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Twitter is getting into the photo-sharing business. This is a natural extension to the Twitter product and its stated goal of giving users a consistent user experience across all of its clients. But how will this affect other photo sharing services that have dominated the space in the Twitter ecosystem?

Social media research company Sysomos looked at all the tweets from May 30 to see what services people were using. Of all tweets that day, Sysomos found that 1.25% of tweets contained a link to a photo sharing service, or about 1/12th of all links shared. That translates into 2.125 million tweets that were pictures from third-party services. It is just one day of Twitter, but it's probably indicative of day-to-day trends. What third party services were the most popular?

Osama Bin Laden is dead.

You may have heard that last night or this morning. It has been all over the television, Twitter, Facebook. Really, any medium that you can possibly think of almost anywhere in the world has been entirely devoted to the death of Bin Laden.

Twitter was especially important in spreading the news. Social media monitoring company Sysomos was curious about just how fast and how much volume was created by the death of Bin Laden and broke down the numbers. Within 12 hours of the news being broken around 10:30 p.m. EST (UTC-4), there had been 40,000 blog posts and an incredible 2.2 million tweets.

It's been a good year for Twitter, and not merely because the company announced yesterday it has secured another huge round of funding. The microblogging platform has grown by over 100 million users this year and expanded its staff from 130 to 350 people. And it's rolled out major redesigns and improvements to its site, mobile apps and APIs.

People who created a Twitter profile before January 2009 now account for just 4.7% of the total Twitter population. That's one of the findings in a new study by the social media analytics and monitoring service Sysomos that examines over 1 billion tweets from 2010 and compares the data with Twitter usage in 2009. So how has the influx of new users changed the ways in which Twitter is used?

Ten years ago, most people were not aware of blogs and blogging. Today, however, blogging is a mainstream phenomenon. While it doesn't get the same hype as Twitter and Facebook today, there are still millions of blogs and bloggers out there. Looking at almost 100 million blog posts in its database, social media monitoring and analytics firm Sysomos created a mini-census of today's blogosphere. Specifically, Sysomos looked at the age, gender and location information attached to these posts.

Not every click is created equal. While publishers know exactly how many visitors per day their sites get, this aggregate data doesn't say much about the actual value of the individual visitors and what they do on the rest of the Web. Social media analytics and monitoring firm Sysomos wants to bridge this gap with its latest product: Sysomos Audience. Using proprietary technology, Audience can automatically assign a certain value to individual visitors, based on the other sites they visit and other factors users can tweak in the service's scoring engine.

On Twitter, there are just five degrees of separation between you and almost everybody else on the service. After analyzing over 5.2 billion friend and follower relationships on Twitter, social media analytics and monitoring firm Sysomos determined that nearly everyone on Twitter is just five steps away from each other, and about half of all the people on Twitter are separated by only four steps.

Now that Facebook allows developers to store data for more than 24 hours, social media analytics firms like Sysomos are finally able to include public updates from Facebook users in their databases. Sysomos began surfacing this data on some of its customers' accounts yesterday and plans to roll these new features out to the rest of its users soon.

Sooner or later, every popular web service with an API spawns a Google Maps mashup. FourWhere, which launches today, combines data from the increasingly popular location-based social network Foursquare with a Google Maps-based interface. Thanks to this, you can now easily find Foursquare venues around your current location or a location you plan to visit. The site was developed by social media analytics service Sysomos.

YouTube is, by far, the most popular online video service, but we actually know very little about how bloggers use the service to embed videos on their own sites. Sysomos, the Toronto-based social media analytics and monitoring firm, just took a closer look at how the blogosphere links to and embeds YouTube videos. Overall, the company analyzed over 2.5 million YouTube videos that were embedded in blog posts between July and December 2009.

Social Media monitoring service Radian6 just announced that it now offers support for Google Buzz. Given that Google Buzz already has more than 9 million users after less than one week on the market, it only makes sense for the large social media monitoring and analytics services to offer their clients the ability to monitor and react to conversations on this new platform. Radian6 currently covers about 4.5 million Google profiles and is expanding its index rapidly.