About 38% of American cellphone owners called a friend for advice about a purchase while shopping. 25% looked up prices for a product found in a store while 24% looked up product reviews. The cumulative total was that 52% of U.S. adult cellphone owners used their cellphones while shopping over the holiday season and 33% use their cellphones specifically for online information of physical goods.

According to Pew, one in five of these "mobile price matchers" would eventually make a purchase online instead of at the retail store. That translates into 5% of all cellphone owners who made purchases online after stepping foot in a retail store. That may not seem like a big number but when it comes to big retail, each percentage point could mean millions if not near billions of dollars. The old retail adage of "just get them in the store" is starting to slip as easy access to information sits in every consumers' pockets.

Of the mobile price matchers, 37% decided not to purchase the product t all, 35% purchased the product at the store, 19% purchased the product online and 8% purchased the product at another store.

The biggest takeaway from Pew's findings is that mobile commerce starting to significantly affect the conversion rates of physical retail stores. How can retail stores stem the tide of consumers deciding to make a purchase elsewhere once they already have them in the store?

The strategy revolves around having a strong mobile Web presence. That does not necessarily mean an actual native app. If you are in a retail store researching with your phone and you Google the product, the retail store should be one of the first results. With the location abilities of smartphones, the search could even tell you what store or neighborhood you are actually in. The retailer could then be able to offer a deal or an incentive to buy and offer to complete the transaction through the device. The mobile Web app could hook into your mobile wallet and bill you directly or instruct the consumer to see the cashier where payment could be made by either near field communications (NFC) or by scanning a QR code. The idea is to control both the research and the transaction. Channel the consumer to your product.

Did you research your holiday spending on your phone? How have your shopping habits changed since you bought a smartphone? Let us know in the comments.

According to the study, customers are 9% more likely to renew a subscription if an interactive edition is available, and 30% of those renewing chose a bundled option with print and digital editions. Additionally, uptake among "device-owning non-subscribers" tripled from 5% to 15% with the presence of interactive editions in online stores.

This data shows that the digital publishing industry is indeed growing and attracting new subscribers from traditional print media. Many view digital editions to be supplementary to the print versions, and advertisers are keen on the ability of users to buy items directly from ads in digital publications, the study finds.

In terms of demographics, the study showed largely equal growth in interest for digital subscriptions among both men and women, as well as across all age groups. This just goes to show that, yes, readers do indeed want interactivity with their subscriptions and are enjoying the added functionality.

"The landscape for digitally distributing magazines and newspapers is about to rapidly change," said Martin Kon of Oliver Wyman, who helped Next Issue Media conduct the survey. "Our Future Marketplace Simulation shows significant consumer enthusiasm for interactive periodicals that offer enhanced features, personalization, multimedia content and optimized layout and navigation."

In other words, if you build it (better), they will come. This seems obvious but digital publications are still only growing at a slow pace. This will be bolstered by the wave of tablet devices likely to hit the market in the wake of the iPad. Android and webOS tablet devices continue to be rumored alongside the possibility of a "BlackPad" from RIM - all which could make for an interesting market for publishers.

Marshall Kirkpatrick recently asked some of our readers that very question. We then picked 10 responses most worth sharing. Congratulations to those who made the list. And if you'd like to add more ideas to this ongoing discussion, please do so in the comments section below.

"I feel the next great advancements in the Web will not be centered around publishing, but filtering all the information so you can find more relevant content and people." - Eric Wortman

"For non-techies like myself, the Internet is empowering. I can have a voice and it matters to some. I can consume, create, share, participate, lurk, connect with others, etc. It's up to me, and I love that." - Robin Ashford

"The Internet's most profound effect on democracy has been the creation of user expectation of inclusion in mass media. The Internet is now building itself out as a bridge between the People and the Power, a bridge that necessarily begins in your home or office, and ends in the TV studios where pundits and politicians road-test policy. As people further organize themselves to wield this new power, consumers become participants, participants become digital citizens, and an expansion of democracy will be inevitable." - Evelyn Messinger

"The early Internet contained links, which represented pages, which contained information. The new Internet is replacing pages with real-time streams, which represent people, who contain social knowledge. Early Internet = the Information Age. New Internet = the Age of Human Engagement." - nozzlsteve

"The Web is fast evolving as the ultimate chronicler of our world's existence. It has and will continue to serve as the environment for all available data to be logged, mined, aggregated, visualized, extrapolated, etc., and force the hand of humanity to constantly question, re-evaluate and transform (a) traditional schools of thought, (b) established mores, and (c) longstanding theories and models as well as consensually pre-conceived and accepted modes of behavior." - autom8

