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The iPad clearly dominated the discussion on Twitter over the last few days, but in the early days of January, the devastating earthquake in Haiti, Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, Lady Gaga, Avatar and the Cincinnati Bengals were among the most hotly discussed people and topics on the popular microblogging service.

Social Media monitoring and analytics service Sysomos analyzed over 100 million tweets from January 1 to 15. Overall, the company looked at topics in six different categories: people, locations, film, business, sports and miscellaneous entities.

While Twitter's growth has slowed down in recent months, new data shows that the popular microblogging service has found a lot of new users outside of the United States. According to new data from social media analytics and monitoring firm Sysomos, the U.S. now accounts for about 50% of all active Twitter users. This is down sharply from 62% in June 2009. The share of Twitter users from Brazil, Indonesia and Germany, however, has grown significantly over the last six months.

Sysomos just launched the next version of Heartbeat, the company's social media monitoring tool. Highlights of Heartbeat 2.0 include a redesigned user interface and Facebook integration. Sysomos' customers can now monitor public conversations on Facebook and manage their Facebook Pages right from within Heartbeat. The Facebook integration tracks user activity, top keywords and top fans on Facebook pages.

Twitter's own homepage is still the most popular tool for users to update their status on Twitter. Around 46% of all updates are made directly on the site. Social media analytics and monitoring service Sysomos analyzed 500 million tweets it collected over the past 5 months and found that TweetDeck is the most popular third-party client. TweetDeck has a comfortable lead with a 8.48% share of the market, followed by Tweetie, Twitterific and Seesmic.

We know that online video continues to grow, but until now we had very little data about how bloggers engage with online video. Thanks to a new report from social media analytics firm Sysomos, we now have very detailed data about the videos being embedded in blogs and which bloggers are using these videos. For this report, Sysomos analyzed over 100 million blog posts and looked at the video-sharing sites being used and compiled a very detailed demographic profile of the bloggers who are embedding videos. Sysomos also released a list of the top 5 most embedded videos of this summer.

Interbrand recently released its 2009 list of the best 100 global brands. Social media monitoring and analytics firm Sysomos took a closer look at this data today. While Interbrand bases its list on criteria such as financial data, international scope and economic value added, Sysomos decided to re-evaluate the top 20 brands by their social media presence on blogs, forums and news sites. Sysomos did not include mentions on Twitter in this study. This obviously led to major changes to Interbrand's list. Google, which placed only 7th on the Top 100 Brands list, ranks 1st when it comes to social media mentions in 2009, while Coca-Cola, the #1 brand on the Interbrand list, ranks only 11th on Sysomos' list.

Only 5% of Twitter's users account for 75% of all the activity on the service, and almost one third of all the tweets posted by the most active users come from bots that each generate more than 150 tweets per day. According to a new report from Sysomos, the up-and-coming social media monitoring and analytics service, one quarter of all the messages posted on Twitter are currently generated by bots. Some of these are obviously spambots, though a large number of bots are also run by legitimate organizations, including @diggupdates, @imdb, and @dogbook, which posts updates from pets on Facebook to Twitter.

FriendFeed, the multi-network activity aggregator co-founded by Gmail creator Paul Buchheit, announced today that it has entered the crowded field of real time search. FriendFeed was already the best way to learn what early adopter social media users were saying about any topic across blogs, Twitter, delicious and other diverse social media sites. If FriendFeed wants to step it up to the next level and challenge business-class conversation trackers, we believe there are four steps the company needs to take.

We think that would make a whole lot of sense. In fact we think that if real time search were turned into a business tool it could challenge social media monitoring services like Radian6, Scout Labs and Sysomos. Here's what we think needs to happen in order for that to become a possibility.

Sysomos, a Toronto-based startup, officially launched its two flagship products this morning: MAP (which stands for 'Media Analysis Platform') and Heartbeat. Both products are incredibly powerful (but costly) social media monitoring and analysis tools. In many ways, it is probably best to think of MAP and Heartbeat as companion pieces. Heartbeat basically provides a subset of MAPs features and is somewhat similar to Radian6's social media tools, with a strong focus on making it easy for companies to track social media metrics. MAP, on the other hand, is a far more powerful and flexible analysis tool.