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While cloud computing gains steadily in the U.S., U.K. and Germany (and rather slowly in Canada), it's taking off in emerging markets like Brazil, China and India. According to a study by GfK Custom Research, and covered by FineChannel,
cloud computing enjoys relatively high penetration rate in emerging markets, regardless of company size.

According to GfK, decision makers in Brazil, China and India have a much more positive view of cloud computing and cite cost-effectiveness, flexibility and security as the main benefits. In contrast, decision makers in the U.S. and the U.K. see security as a barrier rather than a strength, and view flexibility as the main advantage.

The 2011 American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Business Report was published today and the survey of 70,000 US consumers found Facebook to be the least satisfying of the largest social sites on the web. Only 66% of respondents said they were satisfied by Facebook, compared to market leader Wikipedia at 78%. Google, YouTube and Fox News all scored high in the survey as well. MySpace was dropped due to insufficient interest, after scoring the lowest among social sites last year. Low-scoring sites in other categories included AOL, the Huffington Post and the New York Times. Here are the numbers.

With Facebook continuing to show weak consumer satisfaction numbers, the obvious question is what this means for Google Plus. "What we do know is that Google is one of the highest-scoring companies in the ACSI and Facebook is one of the lowest," said Larry Freed, president and CEO of survey partner ForeSee Results. "An existing dominance of market share like Facebook has is no longer a safety net for a company that is not providing a superior customer experience."

BitNami, Cloud.com and Zenoss have released the results of its 2011 Cloud Computing Outlook survey. You can request a copy of the report here.

Only 20% respondents have no plans to develop a cloud computing strategy, but there was a clear preference for using dedicated hardware instead of public cloud infrastructure. Virtualization is very popular, and the biggest benefit respondents perceive in cloud computing was hardware savings.

Google has released results of a survey (PDF) on user behavior with regard to tablet computers, the vast majority of which are iPads. Responses indicate that tablet ownership significantly changes our media consumption habits and computer use.

As one of the fastest-selling consumer technology products of all time, the iPad is an important technology to study the use of. There's something really futuristic and joyful feeling about it, at least in my experience. Given how much other people apparently use theirs, it seems I'm not alone in that feeling.

Cloud management company Appirio, seeing that most surveys on the subject of cloud computing focused on the industry as a whole, sponsored a survey of public cloud early adopters to see how they view the state of the public cloud. The results are quite interesting. Early adopters are downplaying problems like security risks, vendor lock-in and availability and reporting a change in the role of IT.

Last week we told you about "lean startups" and how one of their strengths is rapidly collecting customer feedback and implementing changes to their product. With online tools like Get Satisfaction, gathering the opinons of your users is easy, and now with InstantLoop you can even hear what they have to say with automated phone surveys.

InstantLoop is the recent winner of the Twilio Startup Weekend Challenge, a contest for companies utilizing Twilio's API for sending and receiving phone calls. Users enter questions and possible answers, pick the phone numbers to call and then sit back and watch the results come in. The service is subscription-free; instead, users pay as they go at a rate of $.10 per customer feedback with the first 20 at no charge.

Here's a survey question for you: Do we really need another Web-based survey tool? There are any number of respectable and useful survey products out there today, all of which do a fine job of soliciting responses from a constituency. So when we started to review Survs, the latest entrant to dip a toe into the online survey pool, we were cynical, to say the least. But as we dug into Survs, we found some thoughtful features that had us revising our answers, changing the radio button from "No" to "Maybe."