"While machines are being made to directly serve the Internet and replace current computing norms, there are still some fundamental questions whose answers will show how far this can go: Will the semantic Web take hold, will everything move into the cloud, and/or will viral go HD? In the meantime, no net neutrality is established, the biggest driver of innovation is a completely closed loop, and the federal government is debating a "kill switch"... growing old sucks!" - ChrisKos

"The Internet is more like an extension to the revolution created by the Gutenberg press, carrying INFORMATION that can be used and abused in a myriad ways. Just as Gutenberg broke the stranglehold on knowledge that had favored the church and the elite, so Tim Berners-Lee has unlocked raw information from the bias and distortions of politicians (and their puppets in news media)." - NuGoth

"When we meet somebody, we don't just want to sit across from them and exchange ideas or theories or what we did in the day. We may start like that, but ultimately we want to get deeper and closer; we want to open up, we want to be more intimate in where we are, what we believe, what we feel, what drives us, what our passions are. We want to make connection. And I think that's where the Internet is going. It's allowing us to make connection one-to-one or one-to-many, or many-to-many - that heart-to-heart connection where we feel compassion, empathy, understanding and that's what nourishes us." - Peter Russell

"A massive increase in the frequency and diversity of communication, which is giving rise to an unprecedented time of creativity, collaboration and conflict. As cultures become increasingly entangled, a new social order will emerge, which has the potential to be the first massively scaled culture to value consent over exploitation - an event unlike anything seen in human history." - Justin Kistner

"The edge points of society have found a connective umbrella within the social Web. We are all edge points as individuals. We have found we no longer need the center spoke to move forward. Centralized control systems have been revealed as vestigial hindrances. As a result we are critically examining historical value systems." - Mark Essel

Photo courtesy of Mark Bellucci

Understanding that kids are excellent innovators, Latitude Research in conjunction with ReadWriteWeb recently conducted a study asking children to ideate concepts for new computer and Web technologies - and the results are in.

While it's not too surprising that kids today think about digital technologies (and the experiences they enable) as a given, the study found that kids desire increasingly immersive content experiences, better integration of digital technology into physical objects, spaces and activities, and more intuitive interfaces - 37% of participants' creations didn't even bother with the traditional keyboard/mouse interface.

What's more, our participants' ideas weren't just forward-thinking; they were also surprisingly down-to-earth, with only 4% of kids' "future requests" being impossible demands for today's developers (e.g. time-travel, teleportation, etc.).

"We chose to use kids for this study because they're closer to the problem at hand - closer to their core desires," said Jessica Reinis, an analyst at Latitude who headed up the study.

"They're not thinking within the confines of current market offerings or in terms of routine life situations; they're thinking about what they'd like to do right now, without regard to what's possible or what would be popular with other people. Those are questions that we explore more in adult innovation studies like The New Sharing Economy, but kids are able to tap into a more basic creativity that's great for ideating on really broad questions like this."

Kids today have different experiences with technology during a critical learning period than present adults did, which means they also have different understandings about what it can and should do. "Kids will figure out how to use whatever they get in front of, and that will become the framework inside of which they experience, critique, and create everything else," said Geoff Barnes, Director of User Experience at Elliance. "I think that kids' visions into what the future of technology will look like are highly collaborative with present-day, actual paradigm shifts, like the interaction paradigm shift of multi-touch."

Study Background

The study was comprised of 126 children, aged 12 and under, from across the globe. Here's what we asked them:

"What would be really interesting or fun to do on your computer or the Internet that your computer can't do right now? Please draw a picture of what this activity looks like."

Parents told us some basic facts about their child's Internet usage and technology exposure, along with household demographic information, and submitted their child's drawing.

Screenshot of participant drawings in a Web application (part of Latitude's Lumière Suite) that allows users to contribute and interact with visual input in a behavioral environment.

Latitude coded each of these images (future technology ideas) for common themes, then analyzed them in aggregate. Some examples of broad themes included: interest area, interface characteristics, degree of interactivity, physical-digital convergence, user's desired end-goal, social connectivity, etc.

Next page: "I'd like it if my computer could convert images or food and make them real."

Study Findings: Digitize the Offline World

Thirty eight percent of children's innovations called for more immersive content experiences than are commonly available now, with features like 3D effects (10% of all submissions incorporated 3D) or seamless integration of digital technology into the physical world. In many cases, devices could create physical objects such as food or facilitate physical activities such as playing a sport.

