours. For example a TV show like "Lost" will have some buzz, before, during, and for a short time after the show airs, but will drop out of the stream very quickly. We saw that happen with "LSD" when the drug's creator Albert Hoffman died last week. The final type of discussion we see on Twitter, are long term memes. These are topics of interest that people talk about for days, weeks, or even months. Politics or new video games are great examples of these longer term discussions happening on the platform.

Below we selected a subset of the automatic trends found for the week to illustrate this phenomenon. Each column from left to right shows the days of the week. Topics on the top of each stack represent shorter lived memes, while topics lower on the chart represent items of longer term interest.

You can click on the links below to explore the memes on those days:

Sunday, April 27: Obama, GTA IV, Mario Kart Wii, Coachella, Facebook, NFL, BBQ, Ubuntu, Spurs
Monday, April 28: Obama, GTA IV, Mario Kart Wii, Coachella, Rev Wright, iMacs, Facebook, Social Brew
Tuesday, April 29: Obama, GTA IV, Iron Man, Rev Wright, Ben Jerry, Celtics, Lakers, Deal or No Deal
Wednesday, April 30: Obama, GTA IV, Iron Man, American Idol, LSD, iGoogle, Violet Hill, Neil Diamond, Spurs
Thursday, May 1: Obama, GTA IV, Iron Man, RSS Awareness Day, Diggnation, Baskin Robbins
Friday, May 2: Obama, GTA IV, Iron Man, DC Madam, Hawks, BSG, Lost
Saturday, May 3: Obama, GTA IV, Iron Man, Kentucky Derby, Free Comic Book Day, Maker Faire, YouTube, Boris

Conclusion

While technology, politics, and geekery (sci-fi movies and video games) tend to dominate the long term memes, people are discussing all sorts of things on Twitter -- from sports to pop culture to cooking. Could that indicate that the site it starting to have some mainstream appeal? Or maybe just that even us tech geeks occasionally find time to talk about things other than technology? Either way, the way memes flow on Twitter is an interesting topic and one that we had fun looking at.

Special thanks to Dr. Abdur Chowdhury, co-founder of Summize, a conversational search engine. Dr. Chowdhury did all of the data mining and analysis for the this post, as well collaborated on the text and created the charts.

Nielsen breaks the data down into categories, which is really the most interesting part of their report because it indicates what sort of properties are currently the most popular on the mobile web. The biggest benefactors of mobile were weather and entertainment, categories that each saw a 22% average audience lift when factoring in mobile sites. As Allen Stern on CenterNetworks notes, though, mapping seems mysteriously absent from Nielsen's data.

TotalWeb - Average Online Audience Lift Provided by Mobile Web, by Category (Q4 2007)
Category	Average Lift (%)
Total	13
Weather1	22
Entertainment	22
Games	15
Music	15
Email	11
Sports	10
Business/Finance	4
Social Networking	3
Search	2
Shopping/Auctions	1
Source: TotalWeb Q4 2007, The Nielsen Company. Based on 200+ Internet sites measured across both Home PC and Mobile Internet. 1To be read: In Q4 2007, weather sites measured by TotalWeb averaged a 22% lift in overall audience reach through mobile web traffic, over home PC traffic alone.