"I'd like it if my computer could convert images or food and make them real." - Joanna, Age 10

These requests don't seem too radical if you've ever encountered MIT's SixthSense technology, which transposes digital information onto everyday, physical surroundings, and relies on more instinctive, gestural interactions:

For kids today, true synchrony between physical and digital worlds is becoming an expectation rather than a novelty. And the demand for it is expanding beyond the realm of visual media.

"Currently, we have the 'iGeneration' understanding of device as simply an extension of oneself - and we still think that's pretty novel," said Reinis. "But kids are showing us that the next step will be exactly the converse of that. It'll be a shift from smartphones that can go anywhere to The Internet of Things which is everywhere."

There may be openings to apply mobile RFID/sensors, or even something like Stickybits (which allow people to attach digital content to real-world objects) to register and socialize offline activities through smarter device interactions. HopeLab is currently developing gDitty, a wearable device for kids that records and converts physical activity to points which can be redeemed for "virtual goods and real-world rewards, including customizable avatars, gift cards, even the opportunity to make a donation to a cause."

Regardless of physical world integration, the vast majority of participants, 83%, desired technologies capable of highly intuitive interaction. They requested responsive virtual environments, 3D games, "homework help" computers, telepathy as a form of device input (4% of all submissions), etc.

"Virtual mind-reading games" - Mark, Age 12

Future Request: Content Interaction (As Opposed to Device Interaction)

Kids are already thinking about 3D effects for in-home gaming and media viewing, an offering which is just beginning to hit the market as 3D-enabled TVs. This anticipation of the near-future suggests that visually immersive features alone won't satisfy any audience for long. "We've been investigating a number of emergent media trends and this big idea always comes through; essentially, that users are, more and more, desiring additional ways and means to interact with content - to interact with it and to personalize it," said Reinis, who has worked on 3D studies recently and specializes in interactive advertising research at Latitude.

Kids today approach technology with matter-of-course acceptance - and greater expectations. "It took my 7 year-old son, Alex, under 10 seconds to figure out how to turn it on and unlock the iPad's screen, and no time whatsoever to understand that touching icons launched apps. Or that swiping the screen controlled pagination. Or that pivoting the screen revealed different data presentations," wrote Barnes in a recent blog post.

"I'm hard-pressed to envision his generation entering college and enrolling in required courses with names like 'Introduction to Computing,' to learn about file systems, Microsoft Office, the worldwide web, and email. As I watch Alex, in fact, the idea is as nonsensical to me as offering college courses on how to read an arrow. It's become that obvious," he wrote.

So what might next-generation interaction be like? Based on study findings, it seems that, eventually, each user will crave the ability to architect his or her own content experience: to step into it, to interact with characters, to add and remove plot constraints - ultimately, to alter the course of future events. It would mean the difference between interacting peripherally with a technology, and interacting with the actual story being told through the device.

Download a PDF of the study summary. Part two of the results will be published tomorrow, July 8.

*The names of some of the children have been changed to protect the participants' privacy.

Latitude is an international research consultancy exploring how new information and communications technologies can enhance human experiences. Latitude's user-centered research approach unites generative, media-based methods with robust quantitative analysis to identify concrete opportunities for Web-based innovation. "Children's 'Future Requests' for Computers and the Internet" is one installment of Latitude 42s, an ongoing series of open innovation research studies which Latitude publishes in the spirit of knowledge-sharing and opportunity discovery. For more information on this study and its applications to your business, email Neela Sakaria.

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The survey, conducted by mobile app development company Appcelerator, asked a representative sample of its 51,000 customers to weigh the pros and cons of both the Apple and Google mobile platforms, among other things. According to the findings, developers view Apple's near-term outlook favorably, given its App Store, large market share and device line up. However, it's Android's adaptability as a platform that had developers pegging the OS as the best bet for long-term success.

It should come as no surprise that developers overwhelming picked Apple's iOS (formerly iPhone OS) mobile platform for near-term success, given its market dominance. But when asked for more details, 69% of developers said that Android's potential for long-term success was greater due to its ability to extend to other devices, including tablets, e-Readers and set-top boxes.

Appcelerator positioned this battle as one between "near-term momentum" and "long-term dominance," but there's a flip side to the fight which wasn't fully considered: the battle of the cons between the two platforms, which was a survey question that was left, for the most part, unexamined.

When reporting on the downsides to the two dominant OSs, developers said that Apple's worst "con" was its closed and controlling nature. iPhone (and iPod/iPad) applications aren't immediately accepted into the iTunes Application Store - they're "curated." Or at least that's how Apple CEO Steve Jobs describes it, referring to the company's complex app approval processes and lengthy developer agreements that describe, in detail, what Apple mobile apps may and may not do. And Apple changes its terms with alarming regularly, often to shut out competitors like Adobe and Google, the former whose iPhone app creation tool has been banned, and the latter whose mobile advertising venture competes with Apple's newly launched iAd program.

On the flip side, when it comes to Android, developers who were asked about the OS's downside came up with one major concern: fragmentation. Not only are there multiple versions of the OS out there, there are a plethora of form factors as well. LG alone announced it'll have 20 Android phones by year-end, noted Scott Schwarzhoff, Appcelerator's VP of marketing, and even Google itself is porting Android to other platforms, most notably Google TV.

In the end, the battle may not be a case of which is better (near-term dominance or long-term success) but which is worse: a closed and controlled ecosystem or a fragmented one?

Other Findings: Tablet Interest Growing Rapidly

In addition, the survey found growing interest in the tablet form factor among developers in terms of application development. In particular, interest in the iPad increased by 26 points since the prior quarterly survey to 84%, ranking it number two behind the iPhone. Android tablets, meanwhile, came in fourth at 62%. Other platforms, including Blackberry, Windows Phone 7, Palm's webOS, Symbian, Meego and Kindle remained 30 points or more behind the platform leaders, iPhone, iPad, Android phones and Android tablets.

For more findings, including details on other platforms, iPhone 4 interest and insight into developer mindset in large organizations, you can read through the remainder of the survey here.

Serious and even violent crimes go unreported for a myriad of social, political and personal reasons. What does this have to do with Twitter? Criminologists have for years grappled with that dark figure, and while police science research on social media is in its infancy, the ability to compare official and real-time crowdsourced data could change how we research crime.

Crime that has been reported by victims - a burglary for example - is only a percentage of what is actually occurring in our communities. How do we know? We use what are called social surveys. Some of the survey questions could be: "Have you been the victim of a burglary in the past five years?" and "Did you report it to police?" We then look at the official reported crimes involving burglary and compare that with social survey results.

All of this is very interesting but what does this have to do with social media, annotation, metadata and Twitter's Promoted Tweets? For me as a social scientist on Twitter, there's an exciting potential for everyone from governments to nonprofits to utilize the power of real-time to hypothesize, design, conduct and finally utilize analytics.

If good research design is defined as "the analysis of data in a manner that aims to combine relevance to the research purpose with economy in procedure," then Twitter's new promotional platform not only adheres to this principle but advances the potential for rapid-paced and geographically salient research results on just about any topic.

Possibilities For Policing Agencies

As a criminologist I think a lot about how social media can be utilized in my field and in the field of police sciences. We can study attitudes about crime, fear of crime, urban myths, moral panics, laws, legislation, police services, victim impact, sentencing reform, prison reform and restorative justice. We can look at social media studies and compare them to official crime rates and government social surveys, reports and peer-published research and analysis.

We can do research around issues such as the Facebook panic button and other social media applications directed at sex offender detection, and importantly we can elicit responses from those who currently use social media.

Policing agencies, for example, could use their annual communications budgets to purchase a number of Promotional Tweets to, for instance, alert the public about a wanted person or request information from targeted geographic population. They could use polls to gauge performance, community perceptions, satisfaction and reform. Then they can use the associated data for back-end analytics and to illustrate what I call user-to-user "resonance chains" that show where their tweets went and who retweeted them, and lay out this info for further proactive planning.

For a good example of this in action check out @vpdcanada, @trafficservices and @deputysloly; a further good source for police information on social media is @cops2point0.

What Must Happen Next

With all of the positive out of the way, let's look at some issues that may need to be addressed before some of what I outlined can come to fruition. I will also introduce some of my ideas for application development.

First comes privacy wherein an application that we could build would gather relevant data such as age, location, education level, etc., but would hide identifying information by assigning a code number for those wishing to contribute to social science research.

Second, ethically acceptable research policy beings with the establishment of a clear and fair agreement between the investigator/agency and research participant that clarifies the responsibility of both. Professional researchers and agencies may request a release before research is conducted. We could make an application for all sorts of legal and research releases for use on social media, could we not?

Third, random sampling is a requirement for many experimental designs. How can we do this on Twitter? Perhaps this can be achieved by the creation of an application that can do random samples or shuffling of willing participants.

Fourth, not everyone who may want to purchase promoted Tweets knows how to design an effective 140-character promotion, so how can we assist? Again, create an application or an easy editor/style guide that enriches what Twitter might already have.

A Final Note

As Twitter rolls out its platform for Promoted Tweets, I encourage my peers and social media scholars to get to know what they look like and begin to imagine new ways this could be harnessed for social change as well as for promotional value. I invite further discussion about these are ideas, and I'm hoping that together through innovation we can make Twitter a socially and scientifically accepted tool with which people can do valid and welcomed research.

Photo by georgie_c.

While it's surprising that dating services are the most detested among Facebook ads, it does make sense. Dating ads can tend to be some of the most transparent of advertisements online, especially on a site like Facebook, which has info about your sexual preference, age and location, depending on privacy settings. Though the ads are trying to create a personalized experience, when users see ads for meeting singles in their town within their age range, the ads seem intrusive and creepy.

There also may be a correlation between how users approach Facebook and their distaste for dating site advertisements. From my personal experience with online dating and matchmaking sites, I can attest that your activity on the site is not something you tend to share with many of your friends. With Facebook's recent concerns over privacy, users may be afraid to associate their online dating activities with their personal social graph on Facebook.

The survey by Inside Facebook also found that advertisements that linked to sites outside of Facebook were less liked by respondents. Nearly two-thirds said they dislike ads for outside links the most as opposed to links to Facebook fan pages or events. An advertisement for Coca-Cola, for example, is preferred when it is an add for Coca-Cola's fan page, not for an outside site run by the company. Perhaps dating sites need to advertise their fan pages, but something tells me that wouldn't go over well either.

Parents are taking an active interest in their children's safety online, going as far as to checking their search habits, using parental controls and filters and setting limitations on the amount of time their kids spend online and on cell phones. Yahoo learned that 71% of parents have implemented one of these tactics in an attempt to keep their children safe online.

Another popular way for parents to keep an eye on their kids' online footprint is to run a search on their name and see what comes up. Dads seems to be more protective of their children online, as 53% said they search for their kids' names 2 to 3 times a year, while just 38% of moms do so. Dads are also slightly more likely (71% versus 63% of moms) to take action to help their kids understand the ramifications of posting information online.

Personally I find these numbers encouraging. Online privacy has been a hot topic for discussion lately with the highly-publicized concerns over Facebook - the social network of choice for the majority of Internet users. Overall, Yahoo gave parents a rating of B+ in terms of how well they are doing to protect their children. In other words, parents are doing okay, but there is still more they could be doing. Parents sometimes don't want to become a nuisance or a nag to their kids, but when it comes to online safety and privacy, it's a good thing to be annoying about.

Dave Stanton of the Poynter Institute leads an SxSW session: "My Three-Year Old is my Usability Expert."

Recently, PayPal's Developer Challenge crowdsourced ideas for better integrating payment into developers' own applications. And last year, Netflix awarded $1 million to the team that improved its recommendation algorithm by more than 10%. (Over 50,000 contestants entered the challenge.)

With so much impetus behind technological advancements, some innovative minds -- particularly in the areas of design and usability -- are looking back to a kind of vintage simplicity in distilling the problem and solution principles underlying their creations.

Last month at SXSW, Dave Stanton, a cognitive researcher and Technology Fellow at The Poynter Institute, ran a session entitled "My Three-Year Old is my Usability Expert."

In certain contexts, children's natural limitations turn to strengths. "Children are terrific UI testers because they haven't developed the language necessary to parse text instructions; they have to rely on visual cues," explains Stanton. "Children can help us balance intuitive interfaces with the domain-specific attributes designers use to convey personality."

My 3-year-old daughter is my usability expert

Young children adopt a fundamentally different approach to technology. We can see this at work in simple ways - in the toddler who, accustomed to her mother's iPhone, instinctively approaches a laptop by swiping a finger across it. "We are moving toward more naturalistic interfaces utilizing feel, sound and sight for both user input and device feedback," describes Stanton. "I'm excited to see the elegant modes of human-computer interaction we can uncover by studying how children leverage these mechanisms in problem-solving scenarios."

In conjunction with ReadWriteWeb, Latitude Research is taking children's unique approach to technology one step further. "This project is a step toward understanding how children can help us generate abstract solutions with potential real-world applications," Stanton says.

As part of an open innovation study (whose lead analyst is Jessica Reinis), we're asking kids, age 12 and under, to create ideas for future Web technologies (or, more likely, to demonstrate the underlying, creative-thinking principles which beget these types of innovations) by drawing the answer to a simple question: What would be really fun or interesting to do on your computer or the Internet that you can't do right now?

"The difference between today's children and yesterday's was what technologies were available to them as they tried to make sense of the world around them," said ethnographer and social media researcher danah boyd, when we asked her how pervasive digital culture might be affecting younger generations. "But youth accept whatever contemporary technology is available and try to see if it makes sense in their lives. Adults are the ones who have to shift their understanding of the world based on technology." Naturally, we're interested to see how Web solutions can be informed by more technologically "intuitive" sensibilities when child becomes creator.

Screenshot of the Latitude/RWW study: Kids' Future Requests for Computers and the Internet.

To participate in the study, click here. Latitude's open innovation privacy policy is available here.

Photo by cell911.

Mobile Web: A Better Platform for Socializing?

What has given rise to this trend? What makes social networking such a popular mobile web activity? It's easy to point to the proliferation of smartphones and their host of applications, 3G network speeds and more affordable data plans, built in web browsers and mobile-ready websites. Of course these are all important factors that have helped increase mobile social networks' popularity. However, these measurements are the reason why mobile web use, in general, is growing, not specifically mobile social networking.

A less quantifiable statistic that may also have impacted the rise of mobile social networking to the point where it has surpassed desktop-based social networking is the fact that it's an activity that taps into how people - normal, everyday people - go about their lives. Readers of a technology site like this may indeed spend hours upon hours behind a computer screen scouring news sites, reading RSS feeds, updating Twitter and chatting on Facebook, but that's not necessarily the norm. A good many of folks out there still spend more time offline than on. For these people, screen time is spent doing business-related activities at the office (with the occasional jaunts over to YouTube and Facebook) followed by briefer after-hours web surfing that includes catching up with friends on Facebook and reading personal email, downloading music and other media, streaming videos and/or playing games. But these online sessions have to be interspersed with other real world activities like cooking dinner, caring for the kids, watching primetime TV, running errands, etc. That's why it's no surprise to find that the rise of the mobile phone corresponds with the rise in Facebook's (and other social networking sites) numbers. It has become a do-anywhere activity that captures people's attention whenever they have free time instead of an activity that requires people make time for it.

Beyond Geekdom: Mobile Brings the Mainstream

In addition (and although I don't have statistics on hand to back this up), the mobile web allows social networks to overcome their more "geeky" stigma of days past. As one friend recently scoffed to me about this particular pastime, "I never saw the point of going home, logging on to the computer and updating my Facebook status. I mean like, who cares what I'm doing? But then I got an iPhone and I could share photos and stuff right then and there. It was cool." OK, not the most eloquent speech, but the point is obvious: mobile social networking isn't just convenient, it's cool.

Here's the bottom line, a trend we've been seeing for some time: the mainstream has arrived. They're buying smartphones and downloading mobile applications. They're surfing the web on the go. They're playing FarmVille on Facebook. They'll probably get an iPad. And for them, mobile social networking is an easy activity to participate in now that it's been unchained from the PC. The broader implications of having the less tech-savvy masses online are only beginning to be explored and understood (as ReadWriteWeb recently saw here when Google users accidentally mistook the blog for the new Facebook). Developers and designers will now have to take this into consideration, too. Either they make their applications accessible and simple enough for least common denominator - or risk losing out to competitors who do.

Editor's note: we offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write "Sponsor Posts" and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.

So, here are three things to think about that will help improve the quality of results next time you survey your audience

Invitation design

The way in which you engage website visitors affects the type of visitor you will attract. There are many important aspects to the design of an invitation, including tone of voice and branding, but perhaps the most important is the level of noisiness. At one end of the spectrum, there are invitations that are too subtle: a button in a blog post, a static feedback link in a footer, etc. These can result in a polarized, self-selected sample.

At the other end of the spectrum are noisy invitations. A typical example is the "TAKE A SURVEY, WIN AN IPOD" popup invitation. Crass promises of compensation can have many unintended affects on the sample and carry a high cost in terms of visitor experience.

In general, the goal should be an invitation that is measured, interesting, and respectful. It should be obvious enough so that every (hopefully randomly) selected visitor has an equal, but not annoying, opportunity to participate. At Crowd Science we tend to use text-based HTML overlays.

Timing

Respondents feel and respond differently depending on when they are engaged. Catching someone in a particularly bad, or good, or busy, or anxious mood can affect the way they respond to a survey.

The obvious example here is Monday-itis. If you run editorial on a website, and your bonus is tied to visitor satisfaction scores, you definitely don't want pre-caffeinated, Monday-morning respondents overwhelming your sample. Similarly, if you're running an Apple blog, it's important to be cognizant of the effect of macro events, like Sir Steve unveiling the fabled tablet at Macworld.

Avoid errors due to timing by recruiting as evenly as possible across all meaningful time periods. The unusual visitors are important, but only in the right proportions.

Survey length

Respect respondents' time and they'll return the favor with good data. This is obvious, but it bears repeating. Even the most generous respondents will suffer respondent fatigue given a long enough questionnaire.

The sweet spot for online research is six to 12 questions. That's long enough to dig deeply into one or two topic areas and collect a few attributes upon which to segment - but well within the tolerance and attention span of most visitors, even without monetary compensation.

Online survey research is easy to do, but easy to screw up. Follow these tips and listen to your audience. What survey methods have worked for you? What hasn't worked? Let us know in the comments.

While it's true that the poll results do support these findings, they contradict what tech analysts have been saying about the device's potential. With sales expectations that range anywhere from 1 million to 6 million units over the course of this year, the iPad is predicted to do quite well. So is the survey wrong? Or is it the analysts?

The Apple iPad has the dubious glory of being one of the most over-hyped, hotly anticipated tech products of the year. Rumors surrounding the device prior to its launch had the tablet computer offering everything from OLED to multiple cameras to an innovative multi-touch enabled back. The reality was a much simpler device that looked more like a big iPod than the revolutionary product so many had built up in their minds.

But will this let-down in expectations actually lead to fewer sales? If you believe the Retrevo survey, that could easily be the case. The percentage of consumers who had heard about the iPad but were not interested in buying one jumped from 26% prior to Apple's announcement to 52% afterwards. Also, people who claimed they don't need an iPad went from 49% to 61%. That certainly sounds like bad news for Apple, doesn't it?

Survey Says: Marketing Stunt!

Well not so fast. Let's keep in mind that Retrevo likes to put out these sorts of link-baiting surveys from time to time. For example, a prior survey found that iPhone owners were materialistic and fickle people. (Who couldn't write about that?) We probably should just ignore these publicity stunts... err... surveys, but this one was begging to be shot down... or shored up, we suppose. After all, their survey phrases questions in a way that almost guarantees a negative response. Case in point: "do you need an iPad?" No one really needs an iPad. Not surprisingly, many people said "no." We need water, food, shelter and clothing. Once our basic needs are met, we then focus on obtaining other "needs" like a job, a car, an education, etc. The iPad, however, is something we want. We already have a computer. Maybe even a computer, a netbook and an iPod or iPhone. We can't in all honesty say we need an iPad. It may seem like a simple turn of phrase, but when crafting survey questions, word choice is important.

Will You Buy an iPad?

So instead of going by Retrevo's findings, we'll ask you instead. Will you buy the iPad? Will you rush right out and get one as soon as it hits store shelves? Or will you wait patiently for iPad 2.0? Or are you not interested at all? Now's your chance to weigh in and prove Retrevo's numbers wrong... or right, as the case may be. Just answer the question in the poll below:

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.

While positive feelings outweigh negative ones for almost every cultural epoch from 1960 until 1999, our feelings about the 2000s are predominantly unhappy. Fully 50 percent of respondents have an overall negative impression of the past decade, while only 27 percent said they felt positively about these years.

However, almost across the board, technological advances in basic online and mobile communication tools have been a bright spot in our shared perception of this decade's progressions and events.

Cell phones, email and the Internet were viewed very favorably among all types of Americans, and online shopping and smartphones evoked positive reactions from a majority of respondents, as well. Blogs and the social web, however, earned a solid "meh" from those surveyed.

It is worth noting that the greater a respondent's age, the less likely he or she was to view these technological changes positively. For example, 45 percent of folks between the ages of 18 and 49 - a huge demographic - saw social networking websites as having positive effects on our society. But after the 50-years-old mark, that percentage lowered significantly to between 25 and 21 percent.

It's also interesting to note that the dot-com crash hasn't effected our late-nineties optimism about where the Internet would take us. Most of us still feel, as we did in 1999, that the Internet is having an overall positive effect on Americans.

Again, these responses were subject to age. Around three-quarters of younger respondents saw the web as a positive change, but only 42 percent of people age 65 and older felt the same way. But these older Americans didn't seem to think the Internet was necessarily negative, either. Their responses indicated that they were unsure of its impact or thought its influence was negligible. Another correlation in this opinion was between a positive view of the Internet and a college education. A full 82 percent of folks with a college degree said the web is doing good things for America.

For more details, read the full study, and do let us know in the comments what you think of the 2000s and where the Internet will take us in the 2010s.

In the latter parts of the study, the company looked specifically at social network membership data for users of the AOL, Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo webmail services. Not surprisingly, the study found that Facebook was the most popular network across the board. What's more interesting is how well MySpace fared in some cases. On both the Hotmail and Yahoo webmail services, Facebook only had a small lead. Here, around 20% of all Hotmail and Yahoo webmail users were found to be on Facebook and MySpace. What does this reveal about the Hotmail and Yahoo user base? That they're a little more behind the times? Or that they've been around on the net longer and at one time had created (and possibly now abandoned) their MySpace pages? Unfortunately, the study can't provide us with these sorts of answers.

The study also showed that Twitter is far more popular among Gmail users than anyone else. In fact, on the other services, it's 4-5 times less popular than Facebook. We would like to think that's because Gmail users are just more web-savvy and cool, but it's possible that it's because they're just younger than everyone else.

Not surprisingly, LinkedIn is the least popular social network, but as Rapleaf points out, many LinkedIn users may have registered with their business email instead.

Participation Levels - Hotmail Users have Most Profiles, Gmail Users Better-Connected

When it comes to how the webmail users participate on social networks, Rapleaf found that the majority of the users have only one social media profile. But the service where the average number of profiles is the highest might surprise you - it's Hotmail. There the average is 2.5 profiles per user. Hotmail is followed by Yahoo, then AOL, and it's Gmail users who have the least number of social media profiles. That finding seems odd considering that Gmail users are younger and more likely to use Twitter in addition to Facebook. In fact, it almost seems like this data doesn't even fit with the rest of the study.

However, the discovery that Gmail users are better-connected than the other users makes more sense. On average, Gmail users have the most friends on social networks with 46.2 friends while Yahoo users have the least with 40.0.

Since again, Gmail users tend to be younger than the rest, it goes to reason that they would be in a demographic where their peers are more likely to have social membership profiles. Older webmail users, meanwhile, are still signing up for these sites. Although baby boomers and other middle-aged folks are joining sites like Facebook in droves these days, social networks are still dominated by the young.

Methodology

For the Rapleaf study, the company sampled 120,000 webmail accounts from users with @aol.com, @gmail.com, @hotmail.com and @yahoo.com email addresses. They then looked into the users' age, gender and social networking data by collecting information from public social media profiles. Obviously, in doing so, they've skewed their findings a bit, as the company notes in their original blog post. However, the sample size is large enough to form some conclusions about the members of these services, even if it relied on a particular subset of users.

Really?

If you're an iPhone owner yourself, you're probably going to be taken a bit aback by these findings. For example, the study claims that "cool gadgets" make a person three times more attractive to an iPhone owner than a college degree. Meanwhile "old" gadgets are a turnoff to one in three iPhone users. And yet, if that person spends a little too much time with said gadgets, one in four iPhone owners will break up with them. One in three will do it via email or text message.

Taken on their own, it's hard to say whether these stats are indicative of anything about iPhone owners specifically, or if they could apply to any group of smartphone-owning mobile users. That's why the report compares the iPhone and Blackberry owners on each topic. When studied this way, iPhone owners beat Blackberry owners in every category where "winning" is actually the equivalent of being a materialistic, flaky, fickle dolt...well, at least in our opinion.

To spin the findings even further in Blackberry's favor, one of the questions involved asking the mobile users how they "see" themselves. 40% of the iPhone owners claimed they were an "intellectual" while only 36% of Blackberry users said the same. Propped up against the other results, it's an almost laughable claim.

Don't Buy this Hype

Clearly, this survey wasn't meant to be an in-depth examination of the smartphone toting population - in fact, it's more likely just a publicity stunt to generate talk about Retrevo. Given the questions asked, there were bound to be some "rather interesting" findings, no matter how the respondents answered. And by keeping the sample size to a low number - only 445 individuals - there's no guarantee that these folks are representative of the population at large in any way. After all, who signs up for online surveys anyway? While the panel of participants was distributed across gender, age, income and location in the U.S., what's undisclosed is how the questions were asked - was this done scientifically or were they leading questions designed to generate these sorts of results?  We'd bet on the latter.

Still, you have to wonder if there isn't a tiny bit of truth hiding in these numbers somewhere. Could it be that those who buy Apple's smartphone are a little more wrapped up in mobile life than those whose smartphone purchase probably had more to do with accessing company email in a timely fashion? That may be possible, but that wouldn't exactly be an incredible reveal if so, now would it?